"Looking side-eye at 'everyone'": how public library discourse and policies exclude unhoused neighbors | Danielle Fox

 If you [current and aspiring LIS practitioners at UCLA] want to do a revolutionary thing, start listening to the voices of people who are unhoused — Theo Henderson 

Theo Henderson, who hosts the podcast and YouTube series “We the Unhoused” and is the 2022 Activist-in-Residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy,[1] told me that when he goes to the public library he always looks side-eye at the signs reading “Libraries are for everyone.” Rules barring bulky items, like luggage and carts, prevent many unhoused folks from making it past the front door of the library. The same goes for hygiene policies.[2] Henderson said, during inclement weather, one of the biggest challenges for people who are unhoused is staying dry. “If you have an odoriferous presentation around you, the library refuses to understand that, and utilizes that to weaponize not only security, but lately there are police officers that go into libraries, too, and they have harassed unhoused people, too, so it’s both.”[3]

I spoke with Henderson and my unhoused neighbors Demon and JT for a previous project, looking at how carceral practices in public libraries impact people who are unhoused in L.A. and their visions for more accessible and anti-oppressive library spaces. I aim to return to those conversations and explore their relevance in the context of reading chapters from Simone Brown’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and from Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. I also want to acknowledge that as a white, middle-class, housed person, and as an organizer with Street Watch LA, I am holding myself accountable to centering the experiences, concerns, and visions of unhoused neighbors throughout this post, and want to emphasize that reimagining how public libraries can be spaces for mutual aid, affirmation, and connection, requires the expertise and leadership of unhoused neighbors. 

Considering Michel Foucault’s theory on creating disciplined bodies, I’d ask: what does it mean to exist efficiently in a public library space, and what implications does that have for people who are unhoused? What discipline and infrastructure is in place to maintain that efficiency? How does that ultimately develop discourse that shapes the way ‘everyone’ gets classified in public library spaces? These are huge questions that I hope to merely begin to explore in this post, but I’d argue that most often, public libraries prioritize information services for housed people over the priorities and needs of unhoused people, which in turn produces carceral environments for unhoused neighbors in what gets designated as “public” space. I also aim to explore these questions within the context of acknowledging how public libraries are critical resources for people who are unhoused and have the potential to play a role in hyper-local mutual aid networks. I’ll wrap up with imaginings from my neighbors about how library services and practices could foster anti-oppressive, accessible, and joyful spaces for unhoused communities, which continue to guide me in my scholarship, aspirations to work as a public librarian, and as a housing justice organizer in my community. 

What does it look like to exist efficiently in a public library space, and what implications does that have for people who are unhoused?

In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, I found Foucault’s section on “docile bodies'' and “the art of distribution” helpful to explore how patrons are “located,” “supervised,” “assessed,” and “judged” in public libraries to maximize its efficiency as a space.[4] He argues “the division of time” is “a question of constituting a totally useful time,” which made me reflect: how does the conception of “useful time” shape what activities get labeled as ‘appropriate’ in public libraries?[5] Most public library mission statements emphasize their role in providing educational services and free, easily accessible information. Based on conversations I’ve had with my unhoused neighbors, the top reasons I’ve heard people list for using the library have more to do with the library as shelter and as public space than they do with accessing informational and educational services. For example, my neighbors Demon and JT said their local public library is a critical resource for them because there are outlets to charge their phones, bathrooms for personal hygiene, and overall the library is a place of shelter during winter rains and 100-degree summer heat.[6] Henderson also highlighted the library as a space for work. As a former educator, he relied on the library as a place where he could tutor. With that said, if library missions statements emphasize information exchange as the space’s priority, where does that leave folks who are unhoused who might have different priorities and needs when utilizing the space? Foucault also names the construction of efficient distributions of time as a way systems/infrastructures can “capitalize the time of individuals.”[7] At public libraries, many services fall into brackets of time (i.e. story times, tutoring, events, time limits on computer usage, exchanging books). My neighbors said that they’ve faced open hostility when trying to spend full days at the library to take shelter from the rain, and have been told that if they’re not actively using materials or services at the library, they should leave. This discussion also cannot be parted from the rise of neoliberalism and how libraries increasingly must quantify their value in economic terms, putting the library’s public values in competition with market values, and consequently reconfiguring the public library as a place that prioritizes the private interests of hegemonic culture (i.e. white, male, cis, straight, abled, English-speaking, middle-class, US citizen) over the wellbeing of the public as a whole.[8] As a result, many libraries have expanded their dependence on policing and carceral practices to protect those interests.[9] 

What discipline and infrastructure is in place to maintain an "efficient" public library space? 

