This multimedia project is a companion piece to our article, A Genealogy of Refusal: Walking Away from Crisis and Scarcity Narratives, in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Special Issue: Refusing Crisis Narratives. In this project, we explicate ways librarians are made vulnerable by crisis narratives and constructed scarcity. This work emphasizes juxtapositions: a sort of collage. We invite you to interrogate crisis narratives through this Scalar open-source, semantic web authoring and publishing platform built for born-digital scholarship, a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which offers a non-traditional avenue to explore ideas outside the structure of the academic paper and beyond the norms of the ivory tower. You may find the approach disorienting at times, or even unsatisfying if you are accustomed to “reading” sequentially through a linear narrative. We hope our collage approach creates opportunities for new insights to be uncovered, even in spite of (or perhaps because of!) frustrations that may arise.

You may wish to navigate through our predetermined layout of the project using the Table of Contents—starting with an exploration of how crisis narratives frame our response, moving through avenues for developing fluency for hearing and saying “No,” and concluding by advocating for asset framing. This is the default path we curated in Scalar, but it is by no means the only one: alternatively, you can approach our work through the multiple paths page, which provides different avenues for analyzing the various themes and content we have selected. We encourage you to investigate the connections between the Scalar content—are there any connections that are missing or superfluous? Lastly, we invite you to explore the Genealogy of Refusal Timeline to see the temporal progression of the works we have chosen—what can this tell us about refusal, if anything?