Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

Ida B. Wells Book Project

07 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in library life, my historian hat

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Cover_Southern_horrors

Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, book cover, 1892.

Now that I’ve actually signed the contract (ohmygodohmygodohmygod), a bit of news from my historian/writer’s life!

I was recently approached by an editor — someone with whom I’ve previously worked on an encyclopedia of women in American history — and invited to join a group of authors writing biographies for an ABC-CLIO series called Women Making History aimed at a high school and undergraduate audience. After some discussion and negotiation I have accepted the invitation; over the next eighteen months I will be working on a biography of journalist and activist Ida B. Well (1862-1931)! I am grateful to Dr. Peg Lamphier and her co-editor Dr. Rosanne Welch, as well as Dr. Kim Kennedy White at ABC-CLIO, for the opportunity to tackle this new type of history writing-for-hire. I have enjoyed shorter projects of this nature and recently declined a much larger reference book project that — while interesting to me! — seemed well beyond my bandwidth to tackle alongside my other commitments. This biography project feels like a good length, with a tight enough focus, to be a challenge … but not an overwhelming one. I look forward to strengthening my research and history writing muscles over the next year and a half.

The book will be — by series design — a synthesis biography, grounded in the research and analysis of specialist historians, rather than a work based on my own archival research. I have a strong background in 19th and 20th century American history, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, but I am not an expert on African American history or the life of Ida B. Wells. To complete this project, I will rely on the scholarship of the many historians and activists who have ensured Wells’ life and work are not forgotten, and who have placed her story in rich historical, cultural, and political context.

As a white historian approached to write a book about a black intellectual and activist, I took some time to consider under what terms it would be appropriate to accept this job. As with all of my other work-adjacent projects, I confirmed with the series editors that the authors working on this series are not all white — making sure the project met my inclusion rider prerequisite. It does. Now that I have accepted the project, I want to commit publicly to two additional anti-racist actions:

  1. First, I commit to practicing citational justice, ensuring that the majority of works cited in the book are by scholars of color, and particularly by black women. This also means I will place a priority on purchasing works by black women as I build my research library for the manuscript. If you are interested in the intersection of social justice and citational practice, check out the Cite Black Women Collective, whose five guiding principles inform this commitment. Also this post, “Making Feminist Points” by Sarah Ahmed, and this piece on “The Politics of Citation” by Kecia Ali.
  2. Second, in the interest of transparency about the financial benefits of this project: I have agreed to an advance of $850.00 and 8% royalties. I will be donating one third of the advance ($285) and 50% of any subsequent royalties (hey, a girl can dream!) to the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) to support the work of scholars whose research and writing make work-for-hire writing projects like this possible.

My goal through these actions is to materially redistribute the financial benefits of the work I will be doing in a way that directly supports scholarship by and about black women. I’m making these commitments public not for cookies but because transparency is an important part of accountability. I also believe it’s important to break the white silence around how we benefit from structural racism, and have matter-of-fact discussions about ways to actively resist white supremacy in our daily lives.

I look forward to digging into the scholarship around Wells’ life, and to creating a new pathway into that scholarship through a biography that will be put in the hands of young people. If all goes well, the book will be out in 2021. In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about Ida B. Wells, I would encourage you to start where I have begun my own reading: borrow a copy of Paula J. Giddings biography Ida: A Sword Among the Lions (Amistad, 2008) from your nearest library.

 

Queer Lives, Queer Loves: Library Journal Presentation

10 Friday May 2019

Posted by in library life

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This past Tuesday, 7 May 2019, I gave a presentation to students in a Library Journal professional development course “Evaluating, Auditing, and Diversifying Your Collections.” I was asked to present on the topic of tropes and stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people in media. Below are images of my PowerPoint slides and some of the key talking points of my (unscripted) presentation. A number of people on Twitter requested access to the talk so this is my attempt to make the content available in a more permanent, open access format.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation

A text-only version of the slide deck (PDF) may be downloaded here.
A full-color, image slide deck (PDF) may be downloaded here.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (2)

I began by situating myself in relation to this topic as someone who is privileged in some ways while marginalized in others. I also have training and scholarly interests relevant to this work. I also acknowledged this was the first time I had presented on this particular set of ideas and welcomed feedback from the course participants (I welcome feedback from readers here as well!)

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (3)

I took a moment to talk about my decision to use the word “queer” as an umbrella term for people who are non-normative in the areas of sex, gender, and sexuality. It was important to me that students understand that inclusive collection development in this area means not just materials on gay and lesbian vs. straight people but a diverse web of identities. I explained that a person who is queer may fit in one or more of these non-normative communities — for example, a person may be trans AND bisexual AND kinky. Or nonbinary AND aromantic AND practice BDSM.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (4)

I put my key takeaway in slide four: A collection that predominently represents the lives and stories of white, gay men is not a truly inclusive collection of queer fiction or nonfiction. It is important for libraries that are interested in building a robust collection of queer media to think about internal diversity as well. Think critically and intersectionally about who is (and is not) being represented and whose needs are (and are not) being met by your resources. What gaps do you need to fill? Are there resources to fill those gaps?

We also had an in-class poll to learn what % of student in the course considered themselves queer in some way. The results were about 15% queer / 85% not queer which actually surprised me (I had — clearly lazily! — assumed LGBTQ+ people might be over-represented in a course of this kind. I was speaking to a straighter audience than I had anticipated.)

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (5)

I touched briefly on sexually explicit media because access to SEM in libraries is controversial and regulated — and those regulations disproportionately impact queer people’s access to information and stories by and about queer people. Queer content is often classified as more sexually explicit by default (for example, queer romance getting classified as erotica in content systems even if it is not as explicit as the straight romance that would be classified in the same way). This impacts the visibility of queer content continually, and library staff need to be aware of this dynamic as they assist their users. 

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (6)

The discourse of “own voices” is one that many participants in this course come into the class supporting. I think it is a good tool in the toolbox of collection development, since it asks people selecting resources to think critically about who has the power to tell stories — who is being paid to publish a book, create a documentary, conduct research within a marginalized community. However, I also wanted our students to understand that “own voices” is not always a simple check-box category — particularly when we begin to think of multiple, overlapping communities of marginalization. My favored definition of “own voices” is the one shown here, from Blue Crow Publishing. But even using that group-level test of ownership, not all works fit neatly in or out.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (7)

Using the Blue Crow Publishing definition above, paired with “queer” as the group identity, many of these examples are “own voices” (I count examples 1, 2, 3, 4, and possibly 5 and 7 as well). The students were polled on these examples and only examples 1 and 3 were voted most definitively as “own voices”.

