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• 1 media/CDdisasterwithbackground.jpg 2020-12-15T13:30:58-08:00 Crisis narratives frame our response 44 image_header 2021-04-13T14:59:08-07:00 "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)
  
  Yet, half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The tragedy of the Titanic is an event retold over and over not only because the loss of life on the doomed voyage of the unsinkable ship shocked the world, but also because "it didn't have to be that way." Since then, the very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris(too big to fail full steam ahead regardless of the conditions) and constructed scarcity(let's cast off without enough lifeboats and later when people's lives depend on them we'll deploy them 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?" 
  -Cory Doctorow,  “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories.” Slate Magazine. October 13, 2020.

   
  In librarianship, crises can be leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "There just aren't the resources" [to make it safe, to make it efficient], or "there just isn't the time to wait![to listen to an specialist, or  til we have enough people]." These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use for their rallying cry,  boasting about their "ability to do more with less", while at the same time over-relying on librarians' self-sacrifice or resilience in the face of adversity ad nauseum. Staying open during a pandemic, or persisting in a repetitive manual task that will never be efficient enough to beat the backlog, or disincentivizing vacation, or working people after hours without compensation can all be positioned as stop-gaps in service of noble goals, but they typically stem from a myth that resources are unusually scarce or that the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.
  
  This genealogy of refusal explores such crises and the ways in which we respond to them. 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. 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.
  
  As articulated by Bert Spector in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019), crises can be both real and constructed. And either way, crises are a powerful tool for leaders. Real crises are borne on the wings of natural disasters or a global pandemic.  Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives (such as "A once glorious kingdom under threat"), but can be utilized in conjunction with real crises to form a larger narrative.  Typically they manifest calls for urgency which always stem from the desire for power. Constructed crises are often utilized to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner.
  
  In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, scarcity narratives, and the power of "No." As you explore our genealogy of workplace refusal we invite you to consider: How long should we do more with less? Is it ok 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 crises? 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)