Crisis Narratives
1 2021-09-14T12:43:36-07:00 Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon 1459b2fc55591cd9b08a290af468d31b5dfe46a3 33948 5 plain 2021-09-14T13:02:00-07:00 Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon 1459b2fc55591cd9b08a290af468d31b5dfe46a3This page has paths:
- 1 2021-09-14T12:41:42-07:00 Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon 1459b2fc55591cd9b08a290af468d31b5dfe46a3 Glossary of Key Concepts Natalie K Meyers 4 plain 2021-09-15T12:19:20-07:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22
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- 1 media/CDdisasterwithbackground.jpg 2020-12-15T13:30:58-08:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22 Crisis narratives frame our response 70 image_header 2021-11-10T12:13:41-08:00 Mikala Narlock db843c923469f0dadab98d57ee053b00c88a64b1
- 1 media/COWLMotivation.png 2021-04-08T13:36:18-07:00 Anonymous The invocation of crisis narratives is relentless 48 plain 1043098 2021-12-31T10:33:01-08:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22
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Manifest NO
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Becoming fluent in hearing and saying No
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Learning to say "No" starts with us. Practicing how to Say No! More has been gamified in a lighthearted way that has captured the attention of thousands of fans as well as more than a few reviews where gamers confess how "good it feels to play the game" because saying "No" at work can be such a fraught situation (Fizbin 2021).
The below flowchart, created by Shira Peltzman, is another lighthearted but useful tool that streamlines what to do when another project gets added to your pile--but using this flowchart requires being pretty honest with yourself, your capacity, and your joy in a project.
Is an hour spent at work better than an hour spent doing something you love? How can we say NO to projects or tasks, so that we can say YES to things we love? And, even if a project meets all of those requirements, does a not-NO automatically mean a YES? (Peltzman does not end the flowchart with "accept the project," but "consider it." In other words, these are the absolute minimum requirements a project needs to meet, but even that does not mean you should automatically commit to every project that makes it through the chart.)
In learning to say NO, deciding to decline is not always enough, If we're saying "NO" at work we will eventually need to challenge those who supervise us. If a boss pressures us to commit to a new project, stay late to complete a project, and/or maintain a rapid pace of service completion, but with fewer resources, we will need to find practical and effective ways to refuse. Outright saying "No" may sometimes be impossible, but we can remind ourselves to pause and reframe the conversation. We can utilize phrases like:- I can take on this new work, but I will need your help prioritizing my other responsibilities and redistributing the tasks that I'll no longer be able to complete.
- I can complete this project early with your commitment that I'll be given these [new] resources.
- I can help with this if I have the support and efforts of collaborators X, Y, and/or Z.
She cautions that "You need more than a right to say no for no to be effective." She warns that "If your position is precarious you might not be able to afford no. You might say yes if you cannot afford to say no, which means you can say yes whilst disagreeing with something." She implores us that "This is why the less precarious might have a political obligation to say no on behalf of or alongside those who are more precarious" (Ahmed 2017).
Sometimes you say "No!" but your boss can't hear it - that situation is so common the Say No! More videogame has a scenario about it:
That's why we created a genealogy of workplace refusal. By talking about such things, by learning together how to read the story of refusal, we can have a common narrative. We can develop a common acceptance of the language of "No" that allows us to examine dead-ends and the false turns workplace responses to crisis narratives can take. Donna Lanclos urges that in higher education, we should be refusing "quantification, employability narratives, tracking and surveillance, technocentrism, [and the] 'More with Less'" ethos (2019). Looking to the art of dance, Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto, from Trio A gives us a strong example of how to declare opposition to the dominant forms of our field (Rainer 1965):
Informing ourselves through the kinship diagram in this project, we can recognize false deficits, constructed crises, and other attempts to consolidate power by those in charge. We can see how to say no as a collective, refuse harmful data practices (like in the Feminist Data Manifest-NO), and organize ourselves for collective protest, unionize or strike. We can write and think and negotiate other ways forward that are informed by fictional, feminist, anti-racist, pro-labour, and abundant points of view.
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Crisis narratives frame our response
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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 RMS 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--it was too big to fail so it didn't need enough lifeboats for every person... and went 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). 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 Dilbert cartoon of workplace life:
In librarianship, crises are leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "there just aren't enough resources" to make working conditions safe/effective or "there just isn't the time to wait!" to follow the advice 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 over rely ad nauseum on the self-sacrifice and resilience of library staff in the face of adversity.
Staying open without PPE during a pandemic, disincentivizing vacation, working people after hours without compensation, or simply allowing an understaffed, repetitive manual task to persist (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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A Kinship Diagram of Workplace Refusal
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Why bother doing a genealogy of refusal from literature, science fiction, and popular culture? If we want to confront the options for workplace refusal it helps if we acquaint ourselves with some common stories and the worlds they explore, exploit, and create. Likewise, it requires us to collaborate, commiserate, and co-create with our fellow workers. This project grew out of weekly discussions and a shared bibliography, where we explored the interplay between the theory we were reading, our lived experiences, and the media we were consuming. This ultimately culminated in the short essays and content selections that substantiate our multimedia project and our kinship diagram, a lighthearted visualization inspired by the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Special Issue: Refusing Crisis Narratives. We know this genealogy is, by virtue of its motivation, bound to be arbitrary, incomplete, inaccurate, and always a work in progress, open to argument, revision, and criticism. We are okay with that. Here we look at workplace refusal through art, music, dance, film, sit-coms, games, literature, and science fiction, from Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" to Doctorow's Walkaway. We juxtapose broader cultural lineages of workplace refusal with the library profession’s specific inheritance of vocational awe. If we have conversations about scenarios that illustrate the ways vocational awe stands in the way of our refusals, we create cultural touchstones that can illuminate our way(s) ahead.