It’s complicated.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (8)

We moved on to tropes and stereotypes. My central point in this part of the presentation was to explain how stories about queer experience, from the late-nineteenth century through to the early twenty-first century, have been shaped by cultural and legal regimes that required stories about queer people to end tragically. Depicting queer life as inherently criminal, closeted, sick, sad, and dead functioned to keep queer people marginalized and straight people aware of the importance of not deviating from heteronormative life scripts. Nonfiction and fiction alike treated queerness as a way of life to avoid and fear.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (9)

This resulted in a media landscape in which people are taught to believe that queer survival and queer joy are ahistorical and inauthentic representation of queer experience. I quoted a letter-writer to the  Romance Writers Association magazine who complained that queer historicals mis-represent LGBTQ+ people: “Give the [queer] characters their dignity … teach what life was like for noncisgendered people … the obstacles were life-threatening.” The expectation that a queer life is inevitably a sad and dangerous one (except maybe in the very recent past and present) works to deny the validity of stories that deviate from a cisheteronormative script designed to police and marginalize queer people.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (10)

In a landscape of narratives in which this cycle of marginalization — where cultural narratives systematically render queer joy unimaginable — continues, it’s critically important to understand how those cultural narratives bias the public against the queer historical imaginary and queer history. Evidence of queer life in the past is systematically held to a higher (impossibly higher) standard of proof than evidence of a straight past, which is presumed to be reality.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (11)

I invited the students to consider this passage from a queer romance novel where two queer people, a trans man and his nonbinary lover, discuss this double standered for queer historical interpretation and what would happen if people turned the question around and in the place of presumed cisgender and heterosexual identity historians worked from a place of “assumed homosexuality [and] threw cisgender out the window?” What might history and historical practice look like then?

 

In the final series of slides, I planned to present on my process as a reviewer of queer content, posing a series of questions that I ask fiction and nonfiction works and offering some illustrative examples of works I think do relatively poorly or relatively well on matters of queer representation.

 

Because I ran out of time in the 30 minute presentation timeslot (my own fault!) I was unable to discuss these examples in live time, but did put together a document with a slightly expanded list of critical questions to ask and six examples (three problematic, three solid).

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (14)

You can access the PDF handout I created for the five slides above here.
You can access the PDF of the “further resources” I created here.

Queer Lives, Queer Loves_ Moving from Tropes and Stereotypes toward LGBTQ+ Representation (17)

 

student debt: the thread

13 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in library life, life writing

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A lightly edited Twitter thread I wrote today prompted by this Tweet that crossed my timeline: 

I mostly don’t read or talk about student loans and the PSLF program because it’s a shortcut to panicked paralysis but today let me share my story about debt, grad school, and public service.

My family circumstances made it possible for me to graduate with my B.A. only $5k in debt. I went to a school where my father worked on staff, so I got tuition remission and I lived at home to keep expenses down. So I began the grad school search and application process not very deep in a hole. Between graduating college (May 2005) and beginning grad school (August 2007) I worked at part-time jobs that paid hourly wages of between $7.50-$10.00/hour. I had been working part-time for a decade or more at that point and in that context a $10.00 wage seemed grand! One of my jobs even gave me the option to open a 401(k) to which I began to slowly contribute. I had low expenses because I didn’t have kids, wasn’t maintaining a house or a car, and I was able to live with my parents. I started paying down that $5k of student debt. I put some savings away for a computer to get me through grad school and a cushion to get me through a cross-country move.  I was able to arrange a transfer with one of my part-time jobs (Barnes & Noble) from West Michigan to Boston so that I arrived with a job waiting (even if it only paid $9/hour). Most people don’t have the family support and resources to do this kind of planning when they’re making below living wage.

I was warned by faculty mentors and career services people at my undergrad, when applying for grad school, that student loans were likely inevitable. I was looking at M.A./M.L.S. programs and was told the funding goes primarily to PhD students. I didn’t want to enter a PhD program. But I did need an advanced degree if I wanted to pursue work in the library science field, and I wanted to continue my history scholarship as well both because I loved historical research and writing and also because it would help me on the job market. I chose a private school (Simmons College, now Simmons University) for my grad program for personal and pedagogical rather financial reasons. I wanted to get out of Michigan for a while, and the program offered an integrated archives-history track with small cohorts that sounded like a good fit.

In retrospect I didn’t have much experience cost comparing. I had never shopped for an undergrad college — I had gone where tuition was free, because that seemed like an offer I’d be foolish to refuse. So I was naive. But I had also grown up in a context that predisposed me to pick based on the program first, and cost second. I had been encouraged by all of the adults in my life to evaluate learning experiences first on the basis of whether they supported the personal goal of making a meaningful life and contributing to the collective good and then, second — after deciding whether the learning on offer was a good match — think about whether it was practically feasible. I actually still believe that is a valuable approach. But it is an approach that exists uncomfortably alongside the skyrocketing expense of higher education. “Is this practically feasible?” is a different starting place from, “What is the smartest financial decision?”

When I got the financial aid package there was some merit based scholarship money … and a projected ~$60k in student loans for the four-years of the program. Scary numbers I had no basis for evaluating. (Another reminder that I was a white, middle class young adult who was a third generation college graduate with PhDs in my extended family. Many people go through this with way less cultural competency in the higher education marketplace. And I was still struggling to interpret my options.) So. I get the aid package and am at sea trying to evaluate it. My father has a colleague who does financial advising and he offers to go over the numbers with me for free (again, something most people do not have in their lives). I put together a spreadsheet of projected income and expenses. The financial advisor is impressed I can spreadsheet! He looks over my numbers and the takeaways from our conversation are these:

  • Educational debt is an investment. While I’m not being encouraged to sign for loans willy-nilly, the loans on offer are all government loans with non-predatory interest rates and flexible options for repayment based on circumstances. Taking out loans to pursue professional training is not considered a poor financial strategy.
  • The first year of grad school will likely be most expensive, as I transition to a new city, look for work, look for an apartment, find roommates to cost-share with, etc. I can borrow a bit more in year one and likely bring borrowing down in subsequent years as my expenses go down and my earning goes up.
  • The best practice was not to take out more in loans than I could expect to earn as an annual salary once I had completed my degree. If I kept that equation in mind, it would help keep my monthly payments after graduation to something my earning power could realistically absorb.

I took his advice, bit the bullet, and decided to accept the offer of admittance. It was scary, but I felt I had done my due diligence and no one had raised red flags so I pressed forward. And his advice, as far as it went, was pretty decent. I’m glad I stuck to federal loans, and during graduate school I was able to reduce the amount I accepted in loans each year. I worked multiple jobs (that paid $12 and even $14/hour!), accepted stipended teaching and research assistantships, and shared a 500sqft apartment and living expenses with another graduate student (reader, I married her). Living in Boston is fucking expensive. In my hometown, the apartment that I had shared with a roommate in college cost $500/month. We each paid $250. I knew Boston would be expensive but there’s a difference between knowing on paper a major metropolitan area is more expensive than your hometown and writing a rent check for $1250 every month (today that rent check is $1900). But Boston was where my graduate program was, and it is/was where my job (and my wife’s job) opportunities were — and still are. There was no way, during graduate school, we could pay living expenses working jobs that paid $12-$14/hour, even with both of us working. So loans were a necessity part of making ends meet while we were balancing school, work, and life.