While library placards say that they’re there to serve “everyone,” Demon, Henderson, and JT said the presence of security and police, metal detectors, and carceral library rules have made them feel otherwise. I keep returning to Simone Browne’s discussion of Didier Bigo’s banopticon framework when reflecting on how whiteness defines who gets to exist freely and effortlessly in public library spaces, “where those whom the state abandons are often banned on a racialization of risk” and how the anticipation of that risk perpetuates an expansion of security and surveillance.[10] The large majority of people who are unhoused in L.A. are Black and Latinx; around 34% of Black people make up LA County’s unhoused population, while Black people make up about 8 percent of the county population overall.[11] Henderson, who’s Black, said librarians have utilized police to remove him and other Black unhoused neighbors for sleeping in the library or outside under awnings to take shelter during inclement weather. When the weather is bad, there’s almost always an uptick in the number of unhoused neighbors visiting the library, and that uptick, Henderson said, is met with additional surveillance and security presence. He went on to share:

The reason why [public librarians] see [unhoused people] as a growing threat is because our society has stigmatized the unhoused, they're stigmatized as people that have mental health challenges. They’re stigmatized as people that may have substance usage issues. And so they use that as the vanguard to talk with law enforcement officials who are ever so ready to run in and create a carceral solution for people that are vulnerable and having other issues. 

Browne also writes about the power of the “oppositional gaze” and “disruptive staring” as means of resistance to disrupt racialized surveillance.[12] On his podcast “We the Unhoused,” Henderson shows up with a mic and a camera wherever unhoused neighbors are facing injustices, documenting police brutality, sanitation sweeps, carceral housing, and more, and he challenges mainstream media representations of houselessness.[13] He recently collaborated with Katy Fishell, who runs the Instagram account Sex is Weird, on a comic about the experience of being unhoused during the pandemic, highlighting the near impossible task of finding a place to the use the bathroom or a place to rest and being turned away by police or business owners at every location he tried Downtown.[14] The last place he tried was the public library, but he was “eventually kicked out from there too.” The illustration shows Henderson looking back at two white police officers kicking him out of (presumably) the library. Through this comic, Henderson talks back to the anti-unhoused sentiment and surveillance by centering and making visible unhoused people’s lived experiences in the face of institutions (private and public alike) and police, trying to render them invisible by denying access to basic human necessities.    

Visions for public libraries from unhoused neighbors…    

While I found Foucault’s book to be helpful in examining how these systems of oppression play out in public library spaces, I felt frustrated by his lack of offering re-imaginings and means of resistance from folks directly impacted and on the frontlines of the issues he’s critiquing. I am sitting with Melissa Adler’s reflection at the end of “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress'' where she writes, “the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.”[15] Processes for reenvisioning how public library services and space can feel safe, abundant, affirming, and joyful have to begin and end with centering the imaginings of unhoused communities. This is not a comprehensive list, but I want to leave you with offerings from Demon, Henderson, and JT about how public libraries could play a role in strengthening mutual aid networks and contributing towards community abundance: 

• Training services for people who are unhoused to reenter the workforce and workshops on how folks can start their own businesses and be entrepreneurs (since people who are unhoused are often excluded from the labor market) 

• Deescalation trainings and resources on alternatives to calling the police

• Harm reduction resources and safe usage sites, health clinics, showers in library parking lots 

• Housing office hours with LAHSA, The People's Concern, etc. 

• Storage spaces for bulky personal items 

• Series on mutual aid and the public library's role 

• Screenings of “We the Unhoused,” showcasing unhoused neighbors’ art, storytelling circles

__________________

[1]  “About the Program,” UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, January 22, 2022, https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/activist-in-residence/#theo-henderson.  

[2] “Rules of Conduct,” Los Angeles Public Library, December 12, 2019, https://www.lapl.org/about-lapl/rules-conduct. 

