Irresponsibility and Its Role in The Library (or "The American Civil Bore")

“I think those of us who have been killjoys around family tables probably know this; how useful we are as containers of incivility and discord.”

Sara Ahmed 

from Living a Feminist Life

**Author’s note:  This post is written by a Filipinx-American veteran of the United States Air Force whose experience of the American education system is formed by nine years of Catholic school.  The following post contains themes of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism that fans of theAmerican status quo may find objectionable and, possibly, upsetting.  Responses to these ideas can be sent to lawrencecm@ucla.edu or given in person to the author, who can often be found in Long Beach, California’s north side.  In either case, the author thanks these readers in advance for the opportunity to expand their worldview.

            American life under a Trump administration has seen increased calls for civil discourse, “the free and respectful exchange of ideas,” in a rising tide of incivility.  Susan Herbst has referred to civility as “the fundamental tone and practice of democracy,” which highlights the seemingly benign nature of civil behavior and how it is taken for granted as a democratic, social norm.  The library, as an American institution, often conflates civility with an idealized standard of behavior that applies to its workers and its users, as seen in a recently published book selling on the American Library Association’s online bookstore titled, “Cultivating Civility:Practical Ways to Improve a Dysfunctional Library.”  The connotations associated with the concept of being “civil,” however, are rarely called into question.  If American librarianship wishes to align itself with the ALA’s Core Values of “Diversity” and “Social Responsibility,” the profession would be wise to consider the settler colonial, white supremacist tradition of maintaining “civility” by silencing and enacting violence upon the United States’ marginalized communities.

            In exploring the concept of civility, it is important to note the power relations implied in this behavioral standard and how this standard functions as a “mechanic of power,” enabling authority to “have a hold over others’ bodies…so that they may operate as one wishes.”¹  As a product of capitalist, settler colonial, and white supremacist practices and traditions, the United States as it stands today is the result of Manifest Destiny, the nationalist ideology that deluded 19^th-century American political leaders into thinking they were ordained by divine forces (usually a white, male god) to expand and spread “civilization” across North America by displacing and slaughtering the people who were already living here.  Justifying this massacre required dehumanizing large populations of Indigenous Americans and Mexicans by declaring them to be “savage” and, *gasp* uncivilized (This same belief also fueled the impulse to subjugate Africans and drag them to the colonies so that they could provide free labor).  Those who were not eradicated in the westward expansion were forcibly removed from the land and thrown into boarding schools run by missionaries paid by the American government to “civilize” them. This usually meant having Anglo-Saxon ways of speaking and being imposed on them by punishing Indigenous people for attempting to sustain traditional cultural practices and forcing them to practice Christianity.

            …and everyone lived civilly ever after.

            …that is, until the 1960s, where incivility again reared its ugly head and threatened American civilization.  African Americans in the southern United States had organized a non-violent movement to call attention to the cruel and unjust treatment that deprived them of access to the same benefits of citizenship as white Americans.  They had coordinated a series of non-violent actions, such as boycotts, protests, and marches in order to have their demands heard.  A Gallup poll was taken in 1961 to determine what white Americans thought about these protests.  To the question of whether or not they approved of what these activists were doing, 61% of them did not.  Over half of those responded believed that the “‘sit-ins’… and other demonstrations” hurt African Americans’ chances “of being integrated in the South."  In other words, even when African Americans adhered to non-violence to challenge the American status quo (i.e., white supremacy maintained through legitimized racial segregation laws that Adolf Hitler got starry-eyed over.  Pun begrudgingly intended.), disapproval of these methods highlights how white Americans remain arbiters of what forms of dialogue are deemed “acceptable.”

            In writing about civility, NPR correspondent and producer of the “Code Switch” podcast, Karen Grigsby Bates highlights the long American tradition of dismissing similar calls for justice “as inherently uncivil by the people who want to maintain [the status quo].” She looks at how Bill Clinton’s chastising of Black Lives Matter protesters, the anger directed at activists calling attention to the AIDS epidemic, and the National Football League’s fan base’s response to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem all follow this theme of vocal marginalized communities failing to live up to standards of civility.