As I have written about before, the reality of taking on so much debt — I had never even had to pay interest on my credit card balance, which I paid in full every month! — was physically toxic to my system. I was so frightened of, and humiliated by, the fact of having student loan debt I woke up nauseated every day for the better part of that first year. I felt like I should have been clever enough to find a different way. It felt like irresponsibility to incur debt at all.

While I was in graduate school, the 2008 financial crash happened. NO ONE was hiring. We all felt lucky not to be let go (if we weren’t let go). It was around this time that one of my colleagues made me aware of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. This was before anyone, anywhere had been making payments for the necessary ten years to apply for forgiveness. The criteria seemed opaque but we puzzled through the fine print and concluded our non-profit cultural institution was likely a qualifying employer. THANK GOD there might be light at the end of the tunnel. A safety net by which the chronically low-paying jobs in our field (libraries, archives, and museums) were recognized as a public good and the financial burden we were all carrying in order to do that service work might be lifted.

Notice I say “might.” We were all wary of the PSLF program because it seemed too public-spirited to be true in the age of government austerity. It was way too uncertain a possiblity, way too far in the future, to make any major decision life based upon a “might.” Certainly not as we were watching colleagues be let go, watching the job ads slow to a trickle, watching the housing crisis unfold nationwide.

Just as I was going on the full-time, post-grad school job market in earnest, I was offered a promotion to full-time at my current workplace. The starting salary was $34k/year. So while my student loans (approaching $60k by graduation) met the guideline for not exceeding the “typical” Boston salary in the library sector ($62k) the job — full time! with benefits! in a shitty economy! — on offer was only half that. So the realities of the  situation were this: I could accept a full-time job with colleagues I felt good working with, doing work I felt good about, in a shitty job market and enroll in an income-based student loan repayment plan OR I could keep looking for a job, perhaps even in other sectors I wasn’t trained for, that would allow me to pay off my student loans in the “standard” ten years. Don’t forget that I had/have a partner who also has student loan debt we are jointly responsible for, who was simultaneously making these same calculations around accepting contingent, part-time work or … remaining on the brutal job market.

Remember that my wife and I both work in an entire industry — non-profit, cultural heritage work — where staff are chronically underpaid, especially in relation to our training and the financial investment they were encouraged to put into that education, and all told (and tell eachother) we should be grateful for work we love. Are we foolish to accept and repeat this story? Maybe. But the story is told around us and dictates the conditions of our work in material ways not entirely in our individual control. When an entire sector is organized around the economy of workers expected to be grateful and do more with less, if we push back individually the headwind is strong. We are negotiating on very uneven terms with employers who know they can ask for more, with less, because everyone does.

So. Have I somehow been encouraged to maintain my “lifestyle” of working at a non-profit cultural heritage institution that is in basic alignment with my values because of the possibility that someday, maybe, the federal government would forgive my student loan debt? The structural forces that shaped my graduate school path and the debt that followed from that are — no offense to the federal government — much larger than the vague possibility of potentially qualifying for a debt forgiveness program could have much impact on. The ship of student loan debt, and the job market we graduated into, had sailed long before the PSLF became a thing that might apply to us a decade in the future.

Ideally — ideally — I would argue that a) the costs of education should be socialized so students aren’t taking on astronomical amounts of personal debt to equip themselves for their jobs and b) the wages paid to entry-level workers in any industry — but perhaps particularly the non-profit / public service worlds — should align with the expenses incurred to train plus the money required to be financially secure. Until that happens, the PSLF program is hardly precipitating the problem of overwhelming student debt. It’s a stop-gap measure to make sure those serving the public for low wages don’t sink beneath the weight of educational debt or evacuate the field entirely because it becomes financially unsustainable. I think it is an entirely appropriate role for government to encourage workers to accept and remain in jobs that service the collective well-being of humanity and to step in and provide a safety net that offsets the financial risk we are currently asked to shoulder.

I have been on income-based repayment for my ~$60k + interest student loan debt since August 2011. I’ve had my employer certified as PSLF-eligible. I’m not holding my breath but I have no other choice because we cannot pay rent and pay standard monthly payments on our debt. This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution, and PSLF is one piece of the front line, emergency-response puzzle.

Republicans want 100% of the financial risk of EVERYTHING to be on the individual (student, employee, retiree, sick person, etc. … ). In contrast, I believe — not just because I am one of those touched by the potential of PSLF — that it is a good moral and utilitarian use of government to mitigate the financial burden of education and training in our present reality. If you agree with me, let your representative and senators know! The PSLF is worth fighting for, for all of us, as the first step in reshaping how we fund higher education in the United States. And I’ll be writing my representative Ayanna Pressley, and my senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, this week to tell them so.

own your smut: on sexually explicit media and language

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in fandom, think pieces

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A few days ago this Tweet, from a romance author, was retweeted into my timeline:

I was struck by the intensity of this writer’s response (burn with fire … fucking insulting) to having her sexually explicit stories characterized as porn. As of this writing  her Tweet has been retweeted 135 times and liked 909 times. So Davidson is clearly not alone in this sentiment.

I’ve been writing and publishing sexually explicit fanfic for eight years and reading sexually explicit stories for over two decades. For at least a dozen years, I have consciously chosen to characterize what I read and write as “porn” and “smut” as a deliberate intervention targeting what I see as the harmful distinction between “erotica” (highbrow, legitimate, artful) and “porn” (crass, illegitimate, gratuitous). Obscene and pornographic works — broadly described as works created with a primary goal of sexually arousing one’s audience — have historically been dismissed and derided because of their capacity to engage our bodies in a pleasureable way. Suspect on its own, this capacity to arouse has typically required an external justification — literary merit or educational purpose — to earn widespread (though far from universal!) approval or simply the right to exist and circulate in carefully circumscribed spaces. 

Pornography is so universally understood as creative endeavor of unseemly excess that we use it as an adjective to describe objectional leveraging of emotional response in contexts that have nothing to do with sex: trauma porn, ruin porn, disaster porn. We might be moved by these things, the phrases imply, with their juxtaposed language of depicted pleasure and real-world pain … but we will likely come away feeling gross and guilty for having enjoyed the experience. I believe this is an impoverished view of human sexual pleasure and an impoverished understanding of the way sexually explicit fictions (a.k.a. porn!) can bring us joy. 