[3] Theo Henderson, November 10, 2021, Personal interview. 

[4] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Random House, 1977), 143. 

[5] Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 150. 

[6] Demon and JT, October 24, 2021, personal interview.

[7] Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 157. 

[8] John Buschman, “Public Libraries Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You: It’s the ‘Public’ in Public Libraries That is Threatened,” Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 43, no. 2 (November 2020): 158–171. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/772364#info_wrap. 

[9]Allie Fry and Jeanie Austin, “Whose Safety is the Priority? Attending to LIS Grassroots Movements and Patron Concerns Around Policing and Public Libraries,” The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion 5, no. 3 (May 2021): 224-237. https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v5i3.36187. 

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

[11] “Homelessness in Los Angeles County 2020, Los Angeles Almanac, 2020, http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php. 

[12] Browne, “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness,”58-59.

[13] Theo Henderson, “Home,” We the Unhoused, accessed on January 24, 2022, https://www.wetheunhoused.com/. 

[14] Theo Henderson and Katy Fishell (@wetheunhoused), “#unhoused Blues By @thhheohenderson / @wingchuninchinatown and @sex_is_weird,” Instagram, January 29, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CZVdezdARJC/. 

[15] Melissa Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5, 2012: 370-376. 

 

Against Discipline in Public Libraries | Jenny Le

In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the fabric of modernity is woven by threads of disciplinary measures enforced by omniscient institutional presences, which is society in general, to cull human beings into known individuated subjects, to formulate concepts of knowledge, truth, order — reality, itself. He asserts, “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’... In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[1] What I find captivating (and incredibly frightening) is the emanating and menacing abilities of power: that these identities, values, and components of the known world are molded through dominance and subjection; that they are fictions which we are forced to adhere to and live within. If modern institutions function by discipline and surveillance[2], then how has this ubiquity suffused into the library and information science field (LIS)? 

As Adler demonstrates, “Foucault’s notion of governmentality” is embedded in the Library of Congress’s authoritative regulation of knowledge through their classification and naming processes: that it is corralled into separate fields to control what should be recognized, and in its omission, what should not be.[3] And as Browne elucidites in situating Foucault through the lens of black feminist scholarship, the concept of panopticism in relation to discipline and surveillance are inextricable to the “violence in the making and marking of blackness”[4] that forms modernity. I will extend this Foucaldian purview into the realm of public libraries in which I illustrate their connective ties as disciplinary spaces, wherein they are utilized to develop good citizens; and from there, to go against the grain of that to posit possibilities of re-imagining and re-claimation of being, one that attempts to resist the productive and normative standards of what it is to live in the constructed reality of white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetereo patriarchy.[5]

To discipline human bodies into docile ones, institutional forces operate “absolutely indiscreet”[6] meaning that they are seemingly invisible and thus omnipresent in the regulation of behaviors, beliefs, and values that render society; the natural state of things are not so natural after all.[7] Foucault posits society as an environment wherein architectures enacting disciplinary power no longer is positioned from the outside observing their subjects (exemplified by palaces and fortresses), but rather is “an internal, articulated and detailed control... an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.”[8] What is expressed is an hierarchical value for total access[9] to one’s every movement, idiosyncrasies, and selfhood which is the prerequisite for discipline to be carried forth. Just as Browne illustrates the slave ship’s plan segmented enslaved people into categories of “women, men, girls, and boys” and detailed the size of spaces that they were given to occupy[10], the caliber of violence carried forth by total access in the pursuit of discipline is monstrous; it is this utter violence that undergirds modernity.[11]

These ties of whiteness model the rest of society after itself through subjection and individuation, and have their presence in the public library as an architecture for transformation that Foucault delineated. The American public libraries system that we are familiar with now is conceived through the grants given by Andrew Carnegie. He envisioned them as places to foster in people values such as “industry, ambition, and eagerness to learn.”[12] This vision of white, male philanthropy also has its parallel in the ethos of the Lady Bountiful in LIS: a white woman whose mission is to uphold civilizing values of “intellectual development, active citizenship, and democracy.”[13] Part of the social and cultural mission that public libraries take on as its duty as a democratic institution is providing courses for people to become American citizens.[14] Classes are offered to assist people through lessons and materials that would prepare them to pass the citizenship test. It demonstrates and mirrors the disciplinary measures of “absolute indiscreet[ness]” in which citizenship is reinforced as the only path of acceptance into the social body of order. That to be recognized by the American state and be afforded the rights within that state, one has to adhere to the narrowness of what is allowed in order to be granted citizenship. The conception of public libraries as pillars of democracy cannot be untethered to the reality that it also operates as a disciplinary architecture.