This tradition points to asymmetrical power relations at play here, specifically, “colonized/colonizer,” “master/slave,” and/or “’White’/racialized Other.”  Calls for civility have historically been made to appease those in power so as to not feel discomfort from marginalized peoples’ expressions of experiencing injustice.  In effect, the goalposts for what is deemed “civil” are never fixed and those who challenge the status quo are often denounced for not speaking to those in power on their terms, if such a thing is even possible (shouts to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

Given this context, positioning the library as a space for “civil discourse” alienates people from communities who have had less-than-ideal experiences with different manifestations of “civility.”  Marking the library as “civil” dredges up the skeletons of early American boarding schools notorious for subjecting Indigenous children to corporal punishment.  If making the library a more civil place is what the ALA considers a “contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society,” then perhaps ditching the ALA’s Core Value of “Social Responsibility” may best serve librarians who wish to cultivate and promote diverse, inclusive libraries that serve all the members of their communities.

“Control the terminology and you can control the perception.”

Yawo Brown

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1 Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault^↩

Decolonizing and Indigenizing LIS | Tianji Jiang

European colonization resulted in new worldviews and distant civilizations coming into contact, but also brought the enslavement, exploitation, military conquest and economic dominance by Europe to indigenous populations. As colonialists in the new world, the Europeans had little respect for the indigenous population and their society and culture; on the contrary, they often regarded it as barbarous, uncultured and sometimes evil. This annihilation extends to our academic world. Linda Tuhiwai Smith noted that any work by indigenous peoples can only be identified as “legitimate” and “real” knowledge if it fits within a Western framework and has value for the dominant non-indigenous culture.[1]

The rights of indigenous people and intellectual property was often ignored in western research. In addition, the western world collected a lot of artifacts of indigenous culture and brought them home in the name of preservation and research, keeping indigenous people away from their historical property and memory.[2] Once I visited the natural history museum of Los Angeles. I noticed there were four jade vases in the collection, which were brought by a British solider from the Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War as spoils. As a Chinese person familiar with our history, I know the jade vases should have high research value, but they are only considered as beautiful treasures from the East in the Los Angeles museum. Linda Tuhiwai Smith has put forward much criticism against this lack of respect and equality in the academic world. In her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, she noted that “The word itself, 'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.” [3] Although she may sound a little extreme, it reveals how serious the inequality and prejudice to the indigenous are in our academic world. Furthermore, she also called on Indigenous people to recuperate research for indigenous people.

To understand decolonization and indigenization better, let’s first look at colonialism in depth. Colonialism can be divided into different types by the purposes of colonizers: settler colonialism and exploitation colonialism. Exploitation colonialism is the national economic policy of conquering a country to exploit its population as labor and its natural resources as raw material[4], such as the British Raj and French Indochina. Settler colonialism, in contrast, is a form of colonialism which seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers, such as in the United States, Canada and Australia.

During the 20^th century, we witnessed a storm of political decolonization against exploitation colonialism across the world. This trend of decolonization also stretches to the academic world, and inspires decolonization and indigenization movements in settler colonialism areas. Many indigenous people are willing to know their past, the alternative traditions advocated by their ancestors, the specific experiences of their communities, and the world that surrounds them.[5] Inspired by the movement, some indigenous scholars, such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Simon J. Ortiz (a Puebloan scholar of the Acoma Pueblo tribe), returned to their communities, recuperate researches for indigenous people and did research in indigenous context. They voice resistance to the previous western researches imposed on them and pose their own questions and agendas. They do research in order to solve the indigenous problems, retrieve the indigenous history, spread the indigenous culture and serve the indigenous people.

