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 4 Doctorow, Cory. 2017. Walkaway. New York: Tor Books. https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/ plain 2021-04-17T22:24:07-07:00 2017 Doctorow, Cory. 2018. Walkaway. Doctorow, Cory. 2017. Walkaway. New York: Tor Books. book Doctorow, Cory 0-7653-9277-1 978-0-7653-9277-0 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22This page is referenced by:
-
1
media/Genealogy of Refusal.png
2021-02-14T17:04:04-08:00
A Kinship Diagram of Workplace Refusal
56
plain
2022-04-04T15:44:11-07:00
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. Likewise, it requires us to collaborate, commiserate, and co-create with our fellow workers. This project grew out of weekly discussions and a shared bibliography, where we explored the interplay between the theory we were reading, our lived experiences, and the media we were consuming. This ultimately culminated in the short essays and content selections that substantiate our multimedia project and our kinship diagram, a lighthearted visualization inspired by the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 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 juxtapose broader cultural lineages of workplace refusal with the library profession’s specific inheritance of vocational awe. If we have conversations about scenarios that illustrate the ways vocational awe stands in the way of our refusals, we create cultural touchstones that can illuminate our way(s) ahead.
The above genealogy diagram was created by the authors to visualize the genealogy of refusal. To cite, please use: Natalie Meyers, Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon, Mikala Narlock, & Kim Stathers. (2021). Genealogy of Refusal Family Tree. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4698931
In "The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories," Cory Doctorow (2020) describes how “Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes." 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 (1979), science fiction does not work “to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (156). Philip Jose Farmer (2008) wrote that "...Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, write 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.'" 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 a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) 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 and timeline to refer to that exists alongside of and yet "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. -
1
2021-02-14T17:00:50-08:00
No individual solution to our problems
34
Debunking myths that hold us back to enable collective ways of moving forward
plain
2021-08-13T12:58:40-07:00
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. -
1
media/Wellspring.png
2021-02-14T16:52:40-08:00
Asset Framing
25
image_header
2021-04-17T23:59:53-07:00
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 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 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".
We're going to keep "looking" too, and moving toward a new kind of "Yes." In dance, Rainer's No Manifesto of 1978 was displaced twenty-six years later by Mette Ingvartsen's YES MANIFESTO(Ingvartsen 2004). It reads like this:
How long will it take librarians to reclaim "yes" in a way that works for us?