Category Archives: library life

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

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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.

Book Review: Algorithms of Oppression

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

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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.

Engaging in Critical Librarianship

06 Wednesday Jun 2018

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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.

 

NEA’s Contingent Employment Survey: A Presentation

23 Friday Mar 2018

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In 2016, while I was serving as New England Archivists’ Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator, we conducted a survey on contingent employment in the archives/library field. I was asked to present the findings of this survey at NEA’s annual business meeting. Because of some time constraints, we ended up deferring the presentation from spring 2017 to spring 2018. I will be presenting a ten minute snapshot of finding at the business meeting held on Saturday, March 23, 2018 in New Haven, Connecticut during the New England Archivists/Archives Roundtable of Metropolitan New York Spring 2018 Joint Meeting (22-24 March 2018).

Because the presentation will be a brief ten minutes, I am making the slides available here for anyone who wishes to review them at their leisure.

You may also download a PDF of the presentation slides here.

The full data set (stripped of identifying information) will eventually be made available for researchers in some to-be-determined format through New England Archivists. I will update links when that transpires! In the meantime, I am happy to discuss these findings with anyone who has a further interest in this area. Contact me here or @feministlib!

UPDATE ONE: 2018-03-26.
At the request of a couple of folks who wanted the survey questions for possible reuse in their own region, I have made two Google Documents available:

Appendix 1: Survey Questions (Doc.)
Appendix 2: Semi-Structured Interview Questions (Doc.)

UPDATE TWO: 2018-08-18
I have finally completed cleaning up the footnotes on the final report (January 2017). Here is the report in PDF (via Google Documents), a folder of anonymized interview transcripts:

NEA Contingent Employment Study Final Report 2018-08 (PDF)
Anonymized transcripts of the qualitative interviews (PDF)

UPDATE THREE: 2018-TBD

Anonymized survey responses may be found here (Google Sheets) [Link to come]

 

“The Service Begins When the Service Ends”: Toward a More Inclusive NEA

04 Sunday Mar 2018

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This piece was written as a farewell when I stepped down from my three-year term as New England Archivists’ Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator. It first appeared in the October 2017 issue of  NEA News (44:4). As I have been following the #DERAIL2018 conversation on Twitter this weekend, it seemed like this reflection on the possibilities and problematics of institutional diversity work in the archives world might have broader applicability. So I’m reposting it here. 

I accepted the position of New England Archivists’ first Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator in November 2014 with some trepidation. With our recently-adopted Inclusion and Diversity Statement in hand, the leadership was ready to take action. But what would effective short-term and long-term action look like? Would I have support from the organization to institute change? How would I adequately assess and address the needs of New England’s archivists for a more just and inclusive professional environment? These were some of my initial reservations as a relatively young and newly-involved member of NEA, yet I felt it was important to work on these issues and was committed to charting out a path that future Coordinators might find useful to follow.

Over the past three years, I have been grateful to my fellow archivists within NEA for enthusiastically welcoming my proposals and bringing their own concerns forward that we might address them together. Thanks to the members who brought me ideas and requests, we have made structural changes to our Spring Meeting to ensure people of all genders feel welcome, that nursing parents have space to feed their children, people with a wide variety of dietary needs are fed, and that specific accommodations for participants with disabilities are advertised and provided. These changes have been institutionalized as part of the Spring Meeting planning guide. We are also in the second year of our three-year pilot program to encourage session proposals on social justice themes with the Inclusion and Diversity Travel and Session Award that funds travel expenses for the winning panel participants.

Thank you, also, to the membership for your overwhelming support for adopting our code of conduct that is the policy instrument backing up our stated commitment to building and maintaining an environment where members and guests are free from harassment. While this anti-harassment policy was not developed in response to any specific incident of exclusionary hostility, it does establish a framework through which we can handle any such incidents as they arise. Even more importantly, in my opinion, the code of conduct establishes a common expectation for all members and guest participants in NEA events that we respect the full humanity of one another, honor each others’ complex life experiences, and strive to learn how our multiple identities inform our perspectives both personally and professionally.