Furthermore, the stand against colonization also aroused sympathy and reflection of the western world, especially in those settler colonies. In the past tens of years, the Maoris, the Aboriginal people, the American Indians, the Inuit and many other victims of settler colonialism were recognized as the indigenous people of their areas, and even in some cases received apologies for historic violence and injustices they have suffered. Today, some attention and support from the society of settler colonies are given to indigenous concerns, indigenous practices and indigenous participation as researchers and research subjects. [6] On the other side, decolonization and indigenization in research doesn’t mean all the non-indigenous researchers should be precluded from participating in research that has an indigenous orientation. In fact, non-indigenous scholars are also realizing that indigenous questions can only be solved properly in indigenous context, and the indigenous people and culture should be treated with total equality and full respect in any research. Those non-indigenous researchers shouldn’t be precluded from participating in indigenous researches

In the reading materials for this week, we have learned about several LIS practices following decolonization and indigenization, including The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project[7], Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Grants to Indian Tribes[8], and the Fourth Museum of the National Museum of the American Indian[9]. In these projects, LIS professionals have achieved successful preservation and organization of the American Indian items with careful study of the indigenous language and knowledge system. Some indigenous people also led these projects to figure out problems relevant to indigenous concepts and knowledge.

As LIS professionals or researchers, when trying to organize indigenous knowledge, we must be willing to partner with native and indigenous communities and listen to the stories that give meaning to the naming, describing, and organization of indigenous items. Respect for indigenous people, indigenous holism, political realities, long-term relationship-building, and patience with timelines are essential. Willingness to study native systems of knowledge in indigenous contexts, to write about them, and to design experimental approaches is integral to shaping the theory that will inform practice. [10] Every indigenous tribe, no matter their population, history or current status, should enjoy the same rights in preserving, organizing and retrieving their documents. Last but not least, the indigenous communities should be encouraged to have their own LIS specialist and even facilities, because the indigenous need for document preservation is best known by the indigenous people themselves.

Finally, let’s go back to the previous topic and rethink what the words “decolonization” and “indigenization” really mean. Every nation or indigenous group should have their own right in choosing their way of living their life, preserving their documents and passing on their culture. For westerners, they should fully respect this right and never interfere with the choices of indigenous people. In the name of decolonization or indigenization, as an outsider of the indigenous culture, what we should do is only to respect, to support and leave the indigenous to make their own choices.

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[1] Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd, 214-217

[2] Krebs, A. B. (2012). Native America’s twenty-first-century right to know. Archival Science, 12(2), 173-190.

[3] Smith, L. T. (2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd, 1-2

[4] Gilmartin, Mary (April 2009). Key Concepts in Political Geography. UK: SAGE Publications Ltd. p. 116.

[5] Deloria, V. (1978). The Right to Know: A Paper. Office of Library and Information Services, US Department of the Interior.

[6] Smith, L. T. (2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd, 101-122

[7] Littletree, S., & Metoyer, C. A. (2015). Knowledge organization from an indigenous perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot thesaurus of American Indian terminology project. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53(5-6), 640-657.

[8] Krebs, A. B. (2012). Native America’s twenty-first-century right to know. Archival Science, 12(2), 173-190.

[9] Krebs, A. B. (2012). Native America’s twenty-first-century right to know. Archival Science, 12(2), 173-190.

[10] Duarte, M. E., & Belarde-Lewis, M. (2015). Imagining: creating spaces for indigenous ontologies. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53(5-6), 677-702.

The Archive as Master’s House: Appraising a “House of Difference”

Etymology for “archive”

From Greek archeion government house,
 archē rule, government

“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game,
but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[1]

Audre Lorde boldly declared these words in her influential essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Using the master’s house as a frame, how can we appraise a “house of difference”? This reflection explores “the master’s house” and “the mater’s tools” through archival studies and black studies. I discuss the underlying desires to appraise records in archives, noting such as the master’s archival tool that constructs the master’s archival house. This equation purports the archive as a captive space for bodies of knowledge that may have never desired to enter into its domain. Yet, when we relinquish the desire to hold captive, which arguably begins with appraisal, then what other bodies of knowledge surface outside the master’s archival house? In order to conceive of a “house of difference,” we need to reappraise our desires beyond the master’s archival tool.

