Making Sense of Leased Popular Literature Collections

There is a well-publicized debate in the library field on whether or not it should be an academic library’s responsibility to collect and preserve popular culture materials. Budget constraints, space issues, and the “quality” of these materials, are all widely documented concerns as to why popular culture materials—especially popular literature titles—are still not making their way into an academic library’s permanent collection. This study describes a survey of 22 academic libraries throughout the country that use a leased popular literature collection in addition to or instead of purchasing popular literature titles for their permanent collection. The study was designed to answer the following research questions and others: Why do academic libraries choose to use a leasing plan to provide a popular literature collection for their users? What are the values/benefits these collections provide for the library and its users

You’ve Gotta Read This! Connecting with Readers at an Academic Library

At our small, liberal arts college, the library has developed a vibrant browsing collection of popular fiction and nonfiction titles in both print and ebook formats. Additionally, we have developed extensive outreach and programming initiatives to support the recreational reading habits and intellectual engagement of our students and faculty outside of the classroom. Some of these efforts include an annual summer reading booklet, an online featured reader column, and first year and other thematic reading and discussion groups. Learn how librarians on our campus continue to successfully promote recreational reading in support of lifelong learning

A Constellation to Guide Us: An Interview with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe about the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shares her views about the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. She believes that that the Framework is one among many documents adopted by the Association of College and Research Libraries that academic librarians can and should use to promote information literacy. This interview was conducted in May 2016

Writing The Body: Embodied Forms And Animal Spirits

“Writing the Body: Embodied Forms and Animals Spirits” is comprised of a critical introduction and a novel. The critical introduction, “Embodied Forms: One Writer’s Journey from an Ableist Aesthetic to Disability Consciousness” is a literacy narrative that traces my longstanding internalization of ableist norms and their expression in my fiction, and my gradual embrace of the value of disability as an identity and aesthetic sensibility. In so doing, the introduction argues that dominant notions of “normalcy,” “perfection,” and “beauty” are deeply damaging to the disabled writers who internalize them because they encourage the creation of art that erases disability, both formally and in terms of content. In analyzing “Animal Spirits,” the novel portion of this dissertation, the introduction cites Vladimir Nabokov’s dehumanizing interpretation of the Samsa family in Kafka’s classic story “The Metamorphosis” to show how standards of “normalcy” and “beauty” can be deployed to degrade the worth of poor and bourgeois whites, just as they have long been used to degrade people of color. The introduction concludes with a defense of the proposition that fiction can foster empathy. Specifically, it argues that politically meaningful, coalitional empathy can be created through the reading and writing of literature in which characters who are at once privileged and interpellated in confoundingly inequitable systems are shown struggling to make sense of their realities while seeking to build and sustain meaningful relationships with marginalized characters, including disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. The creative portion of my dissertation, my novel “Animal Spirits,” attempts to enact this coalitional dynamic. The novel is a cripqueer coming-of-age story set on a Mennonite dairy farm amid the 2016 presidential campaign. The narrative depicts the queer and debilitated farmboy Isaac Bauman’s repression of his differences under regimes of compulsory able-bodiedness. Yet though Isaac internalizes many dominant notions of “normalcy,” his stubborn longing for men and his body’s confusing incapacities gradually erode his faith. The novel is also the coming-to political consciousness of Isaac’s father, Clyde Bauman. Clyde has long cherished his quiet life on a dairy farm, but he is increasingly fearful that the plunging price of milk will destroy his livelihood, and increasingly troubled by the hateful – and entirely “worldly” – rhetoric of many of his neighbors who see Donald Trump as a solution to their farming woes. As Clyde seeks to deepen his relationship to God by divesting himself of his worldly attachments to his beloved livestock and an electoral politics of hate, Isaac’s tentative atheism turns into open scorn for Mennonite conformity. He changes his diet, throws himself into hookups on Grindr, and embraces a neoliberal vision of success through college. When Isaac comes out, Clyde is forced to choose between his Mennonite faith and his love for his son, and Isaac is forced to decide whether his eager embrace of conservative notions of perfectionism and inequality is justifiable given the violence fomented in the township by acolytes of Donald Trump. Ultimately, the strictness of Clyde’s faith softens a little, and he expresses support for his son amid his bewilderment, and Isaac comes to understand the value and dignity of his cripqueer body

