Our Labor, Our Terms: Workers’ Inquiry and Libraries

The varied experiences of library workers during the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed a disconnect between how workers perceive the conditions, value, and results of their labor and the actual power they do or do not have over them. This paper proposes a workers' inquiry framework for gaining a more holistic understanding of the nature of library work by assembling the first-hand experiences of workers. This approach involves introducing the workers’ inquiry proposed by Karl Marx as a political strategy and exploring Italian feminism adjacent to the workerist and autonomist movements in Italy during the 1970s. It then examines the distortion of the library's mission during the post-Fordist era and explores how arguments around “the home”, “the family unit”, and “caregiving” have evolved alongside the abolition of binary notions of gender roles and work. By situating workers’ inquiry within its historical utility and connection to 20th century movements, it attempts to lay the groundwork for using this strategy to understand modern library work and workers and expose potential sites of struggle today. Pre-print first published online 02/20/202

Arts-Based Research in Cultural Spaces

This article looks at ways in which conceptual arts-based methods and research creation approaches are applicable to library and information studies. In particular, my research examines the work of racialized artists, away from the Eurocentric canon, and the ways that these works embody concepts that follow practices in the humanities and how these modes of working can apply to cultural studies. Some of the artistic practices that I explore include the conceptual works of artists such as Yoko Ono, On Kawara, Kara Walker, Brian Jungen, Ai Weiwei, and Felix Gonzales-Torres. I look at how research in their work parallels some of the materials, processes, and tools that cultural workers use, such as digitization, archives and databases, code, and the ways in which this information is organized or curated. Many of these artists also work in text-based ways and I also examine how that work is edited based on concepts of indexing and their use of classification methods. The research looks at various dimensions of these artists’ personal histories, stories, and journeys and how they are filled with an emotionally raw temporal articulation of feelings and responses to the world. Some of these artists act as leaders to encourage participation in unfamiliar spaces and hostile environments, in which they are never the center of power but instead struggle against structures of power by operating on the fringes of the art world in order to build bridges with communities. The arts are filled with activism and seek to disrupt, to confront, and to question on all levels the political motivations of systemic power structures and organizations, and to unify and organize around those hierarchies. This is done with the hopes of dismantling and building new structures and systems in creative ways. I look to public institutions and hope that in the future lateral and collaborative working relationships amongst cultural workers are encouraged so that the creation and gathering of knowledge and ideas in different areas plays to organizational and individual strengths. I ask those that are working in the field of Library and Information Studies to repudiate the status quo and instead find new methods for continuous improvements with creative tools and alternate thought processes. Artists are always learning and thinking about ways to use materials in new ways through research, by pushing the boundaries of what can be done both with our physical embodiments and also in how we conceptualize ideas with others in an ongoing dialogue. Through critical analysis, these artists demonstrate inspiration and leadership skills in unconventional and inclusive ways. In order to gain more insight, I gather qualitative data from recent arts-based research articles and books and look at intersections with the work and techniques of the conceptual methodologies of artists outside the Eurocentric art canon. This article proposes to present and discuss findings with practical suggestions for using arts-based tools and techniques to challenge and disrupt current studies around cultural work. In this article, I will discuss artworks from each artist’s oeuvre and also the most important tenets of their work that I think can be applied to arts-based research and also to the more practical work of what can be done in cultural spaces now. Pre-print first published online 07/09/202

Thinking Categorically: Why is LIS Afraid of Power?

