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

No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality

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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
6. 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"
7. 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.
9. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
11. Librarian Action Figure with cape
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. '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.
21. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
22. Party Girl
23. Cover of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All
24. 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.
25. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
27. 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.
28. Ssssshh Librarian
29. Big U First Edition Cover
30. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
31. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
32. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
33. Nice White Lady
34. 'Punk Ass Book Jockeys’: Library Anxiety in Community and Parks & Recreation
36. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
37. Librarians of the World Unite!
38. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
39. 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.
40. No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality
41. Living a feminist life
42. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
43. Common Ground
44. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
46. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
47. 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.
48. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
49. 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.
50. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
51. Librarian Action Figure from Archie McPhee
52. Canada Reads 2021: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
53. 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.
55. 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.

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The invocation of crisis narratives is relentless
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.
No individual solution to our problems In the “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories” Cory Doctorow talks about "the characters’ dawning realization that there is no individual solution to their problems—that the kind of systemic change they want is a team sport and has to include people usually left on the sidelines in tech fights" (Doctorow 2020).

In “Librarians of the World Unite!” a cartoon published in The Nib during the coronavirus pandemic we get a glimpse of how weak we are when we can't communicate with one another and how much change we can achieve if we organize ourselves to understand our common circumstances better.

It's essential to organize to accomplish anything for a whole profession of people. In Cory Doctorow's For the Win the protagonists build a movement that can challenge the status quo and along the way readers find out just how hard fought and hard won are their gains. Those of us in the profession of librarianship, just like the mercenary gamers in For the Win, have reasons to seek change. In “Collective Responsibility: Seeking Equity for Contingent Labor in Libraries, Archives, and Museums" we come face to face with voices that must be heard (Drabinski 2019).

In “Black Study, Black Struggle" Robin Kelley reminds us of how "the university possesses a unique teleology: it is supposed to be an enlightened space free of bias and prejudice, but the pursuit of this promise is hindered by structural racism and patriarchy. Kelley has a lot to teach us about the universities we work in, and the ways they are perceived by the students who study at them and the professors who work at them. He talks about both "modest and more radical critics of universities" and how "Both demand that universities change in ways that we cannot expect them to change" (Kelley 2016). He argues that universities are not up the task [of modest or radical change] and leaves us with the notion that while "universities can and will become more diverse and marginally more welcoming for black students" that "as institutions they will never be engines of social transformation" (Kelley 2016).

Why? We must ask this question, for as academic librarians our jobs and our libraries are situated inside these very same universities. There's not one university for the students and another for the library. Kelley reminds us that the university won't be the engine for transformation because "Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the university" (Kelley 2016). Perhaps some of what we seek for and from libraries has to be similarly situated, and informed by the hard-won knowledge Robin Kelley shares; perhaps the change we seek has to happen wholly or partly outside the library because it can't happen through it?

For us, as librarians, there is no single solution or snake oil to repair all our profession's problems. Studious librarian Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl lobbied for equal pay back in 1974 but the most recent AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey and the CAUT Almanac of Post-Secondary Education in Canada demonstrate that universities haven't quite caught up.

Taking up Doctorow's message acknowledges how we will come up with better solutions if more of our voices are heard. We must hear not just the superheroes' voice but also the voices of the disadvantaged and the most pained among us. Flaherty describes how the "privilege of the able bodied leads to people with disabilities being being pushed out of our movements and our society" (Flaherty 2016, 20). He calls attention to how Disability Justice says "we all must move forward together or it's not really justice" (Flaherty 2016, 20).

The most successful communes in Doctorow's Walkaway are those that don't force their citizens to compete. One leader of a failed commune reflects on his own previously aggressive and hyper-competitive mindset. He'd once ruthlessly critiqued the groups who went without leaderboards and shamed those who couldn't keep up. He later observes that such community members were not the problem:
“It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on--the scale that I was failing on-- was irrelevant.” (Doctorow 2017, 208)
This brings us right back to Bartleby and his boss's frustration at how to consider and treat his refusing employee once Bartleby wasn't fit for work. Was Bartleby a mere managerial challenge? A puzzle to fix? Or an embarrassment, an eyesore, a problem to be gotten rid of? He was much more than that, which is why Melville makes Bartleby's situation so impossible to "look away from".
There is no single 'Superhero' individual who can resurrect librarianship's "once glorious kingdom" to it's real or imagined former prestige. Individually, not even those among us who have organizational or professional power/prestige, can bring our entire profession to a state of equity or equilibrium. But through communal consciousness raising whether it happens on twitter, on librarian blogs, in journals just like CJAL, or in any of the communities where we share ideas, we can begin conversations that help us mount collective concerted efforts that build firmer ground upon which to resolve our issues and move forward together.

Our organizational weaknesses show. There's more than one reason we don't always refuse or debunk constructed scarcity when we could or should. Our weaknesses were hard felt during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. We recognize that'll it'll take more than one person, more than one action to situate ourselves better and that it will require collective as well as individual action. This does not mean we shouldn't have optimism to tackle the barriers that prevent us from occupying our profession more fully--we may be living in a cyberpunk dystopia, but there are avenues that allow us to design our way out of the situations we've inherited.