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

The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance

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1. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street Melville, Herman. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231 "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to".
2. The League [Kyle Higgins Short film]. With the 1946 formation of "The League of Heroes" in Chicago, the country is introduced to the first ever Superhero Labor Union. Founded by The Grey Raven, his kid sidekick Sparrow, and the amazing Blue Blaze, The League of Heroes was a beacon of hope against evil and tyranny in Chicago. Now twenty years later, as The League is about to expand nationally, an old adversary makes a murderous comeback. Drawn by the rampage, the former sidekick Sparrow returns to the city--and The League--for the first time in years. Sparrow says: "Well" Gosh, I think it's great! I want to be a hero forever."
3. 1974 Equal Pay PSA with Batgirl
5. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
7. Librarian Action Figure with cape
8. The Starless Sea: A Novel "Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a rare book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues -- a bee, a key, and a sword -- that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to a subterranean library, hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians--it is a place of lost cities and seas of honey, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a beautiful barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly-soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose -- in both the rare book and in his own life"
10. 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.
11. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
12. A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.
14. Black Study, Black Struggle
15. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
16. Feminist Data Manifest-No
17. YES MANIFESTO
18. All Systems Red A murderous android discovers itself in "All Systems Red", a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial intelligence. In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn't a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied 'droid -- a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as "Murderbot." Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.
19. Johnny Paycheck - Take This Job And Shove It (Audio)
20. Nice White Lady
21. 'Punk Ass Book Jockeys’: Library Anxiety in Community and Parks & Recreation
22. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
23. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
24. 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon." It's that last bit — the histories of our investment in technological solutions (and our faith in technological solutions even when they are obviously so utterly dystopian) — that is really the focus of my work.
25. Party Girl
26. Cover of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All
27. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
28. Gendered Expectations for Leadership in Libraries Despite significant gains in representation at the administration level, there is still a disparity between the percentage of women in our profession and women as library leaders. Additionally, even when women attain leadership roles, even top positions in libraries, there are still hurdles in the shape of gendered expectations. This article examines the history of gender representation in the field, discusses some recent trends, and then makes some recommendations for creating an environment in which women can succeed and how, more specifically, the profession could become more supportive of women in leadership roles.
29. Ssssshh Librarian
31. Last Library Ward Shelley, Brooklyn NY The Last Library August 21 - October 16, 2015 The Last Library is 2 rooms full of about 4,000 (fake) books, books that have not been written. The rooms and the fake books are just supports for the text, but they are not neutral carriers. Apart from what they may individually be about, books and libraries are loaded with meaning in our culture just as symbols, and they represent many things to many people. As such, they add a certain kind of spin to the words we have written on them. You can say a lot with a few words. Where did the titles come from? There was a web page where people could submit titles; from there they were printed out on a book spine and put into the library. Like most creative projects, most of the titles came from a group of interested persons, the artist did a lot of them himself, but was not the most prolific.
32. Big U First Edition Cover
33. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
34. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
35. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
37. Librarians of the World Unite!
38. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
39. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
40. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction Organized labor makes science fiction writers nervous. They create far fewer fictional labor unions than fictional capitalist firms. Perhaps this is attributable to ideological indoctrination. As it has been constructed, American political culture is hostile to organized labor and enthusiatic about capitalism. Perhaps it is simply self-censorship. When science fiction writers create fictional unions they tend to describe them as "guilds," which suggests a proprietarian ideological disapproval of collection action by workers.
41. No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality
42. Living a feminist life
43. Common Ground
44. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
45. Dismantling the public sphere : situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate. As a basis of analysis, Buschman employs critical education scholarship and the research of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whose seminal work on the public sphere—the arena in which the public organizes itself and formulates public opinion—serves as a meta-framework for Buschman's study of librarianship. Buschman asserts that a significant shift has occurred from the library as a contributor to the public good to a model where economic rationality directs policy. He challenges much of the current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries, exploring the circumstances in which librarians and libraries operate and linking the profession back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field. Chapters include: • Crisis Culture and the Need for a Defense of Librarianship in the Public Sphere • The New Public Philosophy and Critical Educational Analysis • The Public Sphere: Rounding Out the Context of Librarianship • Studies in Librarianship and the Dismantling of the Public Sphere • Follow the Money: Library Funding and Information Capitalism • Follow-the-Leader Library Management and the New Public Philosophy • On Customer Driven Librarianship • Drifting Toward the Corporate Model: ALA • Notes on Postmodern Technology, Technocracy, and Libraries • The Public Sphere and Democratic Possibility Highly recommended for courses in policy and librarianship, as well as for academic and public library directors, this work will also be of interest to theorists in the social sciences.
47. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
48. Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear This article presents examples of representations of libraries and librarians taken from modern popular culture, including popular film, television, and novels. Using Michel Foucault's approach to discourse, we assert that such representations are made possible by, and decoded within, the structures of a discourse of fear, a practice of speech and symbols that equates the control and fear of discourse in fundamental ways. The library as an institution falls squarely into the lived tensions of this discourse, and these tensions are made apparent in the themes of the threshold: the librarian as formidable gatekeeper between order and chaos, the other-worldliness of the library, the library as cathedral, the humiliation of the user, the power of surveillance, and the consequences of disrupting the sacred order of texts. The discourse of fear is a language and a vocabulary. It is a way of speaking about the library and the librarian that transcends any specific image or portrayal. Outside of the discourse of fear, such representations would not be recognizable as libraries or librarians at all.
49. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
50. 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.
51. Librarian Action Figure from Archie McPhee
52. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
53. Canada Reads 2021: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
54. 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.