As someone who is pursuing librarianship because she believes in the library as an equitable space for self-actualization, I have come to reckon with those alluring values that have been inculcated in my own system of beliefs. Just as Browne demonstrated evidences of resistance enacted by black artists against the surveillance of the white gaze through re-envisioning and re-claiming themselves as they are and not what they are rendered to be in the imagination of whiteness[15], new possibilities can be made by people to refuse the impositions carried forth by the regulatory architecture of public libraries, wherein the pillars to be unruly and free take precedence. To work in removing myself from the legacy of whiteness — which is to make the world knowable along its terms — is to envision the possibilities of liberation in the realm of public libraries that is rooted in sociality, in the liveliness to be ourselves in unmitigated fullness and incompleteness, rather than a space to be accessed and improved. 

[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194.

[2] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 176.

[3] Melissa Adler, "Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress," Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012), 12. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-370

[4] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 42.

[5] A conceptual term developed by bell hooks to describe the encapsulating intersections of hegemonic power dynamics.

[6] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 177.

[7] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 156.

[8] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 172.

[9] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney see the components of capitalism, based on an algorithmic ordering of society, are "total movement + total access." Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, All Incomplete (UK: Minor Compositions, 2021), 38.

[10] Browne, Dark Matters, 48-49.

[11] What Christina Sharpe refers to as "the weather" is the environment in which we all live, that is the afterlife of slavery, a world suffused in anti-blackness. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 106.

[12] Andrew Carnegie quoted in Sherrin Frances, Libraries amid Protests: Books, Organizing, and Global Activism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), 92.

[13] Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, "The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library," Library Faculty Publications 64, no. 4 (2016), 11. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/622027#info_wrap

[14] Referenced as an example but is not exclusive just to the Los Angeles Public Library. lapl.org. "New Americans Initiative." Accessed January 30, 2022. https://www.lapl.org/newamericans

[15] Browne, Dark Matters, 57-62.

 

“Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty” [1] : The National Archives’ Discourse of Visuality | Emily Benoff

 
     On September 9, 1931—after almost half a century of lobbying efforts by the American Historical Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, veteran’s associations, and other epistemically powerful organizations—the long-standing Central Market in Washington, D.C.’s Federal Triangle was raised to make way for a new National Archives building. In a move to achieve what Jean-Francois Lyotard identified as the “geometry of the dominance over perceptual space,”[2] this transformation disciplined what was once a relatively unregulated social and commercial mooring, a discombobulated mass of push carts and produce stands owned by rural Americans, immigrants, and formerly enslaved peoples [3], into a federally controlled, bureaucratized spatiality. The Public Buildings Act of 1926, which authorized funding for the construction of the National Archives building, enabled “the Secretary of Treasury to provide suitable accommodations in the District of Columbia for the executive departments (…) and for courthouses, postoffices, immigration stations, custom houses, marine hospitals, quarantine stations, and other public buildings.”[4] In this context, the construction of the National Archives was part of a broader project to form a network of interdependent sites of surveillance [5] through which discipline can be “circulated in a ‘free’ state.”[6] The National Archives, then, is imbued with knowledge/power as expressed through its architecture.

     Examined through a Foucauldian lens, which situates power not as a subtraction of freedoms but as a persuasive, productive construction of reality and truth, the National Archives’ architecture facilitates technologies of perception, sight, and gazes to circulate social norms that fix understandings of citizenship, democracy, and national memory. Composed of signals which mark and normalize a form of nationalism that legitimates the state’s epistemic control over its citizens, this “functional site” situates its visitors as docile bodies subjectified by the state’s gaze in service of a “certain political utopia.”[7]  Influenced by Gillian Rose’s notion of “visuality as discourse”[8] and rooted in the methodology of discourse analysis II, I argue that the architecture of the National Archives building orchestrates a discourse of visuality that dictates how the visitor-eye sees both its holdings and the American colonial project they document. 