The above genealogy diagram was created by the authors to visualize the genealogy of refusal. To cite, please use: Natalie Meyers, Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon, Mikala Narlock, & Kim Stathers. (2021). Genealogy of Refusal Family Tree. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4698931
In "The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories," Cory Doctorow (2020) describes how “Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes." He remarks on how Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment (Doctorow 2020). While science fiction authors often engage in world-building, creating entire universes with rules that differ from those their audience are accustomed to, these thought-experiments often reflect current reality, even if shrouded in metaphor. As described by Ursula K Le Guin (1979), science fiction does not work “to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (156). Philip Jose Farmer (2008) wrote that "...Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, write parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales.'" We can begin our own exercise in professional foresight by examining dystopian, utopian, satiric, and humorous workplace scenarios observed in our kinship diagram. We explore workplace refusal as depicted in satire and comedy for much the same reasons, to look at our present-day situation through the lens of popular culture. The extremes presented in this type of media help us develop an appreciation for the language of refusal.
This genealogy is a launching point for understanding the librarian's role in crisis narratives in the workplace. It lets us connect the librarian's role not just to the characteristics accredited through the award of a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) or other degree or credential, but also to other memorable characters in popular culture, and to labour and feminist work. It helps if we have a common narrative history and timeline to refer to that exists alongside of and yet "outside" the profession. We hope it spurs discussion, maybe laughter, and another way of positioning the ways librarians can say and hear "NO" as a complete sentence.
Just as Bartleby lives on (and has been taken up by filmmakers, artists, literary theorists, and even RPGs), libraries and librarians don't exist apart from the culture we curate. We exist in that self-same idiosyncratic, imperfect, self-reflective culture of books, film, comics, music, history, and theory. -
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The invocation of crisis narratives is relentless
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By compounding crises, leaders can solidify power in an urgent fashion. Klein taught this in Shock Doctrine and such consolidation can gain dreadful momentum when a community faces cyclic or concurrent crises. The "Once glorious kingdom under threat" narrative combined with a real, tangible, and physical crisis, such as global pandemic creates an environment rich for exploitation and power consolidation (Spector 2019). Power absorbs labour, especially saviour labour, and its appetite is relentless.
Crises, especially those which are constructed to tell a narrative, are used to harness attention. Media studies show that time and time again, urgent crises will draw readers, listeners, and viewers, even to the point that we find ourselves hanging on to the edge of our seats, waiting to know if we've actually been invaded by extraterrestrials (War of the Worlds, anyone?).In No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality, Jordan Flaherty says:
The Savior mentality always looks for solutions by working within our current system., because deeper change might push us out of the picture. This focus on quick fixes is partly the product of an outrage oriented media. (Flaherty 2016)
Trabian Shorters observes that:
Human beings are hardwired to create and act upon narratives. We crave the moral direction stories provide. And whether we know it or not, we constantly default to these narratives, which often place white men at the front of history. Sure, it’s a very exciting and empowering narrative to those born white and male, but for everyone else, it raises questions about their own value in the world. (Pliska 2018)
The narrative arc for telling 'librarian-as-saviour' stories often describes a librarian rising admirably beyond their anticipated call of service. It's true that librarians have trained to administer life-saving overdose medications like naloxone. It's true that librarians have provided day-to-day special services to mitigate displacements that occur in lives punctuated by addiction extending their jobs from reference to public services, becoming de facto conduits for information about food stamps, welfare, housing assistance, and other critically needed support. These are librarians who have met their patrons at their perceived "point of need" in a multitude of ways they didn't train for in library school.
But, somewhat destructively, as Flaherty points out the librarian-as-saviour crisis narrative is visible and repeated because it is a story that's easy to tell not because it is a story that will take us to a better place. It can just as easily be characterized as a narrative that is nothing more than the "logical result of a racist, colonialist capitalist hetero-patriarchal system setting us against each other":Saviors want to support the struggles of communities that are not their own, but they believe they must remain in charge. The savior always wants to lead, never to follow. When the people they have chosen to rescue tell them the are not helping, they think those people are mistaken. It is almost taken as evidence that they need more help .
(Flaherty, 2016)We emphasize throughout this multimedia experience that how "when we know what's going on" we can push back against crisis-driven constructed scarcity. That instead of being perpetually beholden to a vocational notion of self-sacrifice that crisis is responded to best when a saviour is there to be the remedy we could instead get around to listening to, and better knowing, our communities from the point of view of their strengths. The comic below illustrates how our better nature can be present in the midst of crisis narratives, and we can still be taken advantage of, underscoring that the more we know about what is going on and the more we collectively share our knowledge, the better equipped we are to respond when power doubles down on us during a crisis.
This page references:
- 1 term 2021-03-31T12:45:59-07:00 Constructing Crisis: Leaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency 4 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. plain 2021-04-13T15:08:14-07:00 2019 Spector, Bert. 2019. Constructing Crisis: Leaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1125096372. book Spector, Bert
- 1 2021-04-17T22:05:53-07:00 The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. 1 Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto, Canada: AA Knopf. 978-0-676-97800-1. https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/ plain 2021-04-17T22:05:53-07:00 2007 In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto, Canada: AA Knopf. 978-0-676-97800-1. https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/