Presenters:

  • Eamon Tewell
  • Nora Almeida
  • Romel Espinel
  • Lisa Hinchliffe

ACRL Program session info

hashtag: #ILcapitalism

Introduction #

Eamon

  • Info literacy usually considered a good thing; rarely critiqued, almost totally unquestioned in terms of economic practice
  • So in terms of the conference theme, how might we recast information literacy narratives
  • If we’ll do most socially just librarianship, we need to situated that by considering the context within librarianship is practiced

  • potentially neutralized by neoliberalism?

  • What’s in a word? Do capitalist metaphors…
    • position students as consumers?
    • simplify knowledge production environments?
    • reinforce neoliberal ideology?
  • Goal isn’t exactly just not working within capitalist structures, but to expose and question those structures & how they show up within our work
  • Working a little harder to get at what’s at the root of things

Nora

  • talks about economic underpinnings of why they have to log in from off campus
  • library password is analogous to the log-in for premium cable / HBO content

Lisa

  • distinguish between big umbrella general database & subject specific things, analogy to difference between WalMart & boutique stores

Romel

  • there’s so many ways
  • Pink Floyd’s imagery of students pushed into machinery is a great image of the one-shot instruction model, conveyor belt banking system of instruction

{Great use of microphone, having people come to it since roving mic had a dead battery}

Think / Pair / Share on: “What capitalist metaphors or language do you use with patrons / colleagues / administraotrs?”

