Challenging Surveillance in the Library and the United States
In the near two decades since the Real ID Act (2005) was passed by the U.S. Congress, countless youth have turned of age, received drivers’ licenses and/or state ID’s, and proceeded on with their lives. For a subsequent minority of the United States population, the process of applying for a drivers’ license was never easy.[1] Questions around gender identity, immigration status and permanent residency have disadvantaged already marginalized individuals, but come October 1st of this year, the implementation of the Real ID Act will heighten national security measures that will undoubtedly result in whole swaths of the population being geographically and civically restricted.[2] At the crux of the Real ID implementation is the topic of surveillance. In an age where computers, cell phones, and in-home devices are constantly listening and/or watching, it is no surprise that the United States federal government has chosen to enact a policy that will further capitalize on their prerogative to surveil Americans into submission.[3] Rather than being surprised, I recognize that surveillance is not uncommon in our interactions with the American public library system. Practicing a system of surveillance and implementing mechanisms to ensure practitioners and patrons are well behaved is a routine aspect of working in a library space. Thus, I make the claim that challenges to surveillance in the library serve as solutions to the practices the United States has enacted, and continues to enact, to reinforce conceptions of citizenship, conformity and homogeneity.
Breaking up my paper into two parts, one part being theoretical challenges to surveillance in the library and one part being material challenges to surveillance in the library, I propose that each set of challenges serve as a means for Library and Information Science students to think about the ways they can decolonize their own pedagogy within a library environment. Before discussing the solutions proposed to surveillance, I must address that those who are the most surveilled in society are people whose gender, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, age and class identities are at the margins. These are the folks who are most harmed by surveillance.
The theoretical solutions to surveillance in the library encompass ways of knowing and being that are fundamentally opposed to being in a space that is invested in the subjugation of library users. At the top of the list of solutions is the use of radical empathy in a library space to increase patron/practitioner engagement that produces an ongoing and long-lasting relationship and allows for patrons to do more than just ask reference questions.[4] As Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor state, their advocacy for radical empathy allows for a consciousness of care that demands an analysis of power within an information sharing relationship.[5] Pairing this approach with one of class consciousness, the importance of recognizing workplace decisions that are based around ones class, rather than who is capable and who is incapable, inevitably results in that consciousness being transferred onto patrons and colleagues.[6] In the past, these solutions have not necessarily been applied to challenging surveillance, but serve as clear paths to how each of us can challenge a surveillance model at a time when almost every aspect of our lives is being scrutinized by someone or something. In a library setting, there is little room to come to these solutions on ones own, particularly when constantly under the close scrutiny and supervision that is allotted to everyone in the space. The challenge to surveillance is initiated though when we are able to stop self-surveilling and expand the bounds of how we are intended to act in a library space.
Equally important and applicable are the material solutions that LIS scholars and practitioners have offered to counteract surveillance in a library space. Analyzing the role metrics plays in tracking and counting the number of individuals who are using the library space at any given time, surveillance is inherently connected to the neoliberal approach. Libraries across the country have adopted the, “economization of social welfare” model that has been distributed as a means of keeping libraries open to the public at the expense of patron privacy and control over who should and should not be using the library.[7] The push for a more business oriented model towards public goods and services reinforces the belief that in order to access certain services one must provide sufficient evidence that one is eligible for those services. Much like Dean Spades argument, there is a framework within the United States that says in order to have ‘care taking” services a person needs to be open to some level of surveillance.[8] By naming the ways in which the library has taken on news ways to surveil the population they are intended to serve, library practitioners are conscious of and working towards a more critical way of undoing the harm that these neoliberal techniques have enacted. One concrete example of this is in Samantha Kelly Hastings work with a library population, in which she actively sought out support from the community and developed appropriate library content for the population she was serving.[9] Rather than fall prey to a need surveil, Hastings become engaged and invested in the community resulting in a return from the community that required no increased surveillance.[10]
The surveillance that has always been in libraries, but in recent years has become heightened for a number of reasons is a threat to the libraries central purpose as a place of learning and knowledge production. When that purposes are subverted to be about profit and marginalization there is nothing to do but combat those norms and implement new ways of knowing and being. To except surveillance and feed into it is at the expense of a library system that is worth fighting for.
[1] Terry Nguyen, “Real IDs, explained,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/25/21147550/real-id-explained, last accessed March 10, 2020.
[2] Dean Spade, “Administrating Gender,” Normal Life (New York: South End Press, 2011), as excerpted in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013), 324- 350.
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, “Part Three: Discipline,” 135-228.
[4] Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy
in the Archives,” Archivaria, 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43.
[6] Christine Pawley, “Hegemony’s Handmaid? The Library and Information Studies Curriculum from a Class Perspective,” The Library Quarterly 68:2 (1998): 123-144.
[7] Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor, “Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies: An
Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2 (2019),
https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/122/50.
[8] Dean Spade, “Administrating Gender,” Normal Life (New York: South End Press, 2011), as excerpted in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013), 327.
[9] Samantha Kelly Hastings, “If Diversity is a Natural State, Why Don’t Our Libraries Mirror the Populations They Serve,” The Library Quarterly, Vol. 85, No.2, April 2015, pp. 133 – 138.
[10] Ibid.
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