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

Reference Tramp

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1. Common Ground
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. 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".
4. 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. 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.
10. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
12. Feminist Data Manifest-No
13. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
15. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
16. 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.
17. 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.
19. '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.
20. Black Study, Black Struggle
21. It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers "success risks jealousy, bullying, or being undermined within a competitive workforce, and that deferring to those higher up the ladder is part of the everyday emotional labour performed to manage the emotions of those with more power than ourselves. "an individualistic workplace can be isolating, controlling, and abusive. How can we advise workers to be vulnerable and authentic, if institutions replicating whiteness may in fact end up harming workers who express themselves with trust or authenticity?" "workplace policies can directly contribute to a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and internalized blame within their employees. The onus is on the worker to become resilient and less sensitive, gracefully absorbing harm for the comfort of the institution."
22. Essential, Yet Disposable: How the Career Faculty FTE Cuts Impact Librarians
23. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
24. Distant Reading for Quick Insights
25. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
26. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
27. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
28. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
30. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
32. Living a feminist life
33. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
34. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
35. 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.
38. 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.
39. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction
40. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
42. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
44. 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.
45. Hench "Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called 'hero' leaves her badly injured. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks. Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it."
46. Big U First Edition Cover

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Why don't librarians "Just say No"? 77 Do we prefer to suffer in silence because its a vocation and not "just a job" plain 2021-04-19T18:24:27-07:00
In this page we begin to explore why the librarian stays silent, why the word "No" never seemed to make its way into the vocabulary of librarians, and why sometimes, it is difficult for librarians even to say: "I prefer not to."

We started this page laughing about anti-drug campaigns (DARE and "Just say No") and then found ourselves returning to a circumstance that will not shock anyone who has ever worked in a library: Libraries [& librarians] are often complicit in their own silence, organizationally so desperate to prove their worth, that refusal is not an option.
Morgenstern's Starless Sea takes things quite a bit further. Reviewers describe the book as a beautifully written and compellingly imagined book that introduces a mystical library. These librarians are physically and emotionally inculcated to their vocation, devoting themselves entirely to serving the library.

The librarians will be blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and then either be branded or de-tongued before they can start work. The mutilations are the critical prerequisites that mark the point at which the librarians in the Starless Sea can be trusted to do their jobs.
Why elinguation? Because, borrowing from Popowich, their role is to be caretakers who can't say "No" ? Not meaning makers? (2019)

Library work, like nursing, cleaning, caregiving, early childhood education, and social work is a profession where efforts tend to be performed by feminised labor. Labor that always says "Yes" when faced with human need.

There's a parodied librarian stereotype evident in the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians who enact their role by always answering the call (with a "Yes") They are the ones who "give it away all over town." Along with Morgenstern's acolytes they occupy the far end of the bell curve in our workplace refusal kinship diagram. Men populate the other side of the curve when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music, like Todd Rundgren have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in OfficeSpace foment rebellion and bond over it with co-workers. Other male characters like Dante and Randal in Clerks simply revel in turning up but preferring not to work.

When academic librarians seek to prove themselves and create externally recognizable value, whether through the credential of the MLS, or through determining which achievements will be acknowledged by faculty appointment and promotion committees, we similarly distance ourselves from the service/maintainer and feminized side of the profession. We re-define our role to align more with the masculine to prove our worth alongside our other colleagues in the patriarchal world of the ivory tower. As argued by Seale and Mirza (2019):
the actual work involved in academic librarianship is frequently invisibilized. This invisibility is only emphasized by the fact that much of that work entails emotional labor or maintenance. ... Academic librarianship’s erasure of feminized forms of labor and the field’s “inherent femaleness” is inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor. (258-259)

Why would we do this? "Isn't the academy becoming a more welcming place for women?" you might ask. "Aren't half the students we serve women?" In terms of gender balance in the professorial ranks, particularly in the United States, in the most recent American Association of University Professors' salary survey we find that religious institutions have finally got their gendered salary gaps down to a single digit percentage(AAUP, 2021). That's good news. But the survey data also show there's still an 86.8 percent difference between number or men and women serving as full professors at private-independents(AAUP, 2021).

Writ large we can imagine this imbalance if we picture a woman going up for faculty appointment or promotion. When the time comes for her to convince decision makers that what she does is worthwhile, only 16% of those people are likely to identify with her at the most basic level of having experienced gendered labor like she has. Things aren't likely to get better any time soon in the US either, as long as that will cost money. This past year "The survey found that real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions(AAUP, 2021)."

This patriarchal organization with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is the one in which academic librarians work and are compensated. Another further tension within academic librarianship that can exacerbate pay gendered pay gaps is the one that differentiates between the effort value of those who are seen as innovators (often gendered as: masculine) and those that are seen as maintainers (often gendered as: feminine). Popowhich explores this tension, observing that :
Librarianship—like the world itself—is full of contradictions or antinomies, tensions, productive or causal, non-static dichotomies, dialectical “unities of opposites,” such as that between enlightenment and social control, between concrete library work and the more intellectual labor of library science, or between men’s and women’s work, the center and the periphery, etc. (Popowich, 2019)
In this situation how do you justify yourself, your cost, your service? How do you hang on to your part of the pie when you're really working in the doughnut hole?

