WORK: GSISC 18
Panels 1
Writing Ourselves Into Our Future: Dismantling and Envisioning Alternative Models of Library Leadership
Sofia Leung and Jennifer Ferretti
Recognizing librarianship is a feminized profession with people of color making up less than twenty percent of the workforce, it is easy to be disillusioned with the present state of our field. If the structures of leadership are dismantled and different models are in place, what opportunities does this open up? Bringing together frameworks and strategies from community organizing, science fiction, equityXdesign, and Critical Race Theory, the presenters, Jennifer Ferretti and Sofia Leung will have a conversation around these questions. This conversation will help frame a learning activity that will engage the audience in re-envisioning library leadership.
Aesthetically Potent Environments: Conversation Theory, Gender, and Radical Collaborations in the Public Library
Leigh Hurwitz and Marie McGwier
Cyberneticist Gordon Pask's concept of "aesthetically potent environments" (the idea that a work of art is a system all its own) is a relevant framework for looking at the intersection of art and information in the public library. With a focus on describing and understanding the way meaning and knowledge are constructed, and how learning occurs, Pask's theories allow for a dynamic discussion of the relationships that enable knowing and learning. As Pask scholar, Paul Pangaro states, the premise of Pask's Conversation Theory is that "conversation and identity arise together," in the subjective observation of our participation in an interaction.
Panels 2
Deconstructing Service: Intersections of Identity
Joanna Gadsby, Veronica Arellano Douglas, Jennifer Brown, Sofia Leung
How do our own gender and racial identities impact others' expectations and perceptions of our service responsibilities? Many librarians feel service is at the core of the profession's identity, but in taking a critical lens to this value, we hope to highlight the experiences of women and people of color in libraries in order to work towards a more just and inclusive work environment. This panel discussion will deconstruct the ethos of service in academic libraries and examine how it combines with gender, race/ethnicity, and other intersecting identities to create, stagnate, or even destruct librarians' professional identities.
Collection Development as Emotional Labor: Trauma, Sentimentality, Solidarity, and Care
Leah Richardson, Dolsy Smith and Elizabeth Settoducato
Libraries, as an institution, have always had a role in maintaining structures of power and in the construction of gender. Our collections are a key site of this process. Instead of looking at collections as a monolithic and stable entity, the three presenters in this panel will explore collections and collecting practices as sites of violence, rupture, fantasy, erasure, desire, nostalgia, and radical possibility. This panel will be performative and challenging: our aim is not to prescribe, but to push us out of our cultural and professional containment in order to realize a more meaningful and radical potential for libraries.
Panels 3
Is It Better to Burn Out than to Fade Away? Reflections from New Librarians of Color
Nicky Andrews and Hannah Rainey
Please join us for an honest and critical discussion around juggling the nuances of identity and the changing demands of professionalism. We will discuss our experiences resisting burnout, racial battle fatigue, and self-doubt in our roles as new professionals and people who advocate for social responsibility. As new librarians and individuals whose identities include femininity, queerness, and mixed-race ethnicities; it is increasingly difficult to separate our personal experiences from the impacts of our professional interactions. The audience will engage in dialogue around maintaining a sense of self-worth amid toxic and problematic messaging both from within the profession, and externally.
(Re)productive Labor and Information Work
Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, Alanna Aiko Moore, Chiméne Tucker, Carrie Wade
This panel highlights the voices of four librarians who explore how information work intersects with reproductive expectations and experiences, which are no doubt shaped by gender, sexuality, and various other facets of identity. Topics to be addressed include queer parenting and reproductive information access, naming and categorization, and informal social media groups; the neoliberal casting of unsuccessful reproduction as "failure" and its intersections with information work; choosing to remain childless on the tenure track in academic librarianship, a female-majority profession; and the parallels between how librarians and those with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome are similarly desexualized, defeminized, and made somehow "irregular."
Lightning talks
Internalized Symbolic Annihilation: Emotional Labor in/of Archives
Joyce Gabiola
Based on focus groups and/or individual interviews with communities of color/LGBTQ+ communities in Southern California and Texas, the concept of internalized symbolic annihilation emerged to describe what happens when people with marginalized identities, particularly those who have experienced and held memories of traumatic events connected to their identities, contribute to the underrepresentation, trivialization or erasure of their voices in history and of the communities to which they belong. What does this mean for archivists/educators working with/teaching about marginalized groups? Do they consider the social environment and emotional labor of users that allow them to access archives?