So I responded to Davidson pushing back against her framing:

Davidson never responded to my question but other writers did. “Porn is about sex. That’s the foundation. There can be a larger story but it’s not necessary,” one writer argued, distinguishing this type of storytelling from her own erotic romantic narratives where sex is “an integral part” of a happily-ever-after plot. “It really hurts,” Davidson wrote in response to another commenter, when fellow romance writers “start flinging the term around. You expect erotic romance = porn from ignorant media or fundamentalists or whatever. But other romance authors?” “Erotic Romance stimulates the mind and ones imagination where as Porn doesnt,” chimed in another author. “Smut [and porn] has no literary quality to it. It’s gratuitous,” wrote another. “And also burn the idea that F/F romance is also ‘porn’ – have had this said to me more times than I care to eye roll,” wrote another.

It became clear, as I watched this Twitter thread unfold, that many people in romancelandia have very strong and negative feelings about their work being characterized as pornography. Part of this, I gather from the thread, is coming in reaction to romance writers who write less-sexually-explicit, fade-to-black, “chaste” romance trash-talking writers who choose to tell stories with more — and more detailed — sex scenes. I get it. I get the frustration over being slut-shamed. There is misogynistic policing going on here, with good-girl romance writers distancing themselves from the jezebels who are brazen enough to write sex scenes (“Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!“)

The problem is, responding to the charge that you’re writing porn by splitting hairs, hiding behind ideas about genre conventions or format (image versus text), and arguing that porn is “about sex” not a “larger story” (so … sex can’t be a larger story?) accepts the framing you’ve been given by your accusers. 

“Oh, but we don’t write sex like THOSE people over THERE …” is not a good look.

If we lived in a world where pornography and erotica and romance were located in roughly the same place on the respectibility continuum — where “erotica” didn’t have a history of being wielded as the highbrow alternative to lowbrow “porn”; where “romance” wasn’t struggling against the misogynistic forces that dismiss the entire genre as trivial and trashy because women — maybe … maybe … in that world we could have a valuable discussion about whether differences of genre and convention exist between romantic, erotic, and pornographic styles of sexual storytelling. But in the world we live in, staking your claim to the erotic while taking umbridge at the suggestion your work is pornographic supports a hierarchy of sexually explicit stories. It supports a hierarchy where stories labeled “porn” are dismissed and devalued in order to give you artistic high ground to stand on.

And I am not comfortable with throwing porn under the bus for the sake of respectibility. Because I think that throwing pornography under the bus means we accept the premise that stories grounded in — sometimes consisting entirely of! — human sexual expression are not really stories at all. It means we accept that writing and reading stories to turn people the fuck on — engage their embodied, sexual response as well as their hearts and minds — is categorically different (and more suspect) than engaging them as readers of fiction that elicits other types of physical and emotional reactions.

If it makes us uncomfortable to have our sexually explicit works described as “porn” or “smut” I really think the onus is on us to sit with that discomfort — maybe even to lean into that headwind — and get comfortable with that characterization even if it doesn’t feel 100% accurate in a fine-tuning subgenre sense. Because the alternative only fuels the politically powerful machinary of anti-sex sentiment entrenched in American culture, and that machinary demonizes and marginalizes — directly and materially harms — many of our most vulnerable.

If the price of defusing the charge behind the “insult” of labeling someone a pornographer is getting a little over-generous with our definitional boundaries, I say that’s an entirely acceptable price to pay.

Book Review: Algorithms of Oppression

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in book reviews, library life

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Since we’re talking about the racism built into algorithms this morning, I thought I could share this review I wrote for the NEA Newsletter (January 2019). The published review had to be revised down to 500 words; this is the extended version. 

34762552Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018).

In this accessible and deeply-researched volume, critical information studies scholar Safiya Noble (University of California, Los Angeles; co-editor of The Intersectional Internet) uses the Google search engine as case study to document and theorize the ways in which racism and sexism are embedded within the structures of information harvest and delivery by for-profit companies on the World Wide Web. Noble considers the mechanisms through which results are delivered to those who use Google search, foregrounds the power relationships that shape the nature and hierarchy of those results, and challenges readers to denaturalize the process of “Googling it” when we have a question in need of a ready and reliable answer. As a sociologist and a critical library and information science scholar, Noble weaves together a librarian’s understanding of how cataloging, classification, and research tools operate with a critical Black feminist understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression from within which these technological systems of information organization and retrieval were designed. Often assumed by both developers and the general public to be value-neutral, the typically invisible (and often proprietary) algorithms by which human beings create and access content online are inescapably shaped by these logics of oppression — logics often deemed normal, normative and therefore “neutral” to those who benefit from them, even when they are anything but.

To make her case that we are living with a hegemonic culture of “algorithmic oppression” (4), Noble walks readers through a series of examples that follow out from a catalytic moment early in her graduate school career. She describes in chapter one putting the search string “black girls” into Google search in an effort to find activities for a group of preteen girls only to be inundated with a list of racist and hypersexualized results:

The best information, as listed by rank in the search results, was certainly not the best for me, or for the children I love. For whom, then, was this the best information and who decides? What were the profit and other motives driving this information to the top of the results? How had the notion of neutrality in information ranking and retrieval … remained so unexamined and without public critique? (18)

This first chapter walks readers through the basic concepts of algorithmic search and what can (and cannot) be gleaned about Google’s development of PageRank, its proprietary algorithmic product, from early concept documents. Based on the idea, borrowed from academia, that the most influential literature is also the most often cited, PageRank began with the assumption that a link to a web page was analogous to a citation, and that the web pages with the most links were therefore the most influential and therefore best (itself an assumption about power and authority that must be critically examined). While the algorithm itself may be proprietary, the fact that we cannot analyze the mechanism of Google search at the code level does not prevent us from observing — as Noble does — that Google’s algorithms produce search results that are anything but impartial. Not only does PageRank encourage searchers to engage with advertiser content — advertisers are, after all, Google’s primary clients — but also reproduce and amplify harmful beliefs.

Chapter two delves into specific examples of such searches, and casts a skeptical glance at the efforts of Google executives to distance their company from these harms. Searches including the word “Jew,” for example, produce a high proportion of anti-Semitic content (42); image searches for “doctor” return pictures of mostly white men, while image searches for “unprofessional hairstyles for work” produce pictures of black women (83). Whether or not Google software developers set out to create an algorithm that generates and amplifies the misogynoir[1] of our culture is beside the point. “Intent is not particularly important,” Noble reminds us (90). Whether or not a white person means to be racist (or a developer means to practice misogyny) is a question that may be unanswerable. Rather, as critical information workers and consumers, we must ask — regardless of intent — who is harmed by the images and ideas circulated through Google search interactions.