The situation has improved some since Mary aka The Party Girl got fired from her job at the public library back in '95, but not all that much. Mary's godmother, the librarian, tells her "Melvyl Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require any intelligence. It was a woman's job . . . That means its underpaid and undervalued." (Mayer 1995)

This scarcity scenario is playing out at Universities worldwide, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation which can drive counter-intuitive decision making.

For example, some Libraries unnecessarily delayed closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other academic libraries closed to protect their patrons and their staff (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, 2020). The rationale for those that remained opened was that somehow that the librarians were up for the risk, and that their sacrifice was worth it.
- Were library administrators able to just say "No" and Refuse to send their people to work without PPE during a pandemic situation?
- Were librarians able to say "No PPE? Then I'm not coming in to work/I'm not working around [these co-workers who wont practice social distancing or, that maskless patron] ? "
- Were librarians able to refuse to work when they found themselves denied surveillance or diagnostic testing offered to other members of the campus community like students living in dormitories, or professors doing classroom instruction?
- Were librarians able to say "if you want us to "Stay open/Re-open without COVID-19 testing available, I'm not coming in to work?"
Amidst all these decision points, most libraries eventually closed til mitigations were sufficient to provide a modicum of safety. Among closed libraries the majority were circumspect in how they announced it. Hundreds of libraries were closed, yet text mining their closure websites revealed that only eleven actually came right out and said "We are Closed" (Meyers et al, 2020) Instead, libraries and librarians that closed their doors to patrons emphasized what they could still "do" seeming to avoid at all costs using the phrase "We are closed" even thought that's probably what most patrons were coming to their websites to find out.

There is, of course, no single reason librarians (and Libraries), don't "Just say No." But it is worth remembering that even Bartleby in all his mental anguish was able to voice that he "preferred not to"-- surely this is a language we could adopt more?
Feminized Labour Library work, like nursing, cleaning, caregiving, early childhood education, and social work is a profession where efforts tend to be performed by feminized labour. Labour that always says "Yes" when faced with human need.

Librarian stereotypes are so prevalent in popular culture that the library profession has playfully and/or sardonically adopted them. Examples of these exaggerated feminized stereotypes are depicted book cover parodies, such as the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians enact their role by always answering the call (with a "Yes!"). They are the ones who "give it away all over town." Along with Morgenstern's acolytes they occupy the far end of the bell curve in our workplace refusal kinship diagram.

Men populate the other side of the curve when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music like Todd Rundgren and Johnny Paycheck have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in Office Space foment rebellion and bond over it with co-workers. Other male characters like Dante and Randal in Clerks simply revel in turning up but preferring not to work.

When academic librarians seek to prove themselves and create externally recognizable value, whether through the credential of the MLS, or through determining which achievements will be acknowledged by faculty appointment and promotion committees, we distance ourselves from the service/maintainer and feminized side of the profession. We re-define our role to align more with the masculine to prove our worth alongside our other colleagues in the patriarchal world of the ivory tower.

As argued by Seale and Mirza (2019). 258-259:
the actual work involved in academic librarianship is frequently invisibilized. This invisibility is only emphasized by the fact that much of that work entails emotional labor or maintenance. ...Academic librarianship’s erasure of feminized forms of labor and the field’s “inherent femaleness” is inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor.
Why would we do this? Though we may seek prestige, our efforts rarely lead to increased influence or power within the academy. The truth is that many of the collective benefits depicted in the 9 to 5 film back in 1980 are still among those most valued by today's workers: on-site daycare, job-sharing, flexible hours. One of the most hoped for benefits imagined in the 9 to 5 film hasn't materialized, though: equal pay.

"Isn't the academy becoming a more welcoming place for women?" you might ask. "Aren't half the students we serve women?" In terms of gender balance in the professorial ranks, particularly in the United States, in the most recent American Association of University Professors' salary survey we find that religious institutions have finally got their gendered salary gaps down to a single digit percentage (AAUP 2021). That's good news. But the survey data also show there's still an 86.8 percent difference between number or men and women serving as full professors at private-independents (AAUP 2021).

Picture a woman going up for faculty appointment or promotion. When the time comes for her to convince decision makers that what she does is worthwhile, only 16% of those people are likely to identify with her at the most basic level of having experienced gendered labour like she has. Things aren't likely to get better soon in the US, because the outlook for the academic job market and compensation is pretty bleak. This past year "real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions" (AAUP 2021).

The patriarchal organization of the academy with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is where academic librarians work and are compensated. Further complicating the compensation outlook within academic librarianship are pay gaps between innovators (often gendered as masculine) and maintainers (often gendered as feminine) and how they are comparatively compensated. Popowich explores this tension and more, observing that:
Librarianship—like the world itself—is full of contradictions or antinomies, tensions, productive or causal, non-static dichotomies, dialectical “unities of opposites,” such as that between enlightenment and social control, between concrete library work and the more intellectual labor of library science, or between men’s and women’s work, the center and the periphery, etc. (Popowich 2019)
In this situation how do you justify yourself, your cost, your service? How do you hang on to your part of the pie if you're really working in the empty middle of the doughnut hole?