Why does librarianship hang on to the strict division of the object of inquiry and the subject pursuing inquiry? This paper adopts a conversational form, as seen in feminist work such as Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, and Brian Milstein’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (2018) and Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider’s Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (2018) in order to explore the contradiction between activism and research in library and information studies (LIS). We chose this form to connect our philosophical approach with our work, as well as to contribute to a growing body of scholarly work written in forms beyond the traditional empirical article. Our research questions in this conversation are: Is it truly possible to transform the field and what is the implied state of transformation? In exploring these questions, we draw on our experience and several examples of research projects that combine activism and inquiry in LIS, digital humanities, and interdisciplinary education in North America. Projects and movements explored include: We Here//UpRoot Knowledge, Dark Laboratory, Land Grab Universities, and Blackfoot Digital Library. While committed to building community among practitioners and scholars in the field, we are ultimately skeptical of the extent to which the field can indeed be transformed through discursive means alone. We see the devaluation of research by practitioners and the immaterial labor of their activism, pitted against the valuation of “pure research” as the legitimized form of liberal idealist philosophy in LIS. Further, we emphasize that new theoretical frameworks are necessary for LIS to consider transformation that unites both material and immaterial aspects of librarianship, including the dynamic constituent power and assemblage as collective power within the profession. Pre-print first published online 01/30/202

Useful Divides: Games of Truth in Library and Information Studies Research and Practice

For much of its history, the work of knowing the library has been said to be riven with divides—between academics and practitioners; between theory and practice; between thinking and doing. There is now a sizable literature in library and information studies that seeks to measure, diagnose, and mend these gaps. This paper interrogates this discourse of division in LIS research and practice. We explore its history, the uses to which it is put, by whom, and to what ends. Rather than seek to bridge the divide, we occupy it, as a space of friction, discomfort, and possibility. Drawing on a vast corpus of academic and industry texts that engage with the gap discourse, we approach these as “games of truth,” as systems of knowledge that produce and reinforce certain ways of being. Using this approach, we highlight how the divide sustains power relations between different groups and constitutes specific forms of knowledge (and not others) as useful and relevant. Seeking to challenge the underlying logic of the divide and its effects in the world, we approach these descriptors in a relational, rather than absolute, sense. Through this excavation, we invite a critical praxis that sees usefulness and relevance as not that which is inextricably aligned to instrumentalism, nor the domain of specific social groups. Rather, we suggest that adopting a critical praxis means reorienting use, using knowledge to advance a mode of living differently, of changing the shape of the world, and of asking what can be done in the face of inequality and indifference. With this in mind, we put forward an alternative mode of understanding use in LIS: as a collective resource that we draw upon to challenge inequalities, to understand and repair past wrongs and continued silences, and to challenge the role of libraries and other institutions in constructing and legitimizing broader power divides in society. These, we suggest, are gaps worth challenging. Pre-print first published online 12/15/202

Connecting Chatman to This Moment

In this editors' note, guest editors Amelia N. Gibson and Nicole A. Cooke introduce the special issue, "Chatman Revisited: Re-examining and Resituating Social Theories of Identity, Access, and Marginalization in LIS.

Brazilian Black Librarianship: The Fight Against the Epistemicide of Black Thought in the Library Profession

In Brazil, only recently has Brazilian Black Librarianship (Biblioteconomia Negra Brasileira in Portuguese; BNB) experienced renewed interest as an intellectual, professional and bibliographic movement that ranges from professional training and performance to theoretical and epistemological reflections on the critical reflections produced by Black librarians, as well as research on ethnic and racial issues, socioeconomic conditions, and the Black population within Library and Information Science (Biblioteconomia e Ciência da Informação in Portuguese; BCI). This article presents the BNB movement through its history, praxis, and curricular transformation of the library profession in the context of the epistemologies produced by Black librarians in Brazil. The justification for this study lies in debating how LIS as a field promotes and reproduces whiteness and the death of knowledge of Black librarians (and librarians belonging to non-white ethnic and racial groups), resulting in the exclusion of this knowledge in libraries, praxis, and librarian education training. In other words, whiteness in Brazilian librarianship is instituted as an exercise in epistemicide, nullifying or hiding other epistemologies. For the socio-critical construction of the framework of this research, we analyzed of books, articles, theses, dissertations, annals of scientific events in the field, and manuals published in the period from 1987 to 2020. Such information sources were drawn from databases, websites of scientific events, class councils and professional associations, graduate programs in information science, and the Brazilian platform for researchers' curricula, Currículo Lattes. In this theoretical framework, we sought to uncover the way that Brazilian LIS education promotes Eurocentric (white) thinking and renders racial debate and Black intellectuals invisible, drawing from the philosophies of Grada Kilomba, Sueli Carneiro and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Anchored in these theoretical references from different areas of knowledge, we debate the fight against the epistemicide of Black thought within the scope of scientific production in Brazilian librarianship. Finally, we bring the profile of Black Brazilian librarians and their performance with ethnic-racial issues, and the scientific production of Black librarians at BNB that gave rise to the movement to introduce Black epistemologies in LIS. The conclusion points to critical perspectives that bring the discussion on race to the center of the field and the formation of a Brazilian tradition of theories and methods through the struggles and resistance of the country's Black communities. Pre-print first published online 7/17/202