Having considered the technological processes and biased, arguably harmful results of the Google search product, Noble moves on in chapters three and four to consider other ways in which Google’s dominance in our online lives operates to further marginalize the already marginalized. As in the offline world, without purposeful and ongoing efforts to combat structural oppression in online spaces, inequality persists. Chapter three explores how the Internet, as a space governed by commercial interests rather than as a noncommercial public good, can cultivate and exacerbate harmful and false ideas. When the goal is to generate clicks for advertisers, there is little incentive for search products to “intercede in the framing of the question itself,” and challenge the searcher to critically examine their own desires or beliefs (116). Chapter four raises questions of data privacy and the right to be forgotten by an Internet that never forgets, particularly as increased visibility may deepen the vulnerability of already-vulnerable populations.[2]

algoirthms thread snipAfter reading the book and turning in my review, I had some further thoughts about the way sexually-explicit materials were handled within the text. A thread sharing those thoughts may be found on my Twitter timeline here. 

The final two chapters of Algorithms, along with a brief epilogue that considers the harrowing challenge of our current political moment, turn from the structural problem of algorithmic oppression toward potential solutions. One key intervention is to increase critical awareness of our digital ecosystem’s biases, a project that librarians and other information workers could be particularly well-positioned to undertake. Noble also champions a “public search engine alternative” to the current commercial options (152), a government-funded check on Google’s troubling power within and over almost every aspect of our interconnected lives and livelihoods. Even if that remedy seems politically unrealistic in the near future, it may be a public works project worth fighting for.

By focusing on the ubiquitous tool of Google search, Algorithms gives those just beginning to think critically about our Internet-centric information ecosystem concrete and replicable examples of algorithmic oppression in action. For those already steeped in the rapidly-growing literature of critical librarian and information studies, Algorithms will be a valuable addition to our corpus of texts that blend theory and practice, both documenting the problematic nature of where we are and the possibility of where we might arrive in future if we fight, collectively, to make it so.

[1] “Misogynoir” is a term coined by Moya Bailey to describe the particular misogyny that Black women experience, a misogyny inextricable from the racism they experience under white supremacy. See Moya Bailey, “They Aren’t Talking About Me,” Crunk Feminist Collective, 14 March 2010. http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/.

[2] The “right to be forgotten” is also a concept generating renewed interest in archives and cultural heritage study and practice; see for example Ashley Nicole Vavra, “The Right to Be Forgotten: An Archival Perspective.” The American Archivist vol. 81, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): 100-111. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-81.1.100.

burnout: the thread

11 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in life writing, think pieces

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Below is a lightly modified long-ass Twitter thread that I wrote earlier this week about burnout. It got a high amount of traffic (for me) and I thought some might benefit from having it in blog post form, with some added citational links to other work on these subjects. The thread began as a riff on this Tweet from Anne Helen Peterson:

This response also suggests burnout only “counts” if you’re parenting. And normalizes burnout for parents. If you’re interested in the normalization of burnout for those doing reproductive and other types of care work, Laura Briggs’ How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump for more on this trap. And care work doesn’t begin and end with parenting either. As a thirty-seven year-old millennial not parenting, I still have non-waged kinkeeping that is chronically time-starved. Off the top of my head, kinkeeping activities beyond parenting:

  • Remembering/celebrating family & friends’ birthdays, holidays, etc.
  • Caring for an ill spouse
  • Caring for an ill parent or sibling
  • Caring for companion animals
  • Feeding, exercising, caring for your own body
  • Writing letters, emails, to long-distance friends and family
  • Meeting friends and family for coffee dates
  • Participating in community life (church, neighborhood, volunteer orgs.)
  • Participating in political life
  • Creative pursuits that make the world a more beautiful place

Feminist activists have been pointing out at least since the mid-20th century that when people who previously did unpaid kinkeeping labor (women, teenage daughters, spinsters, elders) are pushed into wagework the need for that labor doesn’t disappear. You either have to pay someone to do this work, or you do it yourself as “second shift” work (leading to burnout), or — because of burnout and a literal lack of time — it doesn’t get done.

(A bit later…) I read Anne’s newsletter on writing the burnout piece, which is all I could face today (So much irony in feeling too burned out to read about burnout…). Some lateral thoughts that bubbled up:

In the newsletter she quotes someone citing Chomsky on “efficiency” for business = extra labor for customers. I haven’t read the Chomsky analysis but I recall a great example of this presented in terms of retirement and pensions vs. 401(k) model. (I tried to find the example online while compiling this post and the Internet defeated me.) Pensions make the work of investing the responsibility of the company rather than the employee. You work, you retire, you get a set amount from your employer. You don’t need to make many complex high stakes choices to ensure the money is there for you. In the 401(k) model, the employee is responsible for ongoing, complex financial management. Most of us do not have expertise in this area, or money to pay independent experts, but WE are responsible and shoulder the risk even when we struggle to be “good” savers.

This shouldering of responsibility and risk — packaged for us as freedom of choice across many areas of life — means in practice that human rights become contingent on our ability to become experts in navigating countless complex systems.* If we don’t have money to outsource the labor of making informed, meaningful choices we are in practice held responsible for “choices” that are not, in fact, in our ability to actively make.**

*My reflections here are shaped by a reproductive justice framework, especially about the human rights problems created by “choice” rhetoric. So a shout out to those scholars. You can read an introduction to reproductive justice here and I also recommend this excellent book on the history and activism of the movement.

**Inserts obvious all caps footnote that along every vector the existing inequalities of race, class, gender, health, education, immigration status, disability, etc both create and amplify this responsibility trap.

On a less meta level than the risk/responsibility trap and its violation of fundamental human rights (YOU HEARD ME) My wife Hanna and and I experience decision fatigue so frequently we have a short-hand for it: “ferret shock”. (The internet informs me another term for this would be overchoice.) If we’re out running errands or standing in the grocery aisle and one of us asks the other to make a decision, that person often says “I”m ferret shocking” and the asker knows exactly what they’re talking about and we go home.

Another thing the burnout discussion is reminding me of Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007), my own reaction to it at the time of its publication, and the limits of countercultural lifeways. For those who haven’t read it, the nutshell argument was/is that for (white, middle-class, aspirational) women of my age cohort (b. 1981) had learned we could/should strive for perfection and it was killing us. When I read it in 2007, I didn’t see myself in this narrative. I knew the narrative, sure, but I had also been insulated from it in a variety of ways leading from my parents’ own countercultural decision to let me opt out of formal schooling until college, and do college extremely part-time as a commuter. Because I never socialized intensely with my cohort or with people drilling aspirational messaging into my cohort, I had some measure of distance from that narrative. I didn’t feel like a failure for opting out of many things my peers felt were obligatory.

(There’s a complicated side narrative here connected to queer identity, chronic illness, and religious subcultures but that’s for another thread.)