These are steps in the right direction, but we still have a long journey ahead to address the structural inequalities baked into our profession. Continue reading →

a year of critical reflection and study

21 Saturday Oct 2017

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This year (2017) marked the tenth anniversary of my entry into the library science / archives field as a graduate student and worker. It also coincided with the end of my three-year term as Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator for our regional professional association, New England Archivists, and the inception of the loose affiliation of resistance archivists we have come to call the Concerned Archivists Alliance.

While I have neither the opportunity nor inclination to return to formal graduate study, I have decided to make 2018 a year of study and reflection as I think about the core values that inform my work as a librarian through the lens of scholarly and activist literatures that critically consider how library and archival spaces are shaping and shaped by social (in)justice.

I am grateful, as I prepare to undertake this year of work, that many scholars have made syllabi and other tools for this exploration readily available to those outside the academy.

LAST UPDATED 4/25/2018

My core resources will be:

I am excited to be enrolled in the Library Juice Academy course Exploring and Applying Critical Theory: An Introduction for Librarians taught by Jessica Critten (April 2018).

#critlib readings and discussion.

Design for Diversity’s Foundational Readings and ongoing engagement with their work.

Adrienne Keene’s Introduction to Critical Race Theory syllabus (Fall 2017).

Raul Pacheco-Vega’s “How to undertake a literature review.”

Laura Saunders‘ Radical Librarianship: Radical Theory & Praxis syllabus (Spring 2016).

LIVING BIBLIOGRAPHY:

In addition, this post will become a living bibliography of the additional books, articles, and online resources that have informed this critical reflection already (*) or that are on my “to read” list for 2018:

*Adler, Melissa. Cruising in the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham, 2017).

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life (Duke Univ. Press, 2017).

*Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke Univ. Press, 2012).

*Beilin, Ian. “Student Success and the Neoliberal Academic Library.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 1:1 (2016): 10-23.

Bly, Lyz and Kelly Wooten. Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Litwin Books, 2012).

Bradbury, Alexandra, Mark Brenner, and Jane Slaughter. Secrets of a Successful Organizer (Labor Education and Research Project, 2016).

Brilmyer, Gracen. “Archival assemblages: applying disability studies’ political/relational model to archival description.” Archival Science (2018): 1-24.

*Bourg, Chris. “Debating y/our humanity, or Are Libraries Neutral?” (11 February 2018).

Caldera, Mary and Kathryn M. Neal. Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion (SAA, 2014).

Cottom, Tracy McMillan. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017).

*de jesus, nina. “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression.” In the Library with a Lead Pipe (24 September 2014).

*Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York Univ. Press, 2001).

*DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Race (Beacon Press, 2018).

*Drabinski, Emily. “Toward a Kairos of Library Instruction.” Brooklyn Library Faculty Publications, Paper 16 (2014).

*Drabinski, Emily. “Are libraries neutral?” (12 February 2018).

*Drake, Jarrett M. “I’m Leaving the Archival Profession: It’s Better This Way” (Medium, 26 June 2017).

*Galvan, Angela. “Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship.” In the Library with a Lead Pipe (3 June 2015).

*Geismer, Lily. Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton Univ. Press, 2014).

*Hathcock, April. “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS.” In the Library with a Lead Pipe (7 October 2015).

Lankes, R. David. The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016).

Lew, Shirley and Baharak Yousefi, eds. Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership (Library Juice Press, 2017).

McAlevey, Jane F. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford U. P., 2016).

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Metropolitan Books, 2007).

Mehra, Bharat and Kevin Rioux, eds. Progressive Community Action: Critical Theory and Social Justice in Library and Information Science (Library Juice Press, 2016).

Nicholson, Karen P. and Maura Seale, eds. The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship (Library Juice Press, 2018).

Noble, Safiya Umoha. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018).

Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want to Talk About Race (Seal Press, 2018).

Picca, Leslie and Joe Feagin. Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (Routledge, 2007).

Popowich, Sam. ” ‘Ruthless Criticism of All that Exists’: Marxism, Technology, and Library Work,” The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, eds. (Library Juice Press, 2018).

Punzalan, Ricardo and Michelle Caswell, “Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy vol. 86, no. 1 (January 2016).

Rinn, Meghan R. “Nineteenth-Century Depictions of Disabilities and Modern Metadata: A Consideration of Material in the P. T. Barnum Digital Collection,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies vol. 5 (2018).

Samek, Toni. Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974 (McFarland, 2001).

*Seale, Maura. “Enlightenment, Neoliberalism, and Information Literacy.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 1:1 (2016): 80-91.

Schlesselman-Tarango, Gina, ed. Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science (Library Juice Press, 2017).

Schomberg, Jessica. “Disability at Work: Libraries, Built to Exclude,” The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, eds. (Library Juice Press, 2018): 111-123.

*Shirazi, Roxanne. “Reproducing the Academy: Librarians and the Question of Service in the Digital Humanities” (15 July 2014).

Sullivan, Susanne. Good White People: The Problem with White Middle Class Anti-racism (SUNY Press, 2014).

Tewell, Eamon. “Putting Critical Information Literacy into Context: How and Why Librarians Adopt Critical Practices in Their Teaching.” In the Library with a Lead Pipe (12 October 2016).

*Tyson, Amy.  The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines (Univ. of Mass. Press, 2013).

*Wakimoto, Diana, Christine Bruce, and Helen Partridge. “Archivist as Activist: Lessons from Three Queer Community Archives in California,” Archival Science 13, 4 (December 2013): 293-316.

Ward, Jane. Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations (Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2008).

 

archivists in interesting times

24 Tuesday Jan 2017

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On January 15th, archivists Jeremy Brett, Katharina Hering, Hanna and myself, released A Statement to the Archival Community regarding the election of Donald Trump. The statement reads, in part:

We are a diverse group of archivists who are deeply concerned with the current state of American politics based on the election of Donald Trump and the subsequent legitimization of his advisers’ and surrogates’ damaging views and policies.

The Core Values and Code of Ethics established by the Society of American Archivists note that “underlying all the professional activities of archivists is their responsibility to a variety of groups in society and to the public good… the archival record is part of the cultural heritage of all members of society.” The Core Values also note that, by “documenting institutional functions, activities and decision-making, archivists provide an important means of ensuring accountability.” As professionals committed to these values and as custodians of society’s historical records, we have a responsibility to ensure that what we do, and how we do it, benefits society as a whole, while holding public officials and agencies accountable. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to speak out when the public good is jeopardized by political action. […]

  • We will not be intimidated, but will continue to provide equitable access to information.
  • We will not be prejudiced, but will continue to serve all our communities to the fullest extent of our abilities.
  • We will remain committed to protecting the fundamental right of people to know what their government is doing and why.
  • We will not act out of fear of elements of the incoming administration, but will continue to preserve the documentary record that holds our leaders accountable to law and justice.

[…] We pledge to remain vigilant in this moment of rapid change, seeking opportunities to put our skills and resources as archivists and information specialists to work as part of the resistance.

To date, the Statement has been signed by 515 colleagues in addition to the four original authors. Our website is currently a bit bare bones, but has links to resources for further action and we are in discussion about how to hold one another accountable and provide a platform for archivist activists to “put our skills and resources to work as part of the resistance.”

Wherever you are, and whatever your skills and resources, I hope you too will join the struggle in your own communities.

professionally speaking

14 Thursday May 2015

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45/365 #365feministselfie

Hanna and I had a meeting yesterday afternoon with Natalie Dykstra at which I snapped my Wednesday #365feministselfie (above). It was the penultimate planning meeting for the GLCA Boston Summer Seminar which we’ve been involved in proposing, planning and — soon! — putting into action this June. We’ve got three teams of researchers, three faculty members and six undergraduates, coming to Boston to spend some quality time in the archives. It’s been a lot of fun and rewarding to develop a program from scratch. I’ve learned a lot — and look forward to learning more over the next six weeks!

You’ll be able to follow us @GLCABOSTON, from which Hanna is going to be live-tweeting our five evening seminars and sharing other tidbits during the June 1-18 residency.