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

Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day

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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. 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.
8. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
10. Librarian Action Figure with cape
11. 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"
12. Black Study, Black Struggle
13. 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.
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. Cover of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All
21. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
22. 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.
23. Ssssshh Librarian
25. 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.
26. Big U First Edition Cover
27. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
28. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
29. Nice White Lady
30. 'Punk Ass Book Jockeys’: Library Anxiety in Community and Parks & Recreation
31. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
32. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
33. '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.
34. Party Girl
35. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
36. 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.
37. No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality
38. Living a feminist life
39. Common Ground
40. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
41. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
43. Librarians of the World Unite!
44. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
45. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
46. 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.
47. Librarian Action Figure from Archie McPhee
48. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
49. Canada Reads 2021: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
50. 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.
52. 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.
54. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
55. 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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What refusal can we take up? Refusal resonates with everyone. This video below of Notre Dame's undergraduates accompanying Todd Rundgren on "I Dont Want to Work" illustrates how, across generations, careers, and backgrounds, we all want do the things we love, and ignore the rest. Rundgren describes I Don’t Want to Work as "the most lucrative song I have ever written..." explaining how "...it got adopted by a lot of sports fans… then it got picked up for various commercials and movie promo—things like that. And then Carnival Cruise decided they wanted it to be their entire identity. For several years, they were paying me ridiculous money to use it. And then they started sinking a lot of ships. So they decided they should change their image *laughs*… I don’t make as much money currently off of it as I used to, but it’s available *laughs*…But, I like to say it was some kind of cosmic gift I was given" (Nolasco 2019).

A cosmic gift indeed! From Bartleby's "I prefer not to" on down through the years to Rundgren's "I don't want to work" money-making song, narratives of workplace refusal are an inheritance, a gift we discuss and build upon. Developing fluency in singing, hearing and saying "No" can be a practice, a celebration, a song, or even the ultimate form of collective refusal--a workers' strike.

A librarians' strike is our profession's ultimate form of collective refusal, but there are many other ways union participation benefits those who have such representation. Collective protections are powerful motivators. Kelly McElroy is paraphrased by ALA as saying: "concerns about working conditions, quality of life, and higher education funding brought many of her colleagues together" (Smith 2018). NPR Planet Money co-hosts Sarah Gonzalez and Solnari Glinto describe the benefit of collective action and representation for those in feminized professions :
GONZALEZ 9to5, the organization [founded in 1973], starts spreading across the country, more and more chapters. And it leads to a local union in Boston, SEIU Local 925 [in 1975]. Get it - nine, two, five. Pretty soon, Karen and the 9to5 women are demanding and getting higher pay at big institutions. They helped pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act [1978]. And a big priority for Karen was to have fun with all of their campaigns. One of the very first things 9to5 instituted was the Pettiest Office Procedure Contest and the Bad Boss Contest. (Gonzalez & Glinton 2021)
The momentum of 9to5 was amplified by the Nine to Five film in 1980 and actor/singer/songwriter Dolly Parton's hit 9 to 5 song featured on the film's soundtrack:
GONZALEZ: After the movie, the number of 9to5 chapters doubles, and the union expands. Both groups are still active today.
GLINTON: And both lobbied to pass marquee employment protection laws, like the Family Medical Leave Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
(Gonzalez & Glinton 2021)

These achievements and the benefit of collective representation are just as relevant today. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic situation, in Pittsburgh, librarians and other professionals at the Carnegie Library worked with their recently-organized union, affiliated with the United Steelworkers, to successfully demand that library employees should not be required to report to library facilities and should be paid regardless of their ability to work from home (DPE 2020).
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?
Satire is rich Satire is rich because “everyone” knows what we’re laughing about?
Workplace Satire is a rich playground of ideas. What can we "brew" for librarians by stirring Satire's cauldron?

When the Librarian ignores Tammy stripping down and instead cautions the group to be quiet saying "Shhh this is a library" in the Jammy episode of Parks and Rec, everyone knows what the joke is. Even a naked woman's hysterical strip tease can't interrupt or trump a librarian's duty to say Shhhhh?

Parks and Recreation: Ron and Jammy (American TV Series). Season 7, Episode 2. Jan 13, 2015.

Refusal resonates with everyone. Todd Rungren describes I Don’t Want to Work as " the most lucrative song I have ever written."

explaining how ". . it got adopted by a lot of sports fans… then it got picked up for various commercials and movie promo— things like that. And then Carnival Cruise decided they wanted it to be their entire identity. For several years, they were paying me ridiculous money to use it. And then they started sinking a lot of ships. So they decided they should change their image *laughs*… I don’t make as much money currently off of it as I used to, but it’s available *laughs*…But, I like to say it was some kind of cosmic gift I was given(Nolasco, 2019). This video of Notre Dame's undergraduates accompanying Rungren on "I Dont Want to Work" illustrates how refusal resonates with everyone and across generations .

[Irony? - grab a stat about how x% of ND undergrads will be employed etc]. University life has long been ripe ground for satirists and the buclic setting of the college campus makes it a great stage for presenting satire and dystopian futures.

In The BigU by Neal Stephenson whether you dress it in a letterman's jacket or slip it into a co-ed's overtight T-Shirt the college campus becomes a stage for:

Stephenson, Neal. 1984. The Big U. New York: Vintage. https://www.biblio.com/9780394723624.

Parks and Recreation (American TV Series). 2009. Parks and Recreation (American TV Series). NBC.
Reference Tramp: She always answered “yes “
Bookmobile badgirl she gave it away free all over town

Nolasco, Stephanie. 2019. “Todd Rundgren Explains Why He’s Never Taken the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Seriously.” Text.Article. Fox News. Fox News. December 13, 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/todd-rundgren-rock-roll-hall-of-fame.