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

Crisis narratives frame our response

In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, scarcity narratives, and the power of "No." 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.

This genealogy of refusal explores crises and the ways in which we respond to them. Why? because "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). 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.

The tragedy of the Titanic is an event retold over and over. The story of the unsinkable ship's doomed voyage shocked the world. It's a real crisis narrative. But the story is also a tragedy because "it didn't have to be that way." Half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris (too big to fail so we don't need enough lifeboats for every person... and full steam ahead regardless of the conditions). It's a story that illustrates the danger of calculated risks and compounding troubles of constructed scarcity: Let's cast off without enough lifeboats, then later when the ship's going down let's deploy the life boats 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)

Crises can be both real and constructed, as Bert Spector explains in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019). And either way, crises can be a powerful tool for leaders. Real Crises can be borne on the wings of natural disasters or a global pandemic. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives. Even still they can be utilized in the wake of real crises to form a larger narrative. Constructed crises are often used as cover by those who seek to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner.

Constructed crisis often manifest as calls for urgency, which always stem from the desire for power. Scott Adams captures that aspect of constructed crisis perfectly in this cartoon of workplace life:

In librarianship, crises are leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "there just aren't the resources" to make working conditions safe/effective or "there just isn't the time to wait!" to follow the advise of an specialist. These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use to boast about their ability to "pivot" or "do more with less", while at the same time they're ad nauseum over-relying on librarians' self-sacrifice and resilience in the face of adversity.

Staying open without PPE during a pandemic, disincentivizing vacation, working people after hours without compensation, or simply persisting an understaffed, repetitive manual task that will never be efficient enough to beat the backlog can all be positioned as stop-gap solutions in service of a noble mission. Underneath, such choices are typically justified by scarcity narratives about how resources are unusually scarce or how the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.

As you explore our genealogy of workplace refusal we invite you to consider: How long should we do more with less? Is it okay 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 crisis? 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
The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories
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.
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.
Dilbert - Sunday July 15, 2012
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.