In “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal” Michelle Caswell provides a feminist appraisal strategy that begins to dismantle the master’s archival house. She asserts that “Feminist standpoint appraisal inverts dominant appraisal hierarchies that value records created by those in power to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of records created by the oppressed to document and resist their oppression and imagine liberation.”[2] This mode of appraisal desires to counter the “view from nowhere” by positioning other bodies of knowledge from the margins of society. Caswell notes that “feminist standpoint appraisal explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created and preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”[3] Through this perspective our appraisal vantage point is inverted from the hierarchal to the horizontal, yet still remains as one of the master’s archival tools that desires to hold captive bodies of knowledge in the master’s archival house.  

Simone Browne directs our attention to the horizonal view of bodies held captive in the archive of transatlantic slavery in Dark Matters. Tracing the historical formations of surveillance, she discusses the spatial arrangement of bodies aboard the Brooks slave ship, which “points to an alternative archive from which to understand the hold of both disciplinary and sovereign power on black life.”[4] Here Browne invites us to consider “How might the view from ‘under the hatches’ be another view from which to conceptualize the operation of power?”[5] This vantage point centers the bodies of black knowledge production, displacing the conquering  “view from nowhere” that pervades appraisal in the master’s archival house. The view from “under the hatches” challenges us to look beyond our appraisal desire to hold captive as to not replicate preexisting structural frameworks that are reproduced through the master’s archive tools. Instead we must conjure other archival imaginaries in order to reappraise a “house of difference.”  

In “Venus In Two Acts” Saidiya Hartman writes about the recorded accounts of enslaved bodies held captive in the master’s archival house. Central to her “recombinant narrative” is Venus—a symbolic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world. Rather than resorting to the archive, which has inflicted violence upon Venus for centuries, Hartman prefers to “write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised [her] strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements.”[6] Here she moves us away from historical recuperation, towards emancipation from the master’s archival house. To do so, Hartman employs “critical fabulation” as a method that combines fictional writing and critical theory to evoke other bodies of knowledge about Venus beyond the historical record. She goes against “the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacts the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.”[7] Hartman guides us towards a reappraisal strategy that is non-reliant on the master’s archival tool and master’s house by moving away from the desire to hold captive in the archive.

Throughout this reflection the authors provide us with other tools for appraising a “house of difference.” In shifting our appraisal desires, we need to move beyond the captive archive that privileges the holding of certain tangible bodies of knowledges, while excluding other ways of knowing, remembering, and preserving our pasts. Not all forms of knowledge depend on the structural framings of the archive for survival, but rather persist through other historical modes to be kept alive. Returning to Lorde, she reminds us that “we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”[8]

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[1] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Crossing Press, 2007): 12.

[2] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020): 6.

[3] Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints,” 7.

[4] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Duke University Press, 2015): 38.

[5] Browne, Dark Matters, 32.

[6] Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 9.

[7] Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," 11.

[8] Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Crossing Press, 2007): 123.

Venus: A Proxy or a Portrait? | Brian Justie

Information Studies—nebulous as it may be topically and methodologically—is centered around the production and organization, classification and contestation, maintenance and preservation of representations. These representations might take the form of artifacts, texts, images, or data, and these forms might be gathered together under the material auspices of a museum, library, archive, or database. In each case, political implications abound and a mandate for critique follows in step. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Saidiya Hartman both trace the contours of the politics of representation in their work, offering overlapping but ultimately divergent tactics for those invested in the critical inquiry of information.

Spivak begins by distancing herself from the reigning poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, both of whom, in their own ways, sought to overcome the philosophical burden of representation altogether. As a deconstructionist, Spivak’s mode of postcolonial critique is premised on piercing the veil of language in order to reveal its complicity, its non-neutrality. To this end, she excavates the uncertain etymology of the word “representation” in order to show that what Deleuze, and to a lesser extent Foucault, had declared dead, is anything but. Rather, Spivak shows how representation simultaneously functions as a “speaking for” and a “re-presentation of,” wherein the former is typically understood politically and the latter aesthetically—the “contrast, say, between a proxy and a portrait” (29). A portrait represents its referent through the ascription of likeness in a different medium—perhaps pigments, pixels, or prose. A proxy, on the other hand, represents its referent through substitution or surrogacy, standing in for that which is absent—a parent for a minor, an elected for the electorate, or a rogue server sidestepping network restrictions. In both modalities, Spivak discovers a latent violence. Portraits reduce, distort, and caricature; proxies control, manipulate, and betray. 

