Journal of Radical Librarianship
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“It Is A Non-Negotiable Orderâ€: Public Libraries’ Body Odor Bans and Authoritarian Aesthetics
No full textMost urban US public libraries have rules authorizing spatial exclusion of people whose body odor is described as “offensive,†despite critics’ identification of such policies as anti-homeless discrimination. Focus on socioeconomic deprivation as a temporary obstacle to producing an odorless body, however, obscures librarians’ role in demonizing people with odor-related disabilities. This paper shows how library rhetoric spreads ableist assumptions about embodiment, interpretation and power. Advice literature addressed to librarians presents patrons’ bodies as simple-to-read texts, in which odor is an unambiguous sign of neglected hygiene. Such beliefs uncritically reproduce elements of classist and racist ideology, while sidelining disability as a disposable exception. The article urges librarians to give up claims of epistemological mastery over patrons’ bodies and make libraries accessible spaces for all
Privatization of Government Information as Primitive Accumulation
Get PDFThis essay examines privatization of government publishing through the lens of capital accumulation by dispossession, an updated and expanded version of Marx’s account of primitive accumulation. It argues that the program of privatizing the governments’ information dissemination activities which began as part of the Reagan administration’s pursuit of neoliberal policies continues today albeit in altered form due to the advent of electronic publishing
Archivists as Amici Curiae: Activating Critical Archival Theory to Confront Racialized Surveillance
Get PDFArchivists are uniquely situated to problematize the use and misuse of records in a legal context. But along with the ability to think critically about how records are discussed and employed, archivists have a responsibility to act when records are being used as tools of oppression. This paper serves a dual purpose. First, it contributes to the field of Critical Archival Studies with original analysis and theory around records in legal discourse. It rethinks the 2018 US Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States through critical examination of four archival frameworks: co-creation and third-party doctrine; the use of documents to control the movements of certain bodies; privacy in record-keeping; and the assumed neutrality of information infrastructure.
Second, it moves beyond specific analysis of the particular case, which has already been decided, to provide other archivists with a conceptual and practical roadmap to problematize the status quo usage of records in a legal context. Archivists’ increasingly nuanced conceptions of records and documentation are not cited as technical background or evidence in Supreme Court cases. Active introduction and application of these new theories to the legal field would disrupt broader societal conceptions of records in daily life, expose racism in legal invocations of records and record-keeping, and ultimately serve an emancipatory function. The paper ends with an appeal to archivists to intervene in the dominant narrative around records in legal discourse
Confronting Librarianship and its Function in the Structure of White Supremacy and the Ethno State
Get PDFRising socio-cultural and political tensions have helped increase awareness about long-standing structures of violence and abuse, as we have seen in the development and tumultuous expansion of the #MeToo movement. However, other significant conditions of injustice and oppression continue without drawing attention. This seems to be the case with the library profession. Despite strong and persistent links to white supremacy and a well-established record excluding minorities from its ranks, the library profession has been remarkably successful in nurturing an unassailable public image of virtuous liberal benevolence and near mythical devotion to the highest ideals of freedom, individual rights, and democracy. Its unsurpassed ability in evading scrutiny or criticism of any serious consequence while maintaining a strong record of dedicated service to white power is all the more remarkable at a time where social media is used to amplify campaigns against injustices or organizations believed responsible for conditions of oppression. Although Critical Librarianship, or #CritLib, is beginning to question some of the doctrinal assumptions underlying the practice of librarianship, an examination of some of the mechanisms with which white supremacy has been able to build an entire system of racial protectionism as an occupational sector that intersects with areas of significant public interest is an important and timely research concern
Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom
Get PDFIn 1977, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) produced a film entitled The Speaker which depicts a high school that invites a professor to speak on the inferiority of African Americans. A throughline connects The Speaker in its 1977 incarnation to OIF’s 2018 actions and discourse around its 2018 revision of the “Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights†to specifically include hate groups. It is not coincidental that the construction of the library as a marketplace of ideas takes place through debates around the fundamental humanity of Black people in the United States; this throughline is embedded in racial capitalism. In this essay, we argue that debates around intellectual freedom within librarianship, with their reliance on the metaphor of the library as a “marketplace of ideas,†must be understood through the broad lens of racial capitalism. More specifically, we use Jodi Melamed’s typology of liberal antiracisms in the twentieth and twenty-first century to analyze ALA and OIF documents, as well as The Speaker, and draw on Randolph Hohle and David Theo Goldberg’s work to consider the relationships between public space, neoliberal policy, and race at play in the “Meeting Rooms†documents