Missing Links : Investigating the Age and Gender Dimensions of Development, Conservation, and Environmental Change in a Southern Zambian Frontier

This dissertation focuses on the lived, material realities of rural women, men, girls, and boys struggling to make a living in the context of changing national development priorities and changing environmental conditions in Southern Province, Zambia. Over the last 20 years, Gwembe Tonga migrants living in the frontier farming area of Kulaale have witnessed significant declines in non-cultivated “bush” resources due to the conversion of forest and grassland to agricultural uses. This dissertation seeks to understand how women, men, boys, and girls differently experience these declines according to local gender- and age-based divisions of subsistence labor. Drawing on a variety of theoretical lenses—including Feminist Geography, Feminist Political Ecology, African Feminisms, the Anthropology of Childhood, and the Anthropology of the State—and utilizing a unique blend of qualitative/ethnographic and quantitative/geospatial research methods, this study finds that the “extractive workloads” (the average annual distance traveled for the collection of key bush resources) associated with women, men, girls, and boys are both unequal and contrary to recent speculations about the distinctive vulnerability of adult women to environmental change. The unequal labor burdens associated with the extraction of bush resources in this changing frontier landscape are but one of several missing “links” that this dissertation identifies within current theorizing about the gendered dimensions of environmental change. Other “links” include the social organization and religious life of Gwembe Tonga migrants, the demographic structure of Kulaale homesteads (their organization on the landscape and their demographic composition), the interplay between agency and vulnerability in children’s daily lives, and the role of the state in shaping Kulaale residents’ perceptions of and interactions with the surrounding environment. This story of Gwembe Tonga migrants’ gendered and aged experiences of environmental change unfolds in the context of competing national economic strategies—frontier development wildlife conservation. This dissertation concludes that women, men, girls, and boys are all physically and economically vulnerable to the changes associated with frontier development, conservation policy, and environmental change, with social, political, and economic factors prompting them to experience vulnerability in aged and gendered ways

Music Education and Sustainability in Lombok, Indonesia

This article discusses the challenges of teaching and sustaining music and other performing arts on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. It follows my field research trajectory on the island over a period of 34 years and analyzes the efforts of government interventions, non-government actors, and teachers and educational institutions in the transmission and sustainability of the arts. Interpretations indicate that a combination of globalization, urbanization, social media, everyday mediatization, and Islamization over recent decades negatively impacted traditional musics in specific ways, by problematizing sustainability. However, several agents–individuals inside and outside the government who understood the situation and had the foresight to take appropriate action–developed programs and organizations to maintain or aestheticize the performing arts, sustain musician livelihoods, and engage a new generation of male youth in music and dance. These efforts, supplemented by the formation of groups of leaders dedicated to the study of early culture on Lombok and fresh initiatives in music education, have ushered in new opportunities and visibility for traditional music and performing arts and performing artists

Religious Processions in Indonesia: Cultural Identity and Politics on Bali and Lombok

In Bali and Lombok in Indonesia, processions—like similar events in many other parts of the world—are ritualized events breaking the normal flow of time. They are always temporally marked, and can be characterized as either religious and temple- or mosque-sponsored, or secular and state-sponsored. This article discusses religious processions generally on the neighbor islands of Bali and Lombok, and focuses on the processions of the spectacular Lingsar temple festival on Lombok. The festival conjoins the migrant Hindu Balinese and the local Muslim Sasak (the majority ethnic group) in ritual participation, but that participation differs in significant ways that are represented in the processions. For the Balinese, the festival is religious and tied to the original, divinely inspired mission from Bali to Lombok; for the Sasak, the festival is “cultural” and a memorial to a Muslim hero who introduced the religion and sacrificed himself to initiate rice field fertility for Sasak descendants. The festival requires an astounding 12 Sasak processions, seven Balinese processions and two mixed processions (some traverse between sacred points, others circumambulate). The music – primarily performed by gamelan ensembles – transforms the notion of time, calls forth the divine, announces the missions and narratives of the processions, and represents both the contestations between Sasak and Balinese over temple ownership and the eventual transcendence of that tension to interreligious unity. And, it is this unity that is the overarching goal of the festival