     In defining discourse analysis II, Rose offers two perspectives from which to analyze how particular institutions (or groups of institutions) concurrently condition their visitors to be seeing subjects and construct ontological realities that mediate the visitor’s capacity to see. First, institutions can be examined from within to explore how technologies of display, interpretation, and spatiality regulate the visitors’ perceptions of themselves, each other, and their surroundings. Second, institutions can be examined from the outside as components of a larger “intersecting paradigm”[9] of intertextual relationships between groups of images and institutions. I begin my analysis by applying the first perspective. 

     A quick look at the National Archives’ main level on the Visitor’s Guide map reveals a network of darkened, shadowy blocks juxtaposed with a brightly colored and centrally located semi-circle representing the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. Compartmentalizing the architectural space through a play of darkness and light, “establish[ing] presences and absences”[10] that dictate where the visitor can and cannot travel, this map immediately guides the crowd into the Rotunda’s 75-foot dome.  Subtly illuminated from the periphery of the dome, far above the visitor’s field of vision, but remaining dimly lit at eye-level, this space plays with light and shadow to suggest the presence of an impersonal and omnipresent “conquering gaze” from above. Vertical visibility is prioritized over horizontal visibility. This gaze sees all visitors and subjectifies them by honing their individualized visions to particular signals within the room— most obviously, to the life-like Barry Faulkner murals depicting the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as well as to the “Charters of Freedom” exhibited below. 

     The Rotunda accomplishes what Ann Reynolds describes as the transformation of the "visitors’ eyes into magnifying glasses, microscopes, or scalpels, which could reveal the invisible workings of a previously familiar but superficially understood (…) world.”[11] In this world, our so-called founding fathers manifested the standards of citizenship and freedom that continue to serve as a yardstick for normativity and belonging vis-a-vis a national surveillance infrastructure. When viewing the familiar scenes of early America as depicted by Faulkner, mounted high above eye-level directly below the dome, the visitor-eye enters an illusion that has been made to seem natural through Faulkner’s use of photographic realism. Indeed, Faulkner relied on contemporary portraits to recreate the likenesses of his murals’ subjects.[12] Displayed this way, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, enclosed in prominent cases along the room’s periphery, are fixed as evidence to legitimize a national history that can be seen but not touched; a one-sided visuality is constructed through which a pre-established ontology is inserted “between the [visitor’s] retina and the world.”[13] Through the exhibition space, a distorted narrative of America’s founding is reified and injected into the present. However, in light of Simone Browne’s assertion that “the historical formation of surveillance is not outside the historical formation of slavery,”[14] the absented violence and oppression lurking under the surface of the Rotunda’s nationalist discourse serve as “negative evidence” to reveal the glaring whiteness of the disciplining gaze. 

     The strict partitioning of public versus private spaces within the National Archives building also contributes to the discourse of visuality. The Public Vaults, situated as spatial extensions of the Rotunda, are open, brightly lit interactive gallery spaces that employ interpretive text, dioramas, and display cases to encourage contemplation of a curated selection of records. This space is meant to allow visitors to “experience the feeling of going beyond the walls of the Rotunda into the stacks.”[15] The displays are organized chronologically according to a Record of America timeline that outlines the progression of presidential communications (i.e., from handwritten letters to telegrams and radio to satellite images). Here, the confluence of manipulated spatiality and temporality prescribes visitors to see American bureaucracy as transparent, communicative, participatory, and empirical. The actual stacks—the inaccessible storage spaces fragmented into small storage compartments connected by winding staircases and narrow hallways—look more like Bentham’s panopticon than the Public Vaults reveal. Without the pretext of a monumental benevolence through which the National Archives proudly permits visitor-citizens the opportunity to see the “raw materials of our American democracy,”[16] the Stacks represent the site of knowledge construction in action: the place where the “raw materials” are selected, preserved, and made meaningful for visitors’ eyes by archivists/researchers whose invisibility affords them power. This conceptual tension between constructed visuality (the Vaults) and unmediated sight (the Stacks) reveals the disciplinary function of the National Archives’ architecture and the truth regime it produces. 