But the thing about structurally-created burnout is that you CANNOT opt out as a single person or even, in many cases, as a subculture or community of crunchy-granola-hippie types (I’m speaking of myself here, with a mixture of mild self-parody and entirely sincere commitment to crunchy granola). The same year Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters came out I moved to Boston for grad school and was structurally forced into a number of systems — graduate school, student loan debt, resume building, the cost of living where I attended school and worked etc. — that create burnout. For a lot of that first year in Boston and back in the formal school environment, I felt like an extreme failure for having been unable to find a countercultural alternative to the cross country move –> graduate school –> librarianship path to adulting. I knew that aspects of the systems I was becoming embedded within were actively toxic to me.

In the past (through social privilege and positive family support for those alternative choices) I had been able to create loopholes for myself. But loopholes don’t create long-term structural change; they don’t fix the problem that created the need for the loophole. And even for the people (like me) who had the resources to create them, they are typically temporary. What I’m groping toward here is that burnout gets spun as an individual mental-health, self-help problem, when burnout is a collective and structural problem. It’s been baked into a system that capitalizes (literally!) our burnout. That doesn’t mean subcultural attempts to address and assuage burnout are pointless — I would argue based on my own experience and my historical research that such subcultural attempts are vital in demonstrating that burnout is historically created and change is possible.

Jo Freeman’s work on the tyranny of structurelessness is also informative and applicable to the condition of burnout we are coping with, as a society as well as individually, in this historical moment. The essay’s basic point is all groups have a structure. Either the structure is explicit, rulebound, with pathways of power and accountability or the structure is denied, shadowy, with no accountability for those who gain power. (Sound familiar?) The language of libertarian freedom of choice so beloved by the GOP and many on left too becomes the tyranny of structurelessness. Sure, we technically all have “choices” … but we don’t all have the power to take meaningful advantage of those choices. And the illusion of everyone having equal agency, in reality, allows people uninterested in sharing power to seize control because they are loud and pushy and don’t care. There is no structural way to stop them.

(When I think about the tyranny of structurelessness, I often remember Angus Johnston’s piece on the value of using Robert’s Rules of Order as a collective decision-making process: “Remember that Robert’s Rules are there to protect your rights, and those of the other members of the group.” If you’re interested in how structure can facilitate inclusivity, I highly recommend reading it.)

So finally, let’s talk about the idea of a “millennial” cohort and whether cohort generalizations are at all useful in this conversation about burnout. Some framing statements: generational language, like decade language (“the Sixties”) is primarily a marketing concept not very useful for historical analysis. Nevertheless, the term is in widespread use. When I use it, I use the Pew Research Center definition: Those born between 1981-1996. A fifteen year spread. I will turn thirty-eight this year, the oldest “millennial” as I was born in 1981. Those born in 1996 will turn twenty-three. So by raw age, the millennials so defined are in middle adulthood. They have jobs, bills, kinkeeping responsibilities. Most are no longer their parents’ dependents. Many have dependents of their own. If I had become a parent at age eighteen, my child would be twenty, possibly in college, possibly a parent themselves. That’s the cohort we’re talking about.

So is the idea of a “millennial” cohort at all useful or are we just stuck with it? I think it can be useful as a concept with some important caveats. I would argue that “millennial is a narrative not an identity. It is a story we tell about the people who arrived in adulthood between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. It is a normative force that helps organize the conditions of our adulthood. Like most normative forces it is less representative than it is pre/proscriptive. It tells us who we are expected to be. Which is why the archetype “millennial” is white, rich, able-bodied, etc. The archetype is tied to age, yes, but in a looser way than birth year. It is a story that lays out how our lives should be organized and also itemizes the ways in which we fail those benchmarks. As a “discourse” (theorists might say) the story about millennials activates when and where our lives intersect with that story. Regardless of our technical age.

Some aspects of the millennial narrative have to do with the big-picture national and world events that shaped our childhoods and early adulthoods: Reagan and Thatcher, globalization, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gutting of the social safety net, Bush v. Gore (my first presidential election), and our endless wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan (I was twenty on 9/11). Those things shaped the lives of everyone who lived through them or is now dealing with the consequences, but the idea of “millennial” argues that these things shape us uniquely depending upon our age and/or “stage of life”. But not everyone follows the middle class, orderly story we are sold (another narrative!) about what order we (are supposed to, ideally) live our lives. So the intersection of a world event with a stage of life gets messy super quickly.

Let’s take the 2008 economic crisis. In 2008, I was beginning my graduate program for library science. My wife, technically a Gen Xer was two years ahead of me in the same program. She graduated into a much more precarious job market than I did. But so did much younger and older graduate students! I was in the same program with people age twenty-one and people in their forties. As a group, our graduate school experience was shaped by the conditions of the millennial narrative with no regard to age. So, in sum, it can be useful to think about how the millennial narrative is both shaped by and shapes the stories that we tell about our lives, the order in which we do (and are supposed to do) things, and how it is used to penalize human beings who fail the narrative.

#TenDayMovieChallenge 2018

06 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in media

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I was tapped by friend Brandy Schillace to do the Ten Day Movie Challenge on Twitter, which involves posting ten stills from ten movies that are meaningful to you with no further commentary. However, if you are interested in what ten movies I chose, here are the stills with film titles, directors, and year of release.

DtnybRSW4AEZFS2

Fire (1996)
Directed by Deepa Mehta

DtqWqaUXgAEUT97

Emma and Grandpa (1983)
Directed by Joy Whitby

strictly-ballroom

Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann

carol-blanchett

Carol (2015)
Directed by Todd Haynes

Narnia1

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1988)
Directed by Marilyn Fox

Iron_Jawed_Angels_TV-681633768-large

Iron Jawed Angels (2004)
Directed by Katja von Garnier

ladies-in-florence

A Room with a View (1985)
Directed by James Ivory

Crimson Peak Movie Film Trailers Reviews Movieholic Hub

Crimson Peak (2015)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro

75.0.0

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Directed by George Miller

MV5BOWZkYzE3MWUtOGZmNC00ZjIzLTg2ZDMtMjZlODNiZTg1YTRmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjIzNTU5NTQ@._V1_

God’s Own Country (2017)
Directed by Francis Lee

more complicated than either/or

24 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in fandom

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I have another short essay (essaylet?) on writing in the “Fic, Fandom & Sexuality” issue of Spark! (No. 43, 22 November 2018). I repost it here for those who may be interested. 

As a bisexual feminist, it’s been important to me from the beginning of my participation in fandom to write bisexual characters, particularly bisexual male characters. I do this for two reasons.

First, because bi erasure—particularly dismissal of bisexuality as a valid form of desire for cis men—is an ongoing problem in queer spaces.

Second, because it is a way of taking men with canonical m/f relationships and queering them without invalidating their past intimacy with women.

Currently, I’m working on a piece of Jimmy Perez/Duncan Hunter fic (Shetland) where I am navigating the fact that both Jimmy and Duncan have lost a wife and lover who was a woman, who was an important relationship in both of their lives, and figuring them both as bisexual means I can honour her place in their sexual histories while also bringing the two men together. I really like having the chance to make a narrative more complicated than either/or.