The liberal west, on its self-appointed rescue mission to “save brown women from brown men,” participates in the ongoing production and reification of both. A menacing portrait of “brown men” necessitates intervention by proxy: “white men” called to stand in for hapless, helpless “brown women.” And if the “brown women” are to reject this heroic benevolence, the only sensible conclusion to draw is that “the women wanted to die” (33). Spivak thus reveals the alienating, colonial, and often gendered logic undergirding “development” discourse, a model which centers the west as savior and the rest as in need of saving. Accordingly, Spivak’s provocative title—“Can the subaltern speak?”—is one carefully constructed to foreclose the possibility of answering it in the affirmative. The subaltern cannot speak, lest they forgo all autonomy. Or, put differently, the subaltern might attempt to speak, but what they have to say will only be understood as coherent if it accords with the imposed frameworks of representation supplied by the west. To speak and to be understood, in other words, is to render oneself legible to those in power. 

But Spivak’s framing of this issue borders on tautology. She argues that the subaltern is a group “whose identity is its difference,” a group who can only be understood in relation to what it is not. The subaltern, then, is only useful as a descriptive category if the primacy of an other—in this case, the west—has been presupposed. As such, the subaltern definitionally cannot speak, for to “speak” would be to abandon the differences and particularities of subaltern subjectivity. And since the subaltern’s identity is fully coincident with these differences, were the subaltern to “speak,” in Spivak’s terms, they would no longer be subaltern. Speech, according to Spivak, and echoing Derrida, is always already a fraught enterprise, always already caught up in the structures and strictures of domination. Speech, therefore, presumes a commensurability otherwise at odds with the colonial impulse to reify difference. The ongoing project to give the subaltern a voice—“the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade”—is subsequently denied its emancipatory weight (28). We might productively reframe Spivak’s question, displacing the onus on the colonized to make themselves heard, instead demanding that the colonizer redress its violent aspirations of universalism: Can the west listen… understand… ignore?

Spivak’s polemical account of representation appears in a monograph bearing the subtitle Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman likewise writes against the grain of representational politics, however she takes as her starting point not a “vanishing present,” but a long-since vanished past. Where Spivak’s project pivots on the prospect of being able to hear that which might be said differently, Hartman’s is predicated on the impossible task of “listening for the unsaid” (3). To my mind, this distinction is critical, insofar as Hartman finds a “productive tension” in the dialectical mismatch of impossibility and necessity, while this same juncture proves stultifying for Spivak. The proxy and the portrait, for Spivak, undoubtedly traffic in those same impossibilities and necessities, but exclusively at the expense of those whom they purport to represent. Spivak’s deconstructive exercise, therefore, reveals the faulty foundations upon which these representations are able to manifest and take on meaning, but then promptly leaves the reader, the critic, the activist, left to wonder about what more might be done. “If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal,” writes Hartman of this all-too-common paralysis of critique, “then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptors from this archive?” (7)

Importantly, Hartman’s suggestion is to fabulate, to narrativize, and to conjure something altogether new from the archive, not to impose something on, or produce something for, or apply something to the archive. Each of these latter approaches run the risk of reproducing the savior mentality Spivak critiques by imposing a system of commensurability onto archive's contents—forcing it to “speak” a language that “we” already understand. Hartman’s project is exemplary inasmuch as it rejects this premise outright, seeking instead to inhabit the immanent gaps, silences, and omissions of an archive, rather than erase them or paper over them. Whereas Spivak’s critique of representation amounts to an unveiling of its futility, Hartman understands the power of cultivating new representations in spite of this fact. “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair”—sentiments which emanate from the pages of Spivak—“must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (13). Spivak’s critical deconstruction, therefore, begins and ends by underscoring what representations cannot do—proxies and portraits are only ever approximations or degradations of something more real, something more originary. Hartman’s critical fabulation, on the other hand, acknowledges this insight to be not only banal but a foreclosure of futurity, while she nevertheless remains invested in what representations can do, if and when we embrace the generative tools of prognostication and projection.