Process and Relationship: A Walking-Dialogue

As an interdisciplinary duo from an academic library background and a performing arts background, we underwent a process of recording a series of dialogues about our respective research practices in and between our fields. As we conversed, we walked in separate locations while remaining connected by our phones, permitting us to explore a kinetic and spontaneous approach as a mode of inquiry. An experiment and intended provocation to demonstrate that, just as there are other ways to research, there are other ways of knowing, generating, and presenting ideas that articulate the value of alternative methods within the academy, specifically within the realm of arts-based research. Troubled by the fact that what we perform and produce as research is not easily sanctioned as “research” within the library or the academy, we discuss what it is about these arts-based methods of experimentation, creation, practice, and knowledge-seeking that we find so generative and value so highly. The main themes that we circled and returned to throughout this walking-dialogue fell into the following categories: embodiment on a local, living landscape; fragmentation, collage, and the interstices of juxtaposition; unknowing, failure and doubt; and diverse ways of knowing. Pre-print first published online 09/29/202

Black Lives Still Matter for LIS: An Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction highlights the articles in the special issue Library and Information Studies and the Mattering of Black Lives

Gathering Residue : A Literature Review of Arts-Based Research in Library and Information Studies

Arts-based research (ABR) encompasses the use of methodological tools including literary (e.g., poetry), performative (e.g., dance), visual (e.g., painting), and audiovisual (e.g., film) genres, and is used by researchers in the humanities and natural, social, and health sciences. Recent publications demonstrate diverse applications of ABR in Library and Information Studies (LIS) research. We have three aspirations for this article. First is to peer through a critical lens of literature reviews by asking ourselves: What are we doing (as activity, task, process) when we’re “literature reviewing”? We also consider metaphors we use to describe the role and application of literature reviews. Our second aspiration is to share an appreciation of the potential of ABR (in theory and in practice) to impact LIS and its transformational potential. Third, we aim to describe the generative potential of the frustrated efforts and gaps created when trying to research something differently. We share our reflections regarding positivism and practice of the literature review genre and include a summary of preliminary findings. This literature review culminates in an invitation to sit with the tensions between theory and practice, ambition and implementation, and time and energy. Pre-print first published online 10/02/202

“You’re Not the Police. You’re Providing a Library Service”: Reflections on Maintenance and Repair in/of Public Libraries During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explores how services gaps between public libraries, governmental authorities, and other institutions were addressed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the labor of filling these gaps reveals the repair and maintenance work in and on the public good of the library. The site for this exploration is the project Australian Public Libraries During the COVID-19 Crisis: Implications for Future Policy and Practice, which used mixed-methods questionnaires and interviews to understand the library and information science (LIS) profession’s response to the pandemic. During the pandemic, public institutions labored to maintain services and repair any gaps arising from disrupted services. The extraordinary labor instigated by the pandemic can be used to theorize the ordinary labor of maintaining public institutions such as libraries and how notions of the public good are reaffirmed through individual and institutional acts of care. The maintenance and repair of public libraries as institutions with community service obligations reveals assumptions about essential services, which communities are disadvantaged, and the policing role of libraries. Understanding the repair role of libraries helps researchers and practitioners to theorize and conceptualize their work and service to the community in new ways. Pre-print first published online 07/21/202