     In discussing the Public Records Act that authorized the construction of the National Archives, I have already touched upon Rose’s second, external approach to discourse analysis II.  Anne Gilliland advances my argument by asserting that—because of state resistance to a centralized Federal government, a paper shortage after the Revolutionary War, and inadequate communication infrastructure—early America suffered an “absence of recordkeeping consciousness” until after World War I.[17] Consequently, the construction of the National Archives building, sandwiched between the newly constructed Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, and two blocks east of the Department of Commerce, was meant to both normalize this disciplinary turn and condition American subjects to visualize their identities in relation to the state’s newly centralized gaze. 

     The physical embodiment of what Foucault terms governmentality, the buildings comprising the Federal Triangle are the very sites in which examination, hierarchical observation, and normalizing judgments are carried out, (dis)affording claims to citizenship and belonging. Considering, for example, the blatant racialization of the prison-industrial complex (re: the Department of Justice) and accumulation of property-wealth (re: the Department of Commerce), the discourse of visuality produced by the Federal Triangle can be reframed through the lens of Fanon’s “epidermalization”: rather than “the imposition of race on the body,”[18] though, this discourse imposes race on the landscape. Built in part to erase the existence of tenements and other under-resourced areas, [19] the federal buildings’ whitewashed (marble) façades, when seen together on the Mall, were made to have a high degree of imageability[20] in the national conscience to superimpose the state-eye onto the public-eye. 

     In recognizing the discourse of visuality that is produced by the National Archives building and its surroundings, it is important to also consider the physical and theoretical spaces within the US bureaucratic infrastructure that are intentionally obscured from view. It is in these spaces—which evade the “trap” of visibility[21]—that imaginative and liberatory disruptions of epistemic violence can and do occur.  As LIS professionals, we can follow Browne in questioning the positionality of the National Archives’ discourse of visuality to expose its racialized, gendered, ableist, and heteronormative biases.  We can also, as Rose suggests, recognize the autonomy of disciplined bodies who have always worked to agitate oppressive truth regimes through the formation and/or upholding of community archives, storytelling traditions, and participatory local histories outside of the mainstream discourse. 

Figures 

Figure 1. The ground and upper levels as depicted on the Visitors Guide to the National Archives Museum map. [22]

Figure 2. Photograph of the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. [23]

     __________

[1] This phrase, often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is inscribed on the outside of the National Archives building. 

[2] Lyotard quoted in Gillian Rose, “Discourse Analysis II: Institutions and Ways of Seeing,” in Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Material (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 245.

[3] John DeFerrari, “Center Market’s Chaotic Exuberance,” Streets of Washington, accessed January 20, 2022, http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2010/05/center-markets-chaotic-exuberance.html.  

[4] Jessie Kratz, “The act that gave us a National Archives,” National Archives Pieces of History, accessed January 20, 2021, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2016/05/25/the-act-that-gave-us-a-national-archives/.

[5] Simone Browne quotes David Lyon in suggesting that “we should look more closely at ‘sites of surveillance’ (…) in order to come to an understanding of the commonalities that exist at these various sites.” Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 13.

[6] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 211.

[7] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 174.

[8] Rose, Visual Methodologies, 245.

[9] Browne, Dark Matters, 9.

[10] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143.

[11] Rose, Visual Methodologies, 244. 

[12] Virginia C. Purdy, “A Temple to Clio: The National Archives Building,” Guardian of Heritage (1985), 25. https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/sources/purdy.pdf.

[13]  Sydney Walker, “Artmaking in an Age of Visual Culture Vision and Visuality,” Visual Arts Research 30, no. 2 (2004), 74. https://ed.arte.gov.tw/uploadfile/periodical/908_0203_7292.pdf. 

[14] Browne, Dark Matters, 50.

[15] “Public Vaults,” National Archives Foundation, accessed January 20, 2022, https://www.archivesfoundation.org/archives_in_dc/public-vaults/.

[16] John W. Carlin, “The Public Vaults Offer an Exciting Journey through American Records,” Prologue Magazine 36, no. 4 (Winter 2004): n.p. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/winter/archivist.html.

[17] Anne Gilliland, “Professional, Institutional, and National Identities in Dialog: The Development of Descriptive Practices in the First Decade of the US National Archives,” Information and Culture 49, no. 1 (2014), 57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43737381.

[18] Browne, Dark Matters, 7.