—

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” As reprinted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft et al, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995, 28-37. 

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 1-14.

Feminist Pedagogy for Transformative Library Instruction

The concern with the way library instruction is being provided is considered to be a “fairly recent phenomenon” within the field of academic librarianship.¹ Still popularly delivered in the form of a one shot or a series of embedded instruction sessions, many librarians are beginning to reexamine the ways that they relay information to students and the responsibility that they hold when it comes to promoting critical thinking skills. Critlib (critical librarianship), a movement of library workers dedicated to incorporating social justice principles into library work, aims to instill critical thinking skills by implementing critical pedagogy and having discussions about white supremacy, capitalism, and a range of structural inequalities.² Feminist pedagogy, a form of critical pedagogy, has failed to gain the same amount of attention. Still, I argue that feminist pedagogy should be applied to library instruction in order to not only enable students to think critically about structural inequality but to make them aware of the different ways oppression and marginalization exist in order to equip them to navigate the world and create social change.


In Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, Maria Accardi discusses the importance of feminist pedagogy, the ways that it can be applied to library instruction, and the lasting positive impact it has on students. Attempting to define feminist pedagogy, Accardi writes, “Feminist pedagogy is broadly concerned with social justice and sees education as a site for social change and transformation, exposing and ending oppression against women and all other kinds of marginalization: racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and so on.”³ When implemented, the library is transformed into a place where these difficult conversations can take place. By touching on these kinds of topics in the classroom, students are able to reflect individually as well as collaboratively, creating a communal environment where they can actively engage with topics and begin to think critically.⁴ Fostering a community of this kind means that students not only begin to feel comfortable speaking about their own experiences and thoughts but begin to become aware of what is going on around them. In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde extensively discusses the importance of community and argues, “community must not mean a shedding of our difference, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”⁵ By having the opportunity to talk about and listen to different experiences, students gain different perspectives about the topics discussed. They are better prepared to not only analyze their position within academia and society but that of others who do not share the same experiences as them. Often feeling invisible within higher education as they may not immediately relate to their peers, especially if they belong to a marginalized population, a communal environment presents students with the opportunity to make themselves visible to those in the classroom.


Practicing feminist pedagogy in the library classroom is argued to be easier said than done by some as challenges can arise. Accardi notes, “these challenges include students not recognizing feminist teaching as actual teaching, because the teacher does not assert ultimate authority.”⁶ While this might be true, librarians practicing feminist pedagogy must remember that students are accustomed to the banking method of learning. Accardi adds, “ banking methods of teaching and learning involve teaching strategies such as lectures, where learners passively take in knowledge and regurgitate it without processing it or contributing their own knowledge or perspective.”⁷ Students failing to engage with a library instruction session based on feminist pedagogy can be expected to react disapprovingly as they have been accustomed to taking in information and not necessarily engaging with it. Being in a classroom where students find themselves having to think on their own and drawing on personal experiences can be unusual at first but in the end, is a transformative and rewarding experience for students as they begin to realize that they already possess valuable knowledge and experiences.


Practicing feminist pedagogy in the library classroom ultimately means that students are participating in the production of knowledge.⁸ To do so, librarians must flip the classroom and create an environment where questions are posed and collaboration is taking place through engaging activities that encourage students to work together, voice their ideas, and even demonstrate learned hands on skills to the class. This can be done so at various parts of a library instruction session by asking which boolean operators generated the most results, for example, or asking what alternative keywords were brainstormed to enter into a database. This does not mean that librarians must remove all of their original instruction content or create entirely new content. Instead, librarians should be rethinking the ways that they can make their instruction sessions more interactive and participatory by shaping what they already have and building on it. This way, students are more engaged and can begin to see themselves as capable researchers with the capacity to analyze and create information.


