Book Launch – Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create
Free Event
Join us May 8, 2025 at 7pm Eastern for virtual book launch for the new title Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create edited by Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski.
About the Event:
Join Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski for a celebration of Ways of Knowing: The Worlds Words Create. Confronted with library systems that hide or exclude them, library workers, scholars, and activists have developed their own. Listen together to select recordings from the three projects included in the book, the Chicano Thesaurus, Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. Series editor Violet Fox will offer contextualizing remarks.
About the Book:
Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. Ways of Knowing presents unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in libraries. The oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered.
The set of oral histories included in the volume document the Chicano Thesaurus, A Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. The authors recorded hour-long oral histories with two representatives from each project, documenting the origins of each thesaurus, the political and social context from which they emerged, and the processes involved in their development and implementation. Introductory essays provide a context for each thesaurus in the history of information and activism in libraries. The book and accompanying digital files constitute the first primary source of its kind and a unique contribution to the history of metadata work in libraries. Capturing these stories through sound recording offers new ways of understanding the field of critical cataloging and classification as we hear the joy, frustration, urgency, and seriousness of critical metadata work.