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

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?"
--"The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories" (Doctorow 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 or "there just isn't the time to wait!" to listen to an specialist or until we have enough resources. 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, 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)

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Welcome to the Cyberpunk Dystopia
Becoming Librarians, Becoming Teachers: Kairos and Professional Identity Using kairos as an analytic lens, this article examines debates around the professional role of librarians as teachers as an example of professionalizing discourse. Rather than inexorably leading librarians toward the best way to understand and teach information literacy, kairos surfaces the discourse as being productive instead of the profession itself. Cette étude s’appuie sur la notion de kairos comme outil d’analyse pour examiner le débat autour du rôle professionnel des bibliothécaires en tant qu’en-seignants, comme exemples de discours de professionnalisation. Plutôt que mener les bibliothécaires inexorablement à la meilleure façon de comprendre et d’enseigner la compétence informationnelle, le kairos émerge du discours comme productif en lieu et place de la profession elle-même.
The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories
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.
Resilience Tweet
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.