I also take particular pleasure in writing stories where older people discover that as they age their sexual desires shift in new ways—not in the sense of long-denied desire surfacing, but in the sense of recognised but marginalised desires taking on new salience, or surprising new desires taking shape.

I tend to write relationship-first stories, wherein the characters are more invested in nurturing relationships that feel right to them than they are in ensuring their relationships neatly map onto some sense of fixed orientation. And that, too, is a political decision (for me as a writer) because our culture is so strongly invested in “born this way” notions of sexual identity.

Such an understanding, requiring fixity of desire across a lifetime, does not accurately reflect the full range of human relational possibility. So I use fic whenever I can to advance a more fluid understanding of desire that focuses less on identity and more on individual people and the joy they bring to one another. And then I let the identity of each character grow out of those encounters.

don’t blame readers

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in fandom

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,

My friends. My loves. My dudes.

If you want f/f books, you gotta buy books from creators who want to write f/f. That’s it. That’s literally the ticket. The more Queer books you buy from Queer authors who are doing the work — the more content there will be. The end.

Last night I saw this Tweet go by on my timeline. I let it go by and then scrolled back to find it because it was bothering  me. And then I wrote a thread about why.

I have screen-capped the Tweet for anonymity because, as I said in the original thread, the person is making a valid point about market-driven content and the need to support creators of the work we want to see out there in the world with our dollars. I also don’t want to pile on this person I have no prior relationship with. But this is a sentiment that circulates with moderate frequency in discussions about whither the f/f romance and I have some feels about shaming and blaming readers for the fact that they aren’t finding the f/f stories they want to read.

First, this argument doesn’t engage with the fact that f/f fiction is structurally more expensive than other kinds of queer romance. I can buy three m/m stories at $2.99 a pop from authors I trust or one $9.99 f/f book from an author I have never read before. Should I be willing to pay more for f/f to support emerging f/f writers? Maybe. But what about readers who only have the $2.99? Too bad for them? Readers don’t have unlimited budgets. We make choices. Cost is a real barrier to access.*

Second, this argument flattens f/f into a single type of story you either want or don’t. Most readers have more specific tastes. I like historicals and paranormals that grapple meaningfully with gender, class, race, include meaningful chosen family networks, and have narratively significant sex. So while I want f/f, I want a pretty specific type of story — a similar type of story to the m/m and f/m narratives I gravitate toward. My other preferences as a reader don’t just swirl down the drain the minute I start sorting by the f/f category tag. If authors writing f/f are not writing in the romance flavors I enjoy, I might feel strongly about the political value of supporting f/f writers in the abstract but as a reader I have low incentive to purchase. Do I pay $4.99 for an m/m or f/m histrom paranormal my trusted social-promotional networks are buzzing about … or $9.99 for a contemporary f/f, the blurb of which makes me feel meh?

And third, those social-promotional networks really matter! Right now, the social-promotional network for f/f seems to be almost entirely separate circle on the Venn diagram from the social-promotional circle of m/m and f/m. (Much like the fandom crossover between original media that inspire f/f pairings and original media that inspire m/m pairings seems to meet only rarely.) In addition to person-to-person recommendations, the algorithimic “readers also bought…” recs in Kindle and cross-promotions at the end of m/m works are rarely (never?!) f/f.** I would totally pay $2.99 to try a new-to-me f/f author with my romance specs if they’re recommended to me by a person whose taste I find reliable vis a vis my own. This ALMOST NEVER HAPPENS with f/f. I am a queer woman romance reader, who follows a lot of queer women readers, and I almost never see this type of squeeful signal boosting of good histrom or paranormal f/f that effectively handsells the author to me (which is how I find most of my m/m and f/m authors). So the books aren’t making it in front of eyeballs is my point. The ecosystem is broken.

In sum: “Pay authors to write f/f!” is not the simple feminist fix it seems. I mean, I would be 1000% happy to be proved wrong and to wake up tomorrow morning to my mentions full of histrom, paranormal, non-transphobic, diverse, sexually explicit f/f romances for $5 or less. (Narrator: This didn’t happen.) But when I ask for recs I mostly get crickets and sympathy.

I anonymized the original Tweet above because I don’t want to attack the person who is making an important point about labor and compensation and demand. However, I think the patronising tone of the message presumes we potential readers of f/f just want good stuff for free. That we’re lazy and cheap. In my experience, romance readers — perhaps particularly romance readers who care about more diverse romance, including queer romance — generally respect author labor and care about supporting the folks who write the stories we love to read. But our feminist political commitment to supporting queer f/f writers doesn’t mean we are all rich and it doesn’t mean we want ANY AND ALL f/f content as individual readers. We pick and choose the f/f stories we will take a chance on just like any other romance purchase. And, sadly, the more times I have chanced that f/f purchase and been disappointed, the more reluctantly I approach the next offer.

One more story. There was a great panel a few years ago about the early years of On Our Backs, the lesbian feminist porn magazine. They had a centerfold — in the great tradition of porn magazines — and one of the former editors on the panel, Susie Bright, told this wonderful story.  That they used to get letters from readers AGONIZING about their feelings of desire for the centerfold. “What are her politics?” they would write and ask:

“Dear “On Our Backs,” — one letter-writer would say– “I do not know how to feel about your centerfold model. What if she’s not a good person? I do not know her politics. I cannot decide whether I should attempt to jill off to this picture when I do not know where she stands on ecology, race relations, veganism.”

And the editor was like: “Here is the gift of a naked woman! Can you not just accept this gift if it makes you feel good??”

“But I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel if I don’t know her stance on nuclear proliferation!!!”

Women who desire women (cis and trans alike, though we experience cultural pressures differently) experience a lot of shame and anxiety about not getting desire “right”. Am I feminist enough? Am I gay enough? Should I enjoy penetration if I’m a lesbian and a feminist? If I’m not turned on by this woman is it a sign of internalized misogyny? When I speak with other queer readers yearning for f/f romance in the marketplace we acknowledge the shame and self-blame that happens every time we read an f/f story we feel less than enthusiastic about: Is this just not a story I like OR AM I A BAD QUEER FEMINIST??? 

So shaming queer women for not buying more f/f — and blaming them, as reader-consumers, for the lack of f/f stories being published — is all tangled up in this long history of queer, feminist women worried about getting our sexual pleasure correct politically. OF COURSE readers have absorbed all manner of biases (sexist and otherwise) as part of our cultural stew. Asking ourselves why we are compelled by certain narratives and not others is TOTALLY valid. But, “buy f/f and stuff you like will eventually be written!” is…not that call to self-reflection.

