This content was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Natalie K Meyers.
Walkaway
1 2021-03-31T12:45:58-07:00 Anonymous 33948 1 Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza, known to his friends as Hubert, was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society and walk away. -- from Amazon. 2021-03-31T12:45:58-07:00 2018 Doctorow, Cory. 2018. Walkaway. book Doctorow, Cory 0-7653-9277-1 978-0-7653-9277-0 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22This page is referenced by:
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2021-02-14T17:04:04-08:00
A Kinship Diagram of Workplace Refusal
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2021-04-16T17:20:55-07:00
Why bother doing a genealogy of refusal from literature, science fiction, and popular culture? If we want to confront the options for workplace refusal it helps if we acquaint ourselves with some common stories and the worlds they explore, exploit, and create. Our kinship diagram is a lighthearted visualization inspired by the CJAL Special Issue: Refusing Crisis Narratives. We know this genealogy is, by virtue of its motivation, bound to be: arbitrary, incomplete, inaccurate, and always a work in progress, open to argument, revision, and criticism. We are okay with that. Here we look at workplace refusal through art, music, dance, film, sit-coms, games, literature, and science fiction, from Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener to Doctorow's Walkaway. We trace the lineages of workplace refusal counterposed alongside the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe.
The above genealogy diagram was created by the authors to visualize the genealogy of refusal. To cite, please use: Meyers N, Martinez-Montavon AM, Narlock M, Stathers K. Genealogy of Refusal Family Tree. April 16, 2021. bit.ly/refusal-kinship-diagram
In "The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories" Cory Doctorow describes how “Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes" (Doctorow 2020). He remarks on how Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment (Doctorow 2020). While science fiction authors often engage in world-building, creating entire universes with rules that differ from those their audience are accustomed to, these thought-experiments often reflect current reality, even if shrouded in metaphor. As described by Ursula K Le Guin, science fiction does not work “ to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (Le Guin 1979, 156). Philip Jose Farmer wrote that "...Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, write[s] parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'" (Farmer 2008). We can begin our own exercise in professional foresight by examining dystopian, utopian, satiric and humorous workplace scenarios observed in our kinship diagram. We explore workplace refusal as depicted in satire and comedy for much the same reasons, to look at our present day situation through the lens of popular culture. The extremes presented in this type of media help us develop an appreciation for the language of refusal.
This genealogy is a launching point for understanding the librarian's role in crisis narratives in the workplace. It lets us connect the librarian's role not just to the characteristics accredited through the award of an MLS or other degree or credential, but also to other memorable characters in popular culture, and to labour and feminist work. It helps if we have a common narrative history to refer to that exists "outside" the profession. We hope it spurs discussion, maybe laughter, and another way of positioning the ways librarians can say and hear "NO" as a complete sentence.
Just as Bartleby lives on (and has been taken up by filmmakers, artists, literary theorists, and even RPGs), libraries and librarians don't exist apart from the culture we curate. We exist in that self-same idiosyncratic, imperfect, self-reflective culture of books, film, comics, music, history and theory.
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2021-02-14T16:52:40-08:00
Asset Framing
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2021-04-17T12:03:34-07:00
In the above image, Wellspring an artwork by artist Charles Luna, a woman holds a small child in patch of grass in the desert. The viewers' eyes might dance between the cityscape in the background, the artist's model in the foreground, and the desert all around. And yet, our eyes always come back to the centre, to the oasis the pair make. Instead of lamenting the desert and all that they do not have, the woman and child are focused on each other and all they DO have when they are together.
Exercises such as engaging with this artwork emphasize "asset framing" over "deficit framing". As articulated by Trabian Shorters, asset framing is about shifting narratives, so that instead of defining individuals or communities by what they lack, we instead "define a people by their aspirations and contributions" (Shorters 2018). In other words, instead of lamenting the mother/child pair's surrounding environment, we instead would define them based on what they have, their hopes, and their contributions to the world around them.
Planning and engaging in work for libraries through the lens of asset framing similarly shifts our perspective. Librarians often work in organizations where resources are "never enough", where scarcity and deficit framing are the norms. At budget time, maintainers in all fields of work can be envious of generous budgets for peers' innovative projects which almost always seem to win out when resources are divvied up.
As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness, "To oppose something is to maintain it... you must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" (Le Guin 2019, 163). So, instead of continuing to using a scale that always promotes for innovation or potential --a scale that we will all fail on in different ways if we're focused on keeping the trains running and the lights on, let's walk down a different road and work towards a new future of academic librarianship, one where we treat cycles of innovation and maintenance like we do the cycle of propagating seeds, sowing them, harvesting our crops, and putting up each season's produce as preserves for the future.
Decision makers would often rather 'invest' in innovation than budget for maintenance. Managers sometimes hire or promote on this basis too. They place a bet on potential rather than making personnel decisions based on a candidate's actual record of success or provable qualifications. This cavalier "No risk, No reward" mindset is characteristically demonstrated and perpetuated more often by male leaders than female decision makers. Why? Because if you place a bet and come out "ahead" the spoils are "all yours"? Ironically, just like in the casino, most people who make these sort of gambles time after time don't remember or talk about the inevitable losses which typically outpace their wins. Male dominated organizations like the universities that house our academic libraries can unwittingly ignore this disconnect, rewarding risk taking regardless of its outcomes until inequitable pay structures arise between innovation and service/maintenance and those compensation structures become intractably gendered.
So, where can we go from here? We can start by staging honest conversations about how articulating the need for support improves both innovation and maintenance project outcomes. We can practice being able to say and be heard when we speak that: "If I’m going to do this new project x successfully, I’m going to need to give up other duty y, and get help from z. We can become more articulate and circumspect about saying "No" in our personal and professional lives--it's a way to go about prioritizing our efforts, to stop burning ourselves out, to stop letting ourselves and others down. If you're invited to serve on a gender dominated search committee or manel, just say "No" and suggest alternate candidates who would improve the panel or a balance that would allow you to change your mind about joining.This is more sustainable than competing against each other for dwindling resources where we constantly have to be seeking new ways to prove our worth or justify our work. The leaderboards in Doctorow's Walkaway provide valuable context for librarians at budget time. It doesn't really make sense to measure balance our budget primarily against measures of individual achievement. The most successful communes in 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, who didn't incentivize rankings or shame those who couldn't do tasks as their peers. He later observes that such community members were not the problems-- it's their systems:“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 treat his refusing employee once he wasn't fit for work. Was Bartleby then a managerial challenge? A puzzle to fix? a mere eyesore, a problem to be gotten rid of? He's much more than that, which is why Melville makes Bartleby's situation so impossible to "look away from".