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Manifest NO 68 Becoming fluent in hearing and saying No image_header 2021-09-14T13:20:53-07:00
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.
All this sounds easy enough when it's put forward like we have above, but Sarah Ahmed reminds us that "You might be free to say no but your no is heard as destructive; hearings have consequences (becoming a killjoy is a consequence)... And then no becomes judged not only as how you stop others from doing something, but how you stop yourself from being something. They might not stop you from saying no but they make it costly for you to say no" (Ahmed 2017).

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.
Asset Framing
In the above image, Wellspring an artwork by artist Charles Luna, a woman holds a small child in patch of grass in the desert. The viewers' eyes might dance between the cityscape in the background, the artist's model in the foreground, and the desert all around. And yet, our eyes always come back to the centre, to the oasis the pair make. Instead of lamenting the desert and all that they do not have, the woman and child are focused on each other and all they do have when they are together.

Exercises such as engaging with this artwork emphasize "asset framing" over "deficit framing". As articulated by Trabian Shorters,
Asset framing is about shifting narratives, so that instead of defining individuals or communities by what they lack, we instead define a people by their aspirations and contributions (Shorters 2018).
In other words, instead of lamenting the mother/child pair's surrounding environment, we instead would define them based on what they have, their hopes, and their contributions to the world around them.

Planning and engaging in work for libraries through the lens of asset framing similarly shifts our perspective. Librarians often find their place "inside" bigger organizations where resources are "never enough", where constructed scarcity, legacies of ableism, sexism, and deficit framing have shaped the culture's norms in more brittle ways even than the library's. In organizations like these, at budget time, service providers in all fields of work often find themselves envious of peers' generous budgets for innovative projects which seem to invariably win out when resources are divvied up.

Decision makers would often rather 'invest' in innovation than budget for maintenance. Managers sometimes hire or promote on this basis too. They place a bet on potential rather than making personnel decisions based on a candidate's actual record of success or provable qualifications. This cavalier "No risk, No reward" mindset is characteristically demonstrated and perpetuated more often by male leaders than female decision makers. Why? Because if you place a bet and come out "ahead" the spoils are "all yours" for your legacy-building? Ironically, just like in the casino, most people who make these sort of gambles time after time don't remember or talk about the inevitable losses which typically outpace their wins. Male dominated organizations like the universities that house our academic libraries can unwittingly ignore this disconnect, rewarding risk taking regardless of its outcomes until inequitable pay structures arise between innovation and service/maintenance and those compensation structures become intractably gendered.

So, where can we go from here? We can start by staging honest conversations about how articulating the need for support improves both innovation and maintenance project outcomes. We can practice being able to say and be heard when we speak that: "If I’m going to do this new project x successfully, I’m going to need to give up other duty y, and get help from z". We can become more articulate and circumspect about saying "No" in our personal and professional lives--it's a way to go about prioritizing our efforts, to stop burning ourselves out, to stop letting ourselves and others down. If you're invited to serve on a gender or racial-majority dominated search committee or panel, just say "No" and suggest alternates who would improve the team. Know how to articulate what would allow you to change your mind about joining but be willing to walk away.

As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness, "To oppose something is to maintain it... you must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" (Le Guin 2019, 163). We can't afford to continue using a scale that always promotes for innovation or potential--a scale that we will all fail on in different ways when we necessarily focus on maintainer goals like keeping the trains running and the lights on. Let's instead walk down a different road and work towards a new future of academic librarianship, one where we treat cycles of innovation and maintenance like we do the cycle of propagating seeds, sowing them, harvesting our produce, and putting up each season's bounty as preserves for the future.
This is more sustainable than competing against each other for dwindling resources where we constantly have to be seeking new ways to prove our worth or justify our work. We're going to keep "looking" too, and moving toward a new kind of "Yes." In dance, Rainer's No Manifesto of 1978 was displaced twenty-six years later by Mette Ingvartsen's YES MANIFESTO (2004). It reads like this:
How long will it take librarians to reclaim "yes" in a way that works for us?