*I don’t talk about libraries in this post in part because they are another access point/barrier to reading queer romance. I have a library widget on my browser that tells me if a book is available at any of the three public library networks I have access to. Only rarely are the romance novels I am looking for available to me free from the library. So readers who cannot afford even the $2.99/book pricepoints have even more barriers to access.

**Unless it’s an f/f by the same author — thankfully an occurrance growing in frequency

Engaging in Critical Librarianship

06 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in library life

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I was invited to participate on a panel at the Tufts University Libraries staff development day, 6 June 2018, on the theme of critical librarianship. Before opening the panel to a more discursive question and answer period, each of the panelists — myself, Stacy Collins, and Liz Phipps-Soeiro — were asked to briefly speak about our own practices of critical librarianship. These were my remarks.

I decided to use my brief presentation time here today, before we move into a more conversational mode, to share three questions with you that I use to frame and reflect on the practice critical librarianship at my workplace and in the field more broadly. I want to note here, at the top of our discussion, that I received no formal training in critical theory when I was pursuing my MLS degree at Simmons College, between 2007 and 2011; last night, when I was preparing my remarks, I did a quick search and found that the #critlib Twitter chats go back to 2014, and the DERAIL Forum at Simmons — a student-led forum for “critical discussions of the intersections between social justice issues and our roles as students and information professionals” — began in 2016. Five years after I finished my graduate education.

As someone who entered the field of librarianship because I was seeking a way to put my leftist politics into practice, I am really excited that these discussions are happening — and often happening in ways that are accessible to library workers who are no longer students themselves (on Twitter, at professional conferences, in forums like this). While I love to read and think about critical theory, I want to underscore that you don’t have to be a theory nerd to think and act critically in library spaces. And I hope that these three questions, which I have found helpful in clarifying my role and responsibilities to work for social justice on the job, help you think about what you can do in your own work space to make our practices more inclusive.

Question One: What are my core values?

A key insight of critical theory is that power is distributed unequally in every area of our lives. Critical theory especially highlights the way that systems and structures — cataloging standards, workplace hierarchies, the physical organization of space — presented as objective, neutral, and natural that may appear “neutral” (in part because powerful people present them as such) in fact actively work to produce and reproduce power and privilege whether or not they are ultimately good for human flourishing.

Many of us became librarians because we are passionate about access to information — particularly access that is made available on an equal basis to everyone in the community (however defined) that the library serves. The hard lesson that critical theory teaches us is that the practice of librarianship is not inherently the practice of social justice. We learn that libraries, too, are sites of oppression. Of colonialism, of racism, of anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-fat, ableist, and sexist attitudes and exclusionary practices. And we learn that sometimes these harmful attitudes and actions are not incidental to librarianship but are, in fact, foundational to the history of our field and woven tightly (perhaps inextricably, in some cases) into our daily work.

This is why my first question — for myself, and for all of you — is: “What are my core values?” Current best practices, organizational mission statements, codes of ethics established by professional bodies — these may be useful, but they should not be your only way of holding yourself accountable for socially just practice. Instead, I encourage you to identify (or create) communities of accountability outside of your workplace, perhaps even outside of your field. In the months following the 2016 election, for example, it became clear to me that speaking out against GOP policies required more than the language of professional ethics and best practices. Identify those people and spaces that help you hold on to your deepest sense of justice and joy, and check in with those people, spend time in those spaces, purposefully reflect on how your daily work can better reflect those values you hold dear.

Question Two: Who is missing from this table?

The second question I encourage you to ask — and ask often — is “Who is missing from this table?” Who is missing from your conversations about policy, about access, about inclusion? When you post a job opening, who is applying for those positions, and who is invited for interviews? If those people all come from very similar backgrounds and all fit a very similar profile: Are they all (or almost all) white? Are they all from middle-class backgrounds? Are they all able-bodied?

Particularly when it comes to questions of power and agency in our institutions, getting into the habit of noticing who is and isn’t at the table when decisions are being made, when resources are being allocated, is a crucial step in taking action for change. Think critically about who serves (and who is asked to serve) on committees. Who has the financial resources to participate in professional development. Whose needs are framed as central in your workplace and whose comfort is considered as a postscript in event planning? And task yourself with documenting the exclusions you notice, and speaking up. To take one example, the Massachusetts Historical Society recently established a lactation space for staff and researchers, and when an email went out to staff announcing this the email referred to the space as a “Mother’s Room.” Not all parents who provide milk for their children identify as mothers, or as women — so I asked the facilities staff to consider more inclusive language for any signs or information text on our website.  In another case, a staff member noticed that our registration form offered no gender-neutral alternative to Mr. and Ms. — a careless oversight that was easily remedied once he brought it to our attention. While sometimes true ideological differences exist, and need to be dealt with, in many cases change can be made with minimal fuss institutionally and make a HUGE difference in how welcome staff and patrons feel.

Question Three: Where, and how do I have agency?

Once you start thinking about the (mal)distribution of power in your library, and once you start noticing who’s being excluded, and how, it’s time to think about where and how you have agency to make change. All of us carry complex identities that mean we have institutional and social power in some contexts and may be marginalized in others. It’s important to do the work of discerning where you, specifically, can bring insight to bear and where you have the power to act. When it comes to social privilege, for example, I am a white woman, I am able-bodied, I hold advanced degrees, English is my first language, I have birthright citizenship. Institutionally, I have the advantage of ten years’ tenure, a supervisor who supports me, and I’m salaried with benefits. On the other hand, I am queer and a woman; I’m not a department head, and in many cases am not at the table when institutional policy discussions take place. I am young compared to many of my senior colleagues. But that doesn’t mean I lack agency. In the comedy world, they talk about jokes that “punch up” rather than “punch down”: Jokes that punch down — fat “jokes” or rape “jokes,” for example — reinforce existing prejudice and police already-marginalized people further. Jokes that “punch up” work in the opposite way, naming and ridiculing those policing practices in a way that exposes their violence and hopefully helps turn the cultural tide. In a similar way, I have come to think about practicing critical librarianship “from the middle” of an institution as an exercise in sheltering down and amplifying up. Assess where you are in your organization, who your allies are, and who among those allies has more structural power and who has less. It’s your job to amplify the voices of those with less structural power. Remember those people not at the table? If you are at the table, do everything you can to bring those people to the table. And if they can’t be there in person, bring their concerns forward yourself. And in the other direction, identify the harmful ways power is being used against the vulnerable in your workplace — and do what you can to mitigate those harms, even if you are not in a position to unilaterally change policies or practices.

Critical race theorists assert (and here I am quoting from Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction) that society should “ ‘Look to the bottom’ in judging new laws [and] if they would not relieve the distress of the poorest group — or worse, if they compound it — we should reject them.” I argue that the practice of critical librarianship is the continual process of checking in with our most vulnerable, our most marginalized community members and challenging ourselves and our organizations to make their experiences, perspectives, and needs central to our policies and practices.