[19] “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form: Federal Triangle,” United States Department of the Interior National Park Service (February 1999), accessed on 30 January 2022, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/89cc2623-131c-4945-b0ae-4f9d0959a283.

[20] Coined by urban planner Kevin Lynch, the term imageability is defined as, “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer.” Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 9.

[21] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.

[22] Visitor’s Guide to the National Archives Museum (Washington, D.C.: National Archives), accessed January 22, 2022, https://museum.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2018-08/national-archives-museum-visitor-guide.pdf.

[23] “Founding Documents in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom,” National Archives Museum, accessed January 22, 2022, https://museum.archives.gov/founding-documents.

The Information Dam: How Majority-World Communities Restrict the Flow of Information

It is hardly a novel concept to compare how information travels from source to source to a stream. Indeed, it has become even more popular with the rise of the internet, with the phrase “information stream” becoming commonplace. Ideally, this “stream” would be able to flow to and fro with little to block its path. However, this is far from the case. In the current field of LIS, the flow of information is skewed sharply in the favor of the minority world at the detriment of the majority world (terms coined by David Hudson in his article “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: used to represent what is commonly known as First World countries and Developing countries respectively). These dams in the information stream exist to give minority world communities control and centrality over majority world communities by limiting what information they receive, controlling what information is deemed important, and creating false information about these communities. These tactics are built from and continue to perpetuate racist ideas of superiority that have been at play for centuries and continue to hide under the notion that “information” is a neutral term that cannot be influenced or subjective. By examining the three impact points where the flow of information starts to drip and how they currently work to undermine information flow to the majority world, we can find ways to shift the control away from the minority world to the majority world and create a more flowing information stream.

 

Starting at the beginning of the information stream, the first control dam we encounter is when information created by majority worlds enters minority world spaces. There are two ways this information can be controlled by the minority world. The first can be when the information is stopped from entering the space. This can be seen in Ghaddar’s article “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory”, where she highlights how the Society of American Archives failed to endorse and incorporate the Protocols for the Native American Archival Materials, a manual primarily created by indigenous collaborators. By refusing information from a majority world community, the minority world continues to hold control over how they handle archival protocols for indigenous archival materials. This has led to inhumane practices such as withholding the bodies of indigenous members from their communities and the preserving of materials that should by indigenous standards be destroyed.

Another way that information from the majority world may be controlled while entering the minority world is if it is taken without consent. An example of this would be the taking of the Iraqi Baath Party records to the USA. This removal of information deprives Iraq of valuable information about its ancestry, and limits access by restricting who has access to it. It also plays off an existing idea that majority world communities are not worthy of taking care of their own information, as they do not understand the importance of it. This idea was recently displayed when the British Museum condemned the Egyptian Museum for the botched repair of King Tutankhamun’s beard on his burial mask, heavily implying that the Museum was incapable of caring for the artifact, and idea that the British Museum used to validate their withholding of artifacts from other majority world communities.

 

After the initial information dam, what meager information from the majority worlds passes to the minority worlds has to contend with the second barrier in the information flow; information that is created about the majority world in house by the minority world. The first example of this that comes to my mind are the treaties that were written during the “Age of Discovery” by Western Europeans that ranked other peoples by how “barbaric” they were. Cultures that were more like the Europeans in terms of government, religion, and economics were seen as more “civilized barbarians”, whereas cultures that structured themselves differently to the minority worlds were seen as “savage barbarians”. This creation of cultural stereotypes was perfected with the idea of the Oriental, as seen in Edward Said’s book Orientalism, where false and imagined images of the Middle East, Indian sub-continent, and the Far East were constructed by Imperial nations to validate their own superiority over these areas. This was done by creating images that evoked fear (Arabs as seen by the United States post 1970’s), submissiveness (Oriental women by Britain, France, and the United States), and a multitude of other sentiments, but the common denominator was they were all seen as inferior traits to the Imperial nations.

