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

The invocation of crisis narratives is relentless

By compounding crises, leaders can solidify power in an urgent fashion. Solnit 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.

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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.
Nice White Lady
No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality
What We Do in a Crisis
The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama)
The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. 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.
Driving Social Impact Through Community And Storytelling