My Biggest Problem Isn't Time Management: Trauma and Academic Ableism in the LIS Profession
Laura Schmidt
This paper takes an autoethnographic approach to mental health and disability within LIS programs and the surrounding profession. I argue that these institutions strip away the dignity of their students and workers when there is a repetitive need for disclosure. Discussions of accommodations often lead to forced intimacy with superiors and the need to adequately "perform" trauma. This paper investigates exploitive facets of current accommodation structures and potential solutions.
Let's Look at One Another: Ways of Seeing in the Library
Meaghan Moody
Oftentimes MLIS students supplement their study with internships and part-time work to gain the experiential knowledge many library programs lack. These positions as graduate students working in libraries are liminal in that they entail job duties and expectations embedded within a supported learning context. This paper explores what it means to break through one another's exterior in library contexts and how uniquely situated MLIS students are for this. Using feminist pedagogy and its ethic of care as a framework to understand the liminality of the MLIS student experience and discuss as an effect the opportunities to cultivate a genuine connection and exchange of ideas when working with undergraduates.
Storytelling as Knowledge Production: Reproductive health and Personal Testimony
Chloe Raub
Storytelling plays a critical role in both the production and consumption of information surrounding reproductive health. This paper explores recent tactics that have emerged as sites of knowledge production relating to individual experiences with abortion and pregnancy loss, including oral history, manifesto, and hashtag campaigns promoting personal testimony. Looking at the role of personal testimony in the construction of knowledge communities, this paper focuses on the work of several projects that create space for the intersection of self-expression and information gathering, and thus have the potential to serve as sites for healing and empowerment via collective storytelling.
Male Librarians and Access to Male Privilege
Julia Bullard and Dean Giustini
Men carry structural advantages into librarianship but this privilege is not equally available among male librarians. By examining the male librarian through the lens of feminist and queer theories of power and privilege, this presentation will explore the topic of masculinity and power in libraries. In particular, we hope to address the following questions: Who has access to male privilege? Is it exclusively male? How can male librarians productively support intersectional feminist ethics? and How can we educate men in library schools to understand their gendered privilege in the context of a feminized profession?
11,000 Wikipedia Articles Later: Art+Feminism at Five Years
Siân Evans
While Wikipedia editing in the field of librarianship is nothing new, Art+Feminism is by far the largest mobilization of librarians to edit articles on gender and sexuality. Since 2014, over 7,000 people at more than 500 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism's Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 11,000 articles on Wikipedia. This paper will explore lessons learned in five years of organizing Art+Feminism events, including the affective labor inherent to feminist organizing, especially as it relates to Wikipedia's community guideline to "be bold." Posters
Posters
The World of Women: Resources
Kellian Clink
If women are to learn about their sisters around the world, they are not going to find any information about them in the standard library tools such as the Europa World Year Book or the Statesman's Year-Book. For scholars who want to understand the lived experiences of women around the world, how many miles they walk to get water, their access to healthcare, ability to get an education, freedom of movement, and more, they need to go to authoritative websites, such as The WomanStats Project, the OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index, and The International Organization for Migration. This poster will outline the contents of valuable information resources for scholars looking to research women and describe her Custom Google Search Box, which allows students to quickly look through a number of websites together to find the valuable data and reports that shed light on the world of women.
Documenting the Role of Women in Labor History
Kristen Chinery and Elizabeth Clemens
Despite underrepresentation within traditionally male-dominated collections, research related to women workers grows exponentially each year. Undeniably, the histories of labor and women's rights are intertwined, as evidenced by subjects ranging from pay equity to the influence of labor unions on women's reproductive health legislation. However, reaching the material that documents that intertwined history is sometimes difficult. This poster will explore how the targeted use of image galleries, blog articles, digital collections, and collaborative social media can serve as a blueprint for improving both access and outreach for women workers and the issues in their working spaces.
The Politics of Ephemerality: Queer Analogies for Zine Collection Development Ethics
Andrew Wang
Though many libraries and archives have come to understand how zines are capable of diversifying their collections' authorship, subject matter, and physical forms, some authors of zines oppose the institutional acquisition of their work. This session will explore the ethics of zine collection development by paying particular attention to the implications of intentionally ephemeral materials, acknowledging both the benefits and dangers of institutional representation and preservation. Critical visual analyses of select passages of zines in conjunction with queer analogies will facilitate this exploration.