That Which Cannot Be Named: The Absence of Race in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
Get PDFThis article examines how information literacy is situated in a history of white supremacy in academia and academic libraries and provides an overview of some of the historical critiques of information literacy, to which the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is ostensibly responding. Using Critical Race Theory, I provide a close reading of the Framework, highlighting the ways in which issues of race and racism are elided and white academia is centered. This article also examines critiques of information literacy and how critical information literacy has responded to the Framework. I then propose some ways to emphasize antiracist pedagogy in the information literacy classroom
Cataloguing, knowledge and power
Get PDFThis paper seeks to unpick the changing perceptions of the concepts contained in its title and investigate some of the relationships between them. It does this by exploring the history of modern cataloguing from the mid 1800s to the present day. It is argued that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cataloguing developments took place predominantly in the library world and, understood through the principles of European Enlightenment thought, catalogues were perceived to provide the public with access to external knowledge and thus empower them. It then identifies technological, cultural and ideological developments in the twentieth century, notably the rise of ‘postmodernism’, as challenges to both the primacy of library catalogues and the tradition of Enlightenment thought within which they were conceived. Finally, it argues that corporate digital companies are now at the forefront of cataloguing and explores the way in which the public have become the subject of these catalogues. Drawing upon Foucauldian theory, it is suggested that rather than allowing knowledge and power to flow to the public these catalogues enable corporate and government bodies to hold it over the public and use it to influence their lives in unprecedented ways
Sketching out the programmatic features of Making Justice: A library program dedicated to court-involved youth
Get PDFThis article sketches out programmatic features that contribute to the success of Making Justice, a public library community program for court-involved youth. This article features images from a collaboration with Lauren Lauter, an educational scholar and artist, alongside text to highlight three programmatic features: aesthetic expression, embracing the present, and reaching out and stepping back. In contrast to traditional forms of education, in particular carceral education, Making Justice offers much needed space for teens to express themselves through the arts and have access to resources allocated for their current enjoyment and wellbeing. This program is predicated on trust that learning can come in multiple forms, matter for multiple reasons, and be determined by the learners themselves
"I Want Them to Know We Suffer Here": Preserving Records of Migrant Detention in Opposition to Racialized Immigration Enforcement Structures
Get PDFThousands of detainee abuse allegations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been documented since ICE was founded in 2003. However, few investigations occur, and they are often held internally. In 2017, ICE requested permission to destroy documents related to detainee abuse including violent assault, sexual assault, and death. The request remains under consideration by the National Records and Archives Administration. This proposal reflects a concerning pattern of anti-immigrant hostility that often intersects with race. Archivists must consider interventional archival practices to build collections that reflect the lives and histories of the disempowered through preserving their counternarratives to the official state narrative. This paper traces racialized border structures and their militarized apparatus to propose a new approach to the management and preservation of detainee abuse records
Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion
Get PDFIn this article we provide a structural critique of attribution as it is figured in colonial practices and ongoing settler-colonial logics that form the basis for creating, circulating, and sharing knowledge through research practices, methods, and platforms. Settler colonialism is a tradition, and as such, it has habits. One of these habits is to hide specific tactics and practices in operationalizing dispossession. Attribution is one of these tactics. Attribution functions as a key mechanism within a copyright/author/archive matrix which maintains hierarchies of knowledge production by reducing Indigenous and non-European subjectivity and legitimating the ongoing appropriation of Indigenous cultural material by non-Indigenous authors. The colonial force of attribution and its practices of exclusion are hidden in the stacks and how they are populated; in the rights fields of databases and how they are cited; in archival processes of selection, appraisal, and accessioning; and through efforts to digitize content and collections in order to make them open without acknowledgment and ongoing relationships. We argue that one mode of decolonizing practices for libraries and archives is through remaking, reframing, and refiguring attribution through ongoing Indigenous connections to land and knowledge