By boiling the image of a country or people to a one-dimensional stereotype such as enemy, overly emotional, or submissive, minority worlds were able to validate any action they may take against these groups that would be unethical in other cases because they know better. This can further alienate the information coming from the majority worlds as they are seen as not being entirely factual, as they are coming from inferior sources, and this perception is extremely difficult to shake. As a personal example, even though I have had a loving and  healthy relationship with a man from the Middle East for over 6 years and have gone to great lengths to disillusion my family to the dangerous stereotypes that the US has propagated about his home country, my mother is still fearful that I will be taken away and forcefully converted to Islam. The stories she hears that perpetuate the narrative the US has created feel more factual and accurate than the testimonies we tell her that come directly from the country in question.

 

The final dam that information must cross to complete its journey is the return home to the majority world, where the perils it faces come in two-fold. The first peril it must navigate around is destruction. The minority world can and will destroy information to keep it out of other hands, just ask the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) when the Canadian government ordered the destruction of the majority of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) records, thus hindering the TRC’s mission to preserve the memories of what occurred in Residential Schools across Canada. While this was done in the name of privacy, given the TRC had to file suit three separate times to gain access to these documents leads one to a more cynical conclusion.

The other peril that must be avoided is the twisting of information to suit the needs and objectives of the minority world it is leaving. This could be as simple as an increased emphasis on a specific notion or added weight or incentive to adapt a new perspective. One example that springs to mind is the Uganda AIDS epidemic; during the 90’s and early 2000’s, Uganda made great strides in reversing its AIDS epidemic through promoting the ABC’s; abstinence, be faithful, and condoms. However, during the mid-2000’s, the US helped fund AIDS prevention strategies in Uganda, but only promised the funds if they dropped the C in their ABC’s model. This was done to appease Evangelical Christians. By dropping the safe-sex aspect of their ABC model, Uganda’s epidemic started to grow again post 2005, with fewer than 8% of men who had sex with multiple partners not using condoms. By manipulating what information was deemed important through the incentive of funding, real harm was caused to Ugandans that would otherwise not have happened.

After looking at the tumultuous journey of the information stream, we see that the need for information control has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that builds off a racist, xenophobic history. By slowing the information flow to a drip to and from majority world countries, the narratives the minority world creates can manifest and reinforce the control the minority world has on a global scale. What needs to happen is a shift in control from the minority world to the majority world, and it can start by tearing down the dams in the information flow. We can accept and incorporate information from majority world communities about their information, we can travel to their communities to study their information instead of taking it for ourselves and acknowledge that they know the significance of their artifacts better than we do. We can accept the narratives they have about their communities and recognize that our values are not the universal (and that determining if something is more civilized by how “logical” it presents itself is an incredibly harmful and incorrect idea). We can give information when asked for such as returning of stolen artifacts and not attach caveats to said information like the US did with aid to Uganda. These seem like very obvious steps to make, but in doing so we can greatly shift the control over information away from minority world groups to create a better flow of information.

 

Resources:

1.     Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Information Studies, n.d., 19.

2.     Ghaddar, J. J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory.” Archivaria, December 2, 2016, 3–26.

3.     Caswell, Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” Edited by Mary Pugh. The American Archivist 74, no. 1 (April 2011): 211–40. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.4185u8574mu84041.

4.     Small, Zachary. “Push to Return 116,000 Native American Remains Is Long-Awaited.” The New York Times, August 6, 2021, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/arts/design/native-american-remains-museums-nagpra.html.

5.     “Tutankhamun: Egypt Museum Staff Face Trial over Botched Beard Job.” BBC News, January 23, 2016, sec. Middle East. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35392531.

6.     Said, Edward W., and Wolfgang Laade. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

7.     Murphy, Elaine M, Margaret E Greene, Alexandra Mihailovic, and Peter Olupot-Olupot. “Was the ‘ABC’ Approach (Abstinence, Being Faithful, Using Condoms) Responsible for Uganda’s Decline in HIV?” PLoS Medicine 3, no. 9 (September 2006): e379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030379.

8.     aidsmap.com. “‘ABC’ Prevention Is Becoming ‘AB’ in Uganda, Thanks to US Influence against Condom Use, Says Report.” Accessed January 9, 2022. https://www.aidsmap.com/news/mar-2005/abc-prevention-becoming-ab-uganda-thanks-us-influence-against-condom-use-says-report.

9.     Kron, Josh. “In Uganda, an AIDS Success Story Comes Undone.” The New York Times, August 3, 2012, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/world/africa/in-uganda-an-aids-success-story-comes-undone.html.