Library instruction, provided with a feminist pedagogical approach, is capable of transforming the lives of students. Believed to be most impactful early on in higher education, Ladenson argues, “working with first-year students is especially critical, as such students need to develop their skills early on in order to have success during their college years and beyond.”⁹ By providing library instruction with a feminist pedagogical approach, students are not only encouraged to think critically but to examine their position in academia and society. Providing library instruction to first year students in this way exposes them early on to not only structural inequality, oppression, and marginalization, but makes them personally engage with the experiences of other students. This helps humanize research, making it approachable, less intimidating, and a tool for self expression and social change. This is both empowering and reassuring to students as they are able navigate higher education knowing that their unique experiences matter and that they have the tools to create a society where they are no longer invisible.

1 Maria Accardi,  Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013), 26.

2 “about/join the discussion,” critlib, accessed February 13, 2020, http://critlib.org/about/.

3 Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, 28.

4 Sharon Ladenson, “Paradigm Shift: Utilizing Critical Feminist Pedagogy in Library Instruction,” in Critical   

   Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (Duluth: Library Juice Press, 2009), 107.

5 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and   

   Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

6 Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, 31.

7 Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, 32.

8 Ladenson, “Paradigm Shift,” 106.

9 Ladenson, “Paradigm Shift,” 108.

Accardi, Maria. Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction. Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013.

“about/join the discussion.” critlib. Accessed February 13, 2020. http://critlib.org/about/.

Ladenson, Sharon. “Paradigm Shift: Utilizing Critical Feminist Pedagogy in Library Instruction.” In Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, 105-112. Duluth: Library Juice Press, 2009.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, 110-113. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Personal/Political Epistemologies

Reflecting on how feminist epistemologies could influence our work as librarians and archivists brought me back to a particularly resonant moment, when I first met my friend and feminist scholar-activist Dawn. We exchanged our collections of anarcha-feminist pamphlets from the 1970s and 80s like precious relics of a bygone era; these documents felt important because they revealed the possibility of a vibrant and revolutionary feminist movement we did not see around us. Such documents hold a particular affective power for us, as records of everyday women’s lives and the grassroots movements they built form only a small portion of the “archival sliver” and can be difficult to trace.1 Standpoint epistemologies are both a methodology and a political strategy, that might serve to hold up documents and information, like the movement pamphlets I collect, which could inspire feminist struggle.

Sandra G. Harding defines feminist standpoint epistemologies as those which organically stem from the lives, experiences, and struggles of oppressed subjects, position knowledge as inherently socially situated, and privilege the knowledge of the oppressed. Presumably universal positions usually represent white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied viewpoints.2 Knowledge created by or alongside oppressed communities expands our understanding. In her germinal speech Audre Lorde argues that her marginal position, in society and the feminist movement, as a Black lesbian “forged in the crucibles of difference” enables her to envision liberation and methods to achieve “genuine change.”3 Thus, I argue that by centering the knowledge of oppressed communities and embracing difference instead of hiding hegemonic perspectives behind a veneer of objectivity, feminist standpoint epistemology imbues archives and libraries with the potential for information to become a tool for liberation.

Caswell’s theory of feminist standpoint appraisal corrects the over representation of white male subjects in archives by assigning higher value to the records and histories of oppressed communities.4 Such communities were devalued by traditional theories of appraisal which served to legitimate state power. She provides a genealogy of these theories from Jenkinson and Schellenberg to the more egalitarian Cook and Harris and analyzes each from below, imagining how women, colonized, and working class subjects, and those who occupied more than one of these positions, were erased from the historical record.5 Instead of seeing the positionality of the archivist as an obstacle to neutrality, she argues acknowledging it is the first step towards justice.6

Yet, the principle that anyone can take the perspective of the oppressed can also subsume difference and complicity under another false universal perspective. Caswell follows Black feminist theorists like Patricia Hill Collins by acknowledging that we can embody the standpoint of both oppressed and oppressor, particularly as white women, and must interrogate and theorize from the position of our own complicity, instead of misappropriating the standpoint of the oppressed. 7 Harding admits that feminist movements have a long historical association with racist, bourgeois, heteronormative, and otherwise discriminatory projects.8 As Lorde pointed out, white women must interrogate their own complicity, as they attend feminist conferences while impoverished women of color perform their housework and care for their children. We must answer her still urgent question: “What is the theory behind racist feminism?”9 Caswell provides questions that archivists might use to interrogate these power relations, such as “Is my standpoint one of oppressed or oppressor in relation to this collection and the community from which it emerges?” While asking such questions is a first step, Caswell also argues that the profession must financially and materially reward the visionary work of community-based archives led by people of color.10

