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

Ssssshh Librarian

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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."
4. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
5. 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.
6. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
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. 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.
12. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
13. Feminist Data Manifest-No
14. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
15. Big U First Edition Cover
16. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
18. 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.
19. Nice White Lady
20. 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.
21. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
23. Black Study, Black Struggle
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. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
26. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
27. 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.
28. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
29. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
30. Common Ground
32. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
34. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
35. Living a feminist life
36. Librarians of the World Unite!
37. Librarian Action Figure from Archie McPhee
38. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
39. Canada Reads 2021: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
40. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
42. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
43. 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.
44. 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.
46. 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.

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I am not your hero In our genealogy there are stereotypical librarians from the Bookmobile Bad Girl, to the Parks and Recreation "Sssshh!" librarian, to Morgenstern's Acolytes, Keepers, and Guardians in The Starless Sea. Each of these stereotypes help us to recognize the encumbered ways librarians live out saying nothing but "yes" so we can "deliver it all over town," or how we "Ssssh!" in the face of actual crisis, or even offer ourselves up to elinguation so that saying "No" becomes impossible. The burden of these roles make it difficult for library employees to refuse, let alone have the difficult conversations we need to work through if we want to experience greater trust in community, whether during abundance or crisis.

As an antidote to the hero narrative and accompanying vocational awe, we propose Martha Wells' Murderbot, an anti-hero, as the new patron saint for librarians.
In her novella All Systems Red (2017), author Martha Wells introduces readers to Murderbot, an artificial intelligence designed to serve as a security unit (SecUnit) for profitable ventures. The SecUnit was created for a single purpose: keep the contract alive, even if it means taking damage to itself. Murderbot's feature set ensures that it can do so-- but through a first-person perspective, it becomes clear that Murderbot is no gung-ho savior seeking adulation. In fact, the Murderbot cares about keeping its cohort alive, but only in a self-interested capacity that requires the minimum level of effort and interaction with those it protects.

We learn that Murderbot has hacked its own governor module - the device that is supposed to keep it under the command of the mission leader - and is free to make its own decisions. With this newfound freedom, Murderbot isn't volunteering to take on more work; nor is it attempting to fraternize with its cohort, or ingratiate itself in search of greater acceptance or promotion. Murderbot uses its specialist capabilities to create workplace efficiencies that allow it to spend less time working, and more time doing the things it prefers to do. Self sacrifice is the furthest thing from its mind as it escapes the tedium of work and its workmates by watching episode after episode of Sanctuary Moon re-runs.

This fan-imatic by Mar set to a soundtrack by Canadian duo Tegan and Sara depicts Murderbot, freed from its governing module yet no less expert, no less effective as it [re]-negotiates its relationship with work and team members.