A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives Main Menu Crisis narratives frame our response Bartleby at the Wall How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship? Proud Descendants who "Prefer not to" Some recent gems from Bartleby's lineage A Kinship Diagram of Workplace Refusal Satire is rich Comedic instances of workplace refusal are especially powerful Dark side of parody More Satire When Expectations Cross the line Why don't librarians "Just say No"? Do we prefer to suffer in silence because its a vocation and not "just a job" Feminized Labour Saying Yes all the Time I am not your hero Murderbot: the alternate patron saint for librarians The invocation of crisis narratives is relentless No individual solution to our problems Debunking myths that hold us back to enable collective ways of moving forward What refusal can we take up? A Cosmic Gift Manifest NO Becoming fluent in hearing and saying No Asset Framing Bibliography Works cited, featured, mentioned and consulted for Genealogy of Refusal project Glossary of Key Concepts Multiple Paths A compendium of paths through the Genealogy of Refusal content: a choose-your-own-adventure approach to this companion piece. Genealogy of Refusal Timeline We welcome contributions Learn how to contribute to this project About the Authors Multimedia project for the The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Special Issue on Refusing Crisis Narratives

Superhero Librarians

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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a librarian! The eponymous purveyor of popular culture, Archie McPhee sells the Librarian Action Figure.
She's "an homage to those warriors of the printed (and electronic) word that keep fighting for literacy in the face of dwindling budgets and the decline of the printed word . . . This hard vinyl 3-3/4" action figure has a removable cape that symbolizes how heroic librarians really are." (Archie McPhee)

Librarians engage in valuable and meaningful work as the sustainers of curated collections and knowledge that will be passed along to future generation. Similarly, the ways generations of librarians uncomfortably wear the mantle of our benignant profession also perpetuates a genre of hero narratives all its own.

The first gen librarian action figure started out in 2003 modeled after Nancy Pearl, a Seattle area librarian, who was depicted as an kitschy cardigan wearing stereotype, complete with a button on her back that makes her arm move with "amazing shushing action!" She sold out in a week and went deluxe in a red outfit complete with a "library diorama with a reference desk, computer, book cart, multiple book stacks. (Archie McPhee)
“The History of the Librarian Action Figure and Nancy Pearl.” n.d. Archie McPhee. Accessed April 13, 2021. https://mcphee.com/pages/history-of-the-librarian-action-figure.)"




The [Super]Hero Narrative is nothing new in librarianship, it's an inheritance of vocational awe reinforced with celebratory and kitschy accolades that both mock and perpetuate it. 

These are stories in which librarians as hero first responders step into the wake of natural disasters, sifting through toppled stacks after earthquakes, salvaging materials after floods, or are required to go in during a literal pandemic to provide access to content under the term "Hero."




It is a slippery professional slope from hero or rockstar librarian, to martyr librarian, to burn-out. A hero mentality that relies on a vocational identity of self-sacrifice may manifest in library staff endangering themselves and their communities when they should not be or when they cannot effectively say “No”.
These are the librarians with inadequate PPE working in libraries that remained open during a pandemic and risked their lives so unmasked patrons could have access to library materials, or who used their own cars and time to deliver books to quarantined students stepping out of pandemic isolation wards.


This mindset is not sustainable, especially when library staff find themselves thinking of their work as a matter of life and death (a notion reinforced and celebrated by other colleagues, administrators or local politicians).

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  1. Table of Contents Natalie K Meyers

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