Feminist pedagogy also frames personal experiences as knowledge, bringing the emphasis on the personal as political into the classroom. Alongside an emphasis on cooperative learning and critical thinking, a respect for personal experience and affect as knowledge allows students and teachers to build more equitable relationships and learn from each other. Teachers traditionally emphasized this approach in fields like Gender and Sexuality Studies and Ethnic Studies where they could use texts from authors like Angela Davis or Gloria E. Anzaldúa to spark discussion and challenge the hegemonic canon.11 Feminist teachers and library instructors like Maria Accardi and Sharon Ladenson apply this approach to the less obviously political spaces of the library instruction session and the reference desk. Accardi mirrors Caswell’s insistence on her personal stake in archival appraisal by beginning her discussion of feminist pedagogy with personal stories which demonstrate how she brought the insights gained from her positionality as a queer woman to the classroom and the reference desk. Accardi recalls the moment she came out as homosexual to a student whose research question about articles “proving” televised representations of homosexuality had negative consequences was blatantly homophobic. She saw “my coming out to him as a feminist act.”12 It honored her own deeply political position and affective response of shock and distress, instead of “objective” facts.

All of these theorists invoke the political implications of standpoint epistemologies. They select records or even keywords for instruction sessions based on their potential to spark feminist movements and the radical imagination. Caswell argues that “Feminist standpoint appraisal does not start and stop with more representative archives, but explicitly asks about the liberatory uses of such collections.”13 While factoring use into appraisal decisions may contradict the canon of appraisal theory, community archives like the ones Caswell mentions may already be committed to such practices, given their explicitly political missions. Similarly, autonomous community based libraries like the Feminist Library on Wheels and the Free Black Women’s Library seek to use their collections to build community and feminist movements. Since 2015, the Free Black Women’s Library has been dedicated to promoting the writings and perspectives of Black women. Volunteer Cara Elie Taylor told the LA Times that the collective’s mission reaches beyond “reading stories about Black women,” to attempt to “further the stories of Black women living now and help them achieve whatever exposure they’re looking for.”14 These approaches take the first step towards envisioning knowledge and memory from the perspectives of marginalized communities, and with it a more equitable and just future.

1 Harris, “The Archival Sliver,” 64; Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue,” 18.
2 Harding, ​The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader,​ 3.
3 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 2.
4 Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 7.
5 Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 15–22. 
6 “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 7.
7 “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 25,
8 Harding, ​The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader,​ 9.
9 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 2.
10 “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 28–29.
11 Ladenson, “Paradigm Shift: Utilizing Critical Feminist Pedagogy in Library Instruction,” 106–7.
12 Accardi, ​Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction​, 12.
13 Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies,” 29.

14 Recinos, “The Free Black Women’s Library Amplifies the Voices of Female African American Writers.”

Accardi, Maria T. ​Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction.​ Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2013. http://gse.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/litwin/379rsb.
Caswell, Michelle. “Dusting for Fingerprints | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies.” Accessed February 10, 2020.
https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/113.
Cook, Terry. “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future
Paradigm Shift.” ​Archivaria​ 43 (1997).
Harding, Sandra G. ​The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political
Controversies​. Psychology Press, 2004.
Harris, Verne. “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa.” ​Archival
Science​ 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435631. Ladenson, Sharon. “Paradigm Shift: Utilizing Critical Feminist Pedagogy in Library Instruction.”
In ​Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods.​, by Maria Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier. Duluth: Library Juice Press, 2014. http://qut.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=3328227.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In ​Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.​ Crossing Press,2007.
Recinos, Eva. “The Free Black Women’s Library Amplifies the Voices of Female African American Writers.” Los Angeles Times (Online), June 28, 2019. https://search.proquest.com/docview/2249046170?accountid=14512.