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A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives

Constructing Crisis: Leaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency

There is no such thing as a crisis. Rather than an actual, corporeal thing, a crisis is a claim asserted from a position of power and influence, intended to shape the understanding of others. A constructed crisis by a leader may or may not be legitimate, and, legitimate or not, the content of a claim alone does not determine whether people decide to believe it. Rather than viewing crises as the result of objective events, Spector demonstrates that leaders impose crises on organizations to strategically assert power and exert control. Interpreting crisis through a critical lens, this interdisciplinary book encompasses not just management and organizational literature, but also sociology, history, cognitive science, and psychology. The resulting wide-ranging, critical, and provocative analysis will appeal in particular to students and academics researching leadership and crisis management.

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Contents of this tag:
1. Common Ground
2. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
5. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street
6. A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.
8. Feminist Data Manifest-No
9. Constructing Crisis: Leaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency There is no such thing as a crisis. Rather than an actual, corporeal thing, a crisis is a claim asserted from a position of power and influence, intended to shape the understanding of others. A constructed crisis by a leader may or may not be legitimate, and, legitimate or not, the content of a claim alone does not determine whether people decide to believe it. Rather than viewing crises as the result of objective events, Spector demonstrates that leaders impose crises on organizations to strategically assert power and exert control. Interpreting crisis through a critical lens, this interdisciplinary book encompasses not just management and organizational literature, but also sociology, history, cognitive science, and psychology. The resulting wide-ranging, critical, and provocative analysis will appeal in particular to students and academics researching leadership and crisis management.
10. Compassion: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville”
11. Essential, Yet Disposable: How the Career Faculty FTE Cuts Impact Librarians
12. Black Study, Black Struggle
13. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
14. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
16. Gendered Expectations for Leadership in Libraries Despite significant gains in representation at the administration level, there is still a disparity between the percentage of women in our profession and women as library leaders. Additionally, even when women attain leadership roles, even top positions in libraries, there are still hurdles in the shape of gendered expectations. This article examines the history of gender representation in the field, discusses some recent trends, and then makes some recommendations for creating an environment in which women can succeed and how, more specifically, the profession could become more supportive of women in leadership roles.
17. 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon." It's that last bit — the histories of our investment in technological solutions (and our faith in technological solutions even when they are obviously so utterly dystopian) — that is really the focus of my work.
18. Last Library Ward Shelley, Brooklyn NY The Last Library August 21 - October 16, 2015 The Last Library is 2 rooms full of about 4,000 (fake) books, books that have not been written. The rooms and the fake books are just supports for the text, but they are not neutral carriers. Apart from what they may individually be about, books and libraries are loaded with meaning in our culture just as symbols, and they represent many things to many people. As such, they add a certain kind of spin to the words we have written on them. You can say a lot with a few words. Where did the titles come from? There was a web page where people could submit titles; from there they were printed out on a book spine and put into the library. Like most creative projects, most of the titles came from a group of interested persons, the artist did a lot of them himself, but was not the most prolific.
19. It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers – In the Library with the Lead Pipe "success risks jealousy, bullying, or being undermined within a competitive workforce, and that deferring to those higher up the ladder is part of the everyday emotional labour performed to manage the emotions of those with more power than ourselves. "an individualistic workplace can be isolating, controlling, and abusive. How can we advise workers to be vulnerable and authentic, if institutions replicating whiteness may in fact end up harming workers who express themselves with trust or authenticity?" "workplace policies can directly contribute to a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and internalized blame within their employees. The onus is on the worker to become resilient and less sensitive, gracefully absorbing harm for the comfort of the institution."
20. Living a feminist life
22. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
23. Distant Reading for Quick Insights
24. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
25. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
26. Editorial: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
27. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
28. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
29. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
31. Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias: The difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails.
32. Dismantling the public sphere : situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate. As a basis of analysis, Buschman employs critical education scholarship and the research of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whose seminal work on the public sphere—the arena in which the public organizes itself and formulates public opinion—serves as a meta-framework for Buschman's study of librarianship. Buschman asserts that a significant shift has occurred from the library as a contributor to the public good to a model where economic rationality directs policy. He challenges much of the current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries, exploring the circumstances in which librarians and libraries operate and linking the profession back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field. Chapters include: • Crisis Culture and the Need for a Defense of Librarianship in the Public Sphere • The New Public Philosophy and Critical Educational Analysis • The Public Sphere: Rounding Out the Context of Librarianship • Studies in Librarianship and the Dismantling of the Public Sphere • Follow the Money: Library Funding and Information Capitalism • Follow-the-Leader Library Management and the New Public Philosophy • On Customer Driven Librarianship • Drifting Toward the Corporate Model: ALA • Notes on Postmodern Technology, Technocracy, and Libraries • The Public Sphere and Democratic Possibility Highly recommended for courses in policy and librarianship, as well as for academic and public library directors, this work will also be of interest to theorists in the social sciences.
33. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
35. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction
37. Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear This article presents examples of representations of libraries and librarians taken from modern popular culture, including popular film, television, and novels. Using Michel Foucault's approach to discourse, we assert that such representations are made possible by, and decoded within, the structures of a discourse of fear, a practice of speech and symbols that equates the control and fear of discourse in fundamental ways. The library as an institution falls squarely into the lived tensions of this discourse, and these tensions are made apparent in the themes of the threshold: the librarian as formidable gatekeeper between order and chaos, the other-worldliness of the library, the library as cathedral, the humiliation of the user, the power of surveillance, and the consequences of disrupting the sacred order of texts. The discourse of fear is a language and a vocabulary. It is a way of speaking about the library and the librarian that transcends any specific image or portrayal. Outside of the discourse of fear, such representations would not be recognizable as libraries or librarians at all.
38. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach

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Crisis narratives frame our response "Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken." (Doctorow 2017)

Yet, half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The tragedy of the Titanic is an event retold over and over not only because the loss of life on the doomed voyage of the unsinkable ship shocked the world, but also because "it didn't have to be that way." Since then, the very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris(too big to fail full steam ahead regardless of the conditions) and constructed scarcity(let's cast off without enough lifeboats and later when people's lives depend on them we'll deploy them half-empty).
"This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?"
-Cory Doctorow, “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories.” Slate Magazine. October 13, 2020.

In librarianship, crises can be leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "There just aren't the resources" [to make it safe, to make it efficient], or "there just isn't the time to wait![to listen to an specialist, or til we have enough people]." These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use for their rallying cry, boasting about their "ability to do more with less", while at the same time over-relying on librarians' self-sacrifice or resilience in the face of adversity ad nauseum. Staying open during a pandemic, or persisting in a repetitive manual task that will never be efficient enough to beat the backlog, or disincentivizing vacation, or working people after hours without compensation can all be positioned as stop-gaps in service of noble goals, but they typically stem from a myth that resources are unusually scarce or that the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.

This genealogy of refusal explores such crises and the ways in which we respond to them. Our aim is to re-frame crisis narratives in librarianship so library staff called upon to compensate for scarcity have other ways of contending with need. As explored by Drabinksi (2016) and in our companion short piece, crises, both real and constructed, are behind the narratives that frame our individual and collective responses to disaster, scarcity, and refusal.

As articulated by Bert Spector in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019), crises can be both real and constructed. And either way, crises are a powerful tool for leaders. Real crises are borne on the wings of natural disasters or a global pandemic. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives (such as "A once glorious kingdom under threat"), but can be utilized in conjunction with real crises to form a larger narrative. Typically they manifest calls for urgency which always stem from the desire for power. Constructed crises are often utilized to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner.

In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, scarcity narratives, and the power of "No." As you explore our genealogy of workplace refusal we invite you to consider: How long should we do more with less? Is it ok to simply exist? Instead of demanding exceptional resilience in the face of adversity could we focus on surviving with some semblance of quality of life? How do we know if there actually IS a crises? Or if resources are, in fact, scarce? In the words of Leah Zaidi, could we design our way out of the cyberpunk dystopia we are awakening to find ourselves in? (Zaidi 2021)