This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/CDdisasterwithbackground.jpg 2020-12-15T13:30:58-08:00 Crisis narratives frame our response 59 image_header 2021-09-14T13:16:40-07:00 In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, scarcity narratives, and the power of "No." Our aim is to re-frame crisis narratives in librarianship so library staff called upon to compensate for scarcity have other ways of contending with need.
  
  This genealogy of refusal explores crises and the ways in which we respond to them. Why? Because "Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken" (Doctorow 2017). As explored by Drabinksi (2016) and in our companion short piece, crises, both real and constructed, are behind the narratives that frame our individual and collective responses to disaster, scarcity, and refusal.
  
  The tragedy of the RMS Titanic is an event retold over and over. The story of the unsinkable ship's doomed voyage shocked the world. It's a real crisis narrative. But the story is also a tragedy because "it didn't have to be that way." Half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris--it was too big to fail so it didn't need enough lifeboats for every person... and went full steam ahead regardless of the conditions. It's a story that illustrates the danger of calculated risks and compounding troubles of constructed scarcity: Let's cast off without enough lifeboats, then later when the ship's going down let's deploy the life boats half-empty.

  "This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?"
  --"The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories" (Doctorow 2020)

  
  Crises can be both real and constructed, as Bert Spector explains in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019). Either way, crises can be a powerful tool for leaders. Real crises can be borne on the wings of natural disasters or a global pandemic. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives. Even still they can be utilized in the wake of real crises to form a larger narrative. Constructed crises are often used as cover by those who seek to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner.
  
  Constructed crisis often manifest as calls for urgency, which always stem from the desire for power. Scott Adams captures that aspect of constructed crisis perfectly in this Dilbert cartoon of workplace life:
  
  In librarianship, crises are leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "there just aren't enough resources" to make working conditions safe/effective or "there just isn't the time to wait!" to follow the advice of an specialist. These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use to boast about their ability to "pivot" or "do more with less", while at the same time they over rely ad nauseum on the self-sacrifice and resilience of library staff in the face of adversity.
  
  
  Staying open without PPE during a pandemic, disincentivizing vacation, working people after hours without compensation, or simply allowing an understaffed, repetitive manual task to persist (that will never be efficient enough to beat the backlog) can all be positioned as stop-gap solutions in service of a noble mission. Underneath, such choices are typically justified by scarcity narratives about how resources are unusually scarce or how the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.
  
  As you explore our genealogy of workplace refusal we invite you to consider: How long should we do more with less? Is it okay to simply exist? Instead of demanding exceptional resilience in the face of adversity could we focus on surviving with some semblance of quality of life? How do we know if there actually IS a crisis? Or if resources are, in fact, scarce? In the words of Leah Zaidi, could we design our way out of the cyberpunk dystopia we are awakening to find ourselves in? (Zaidi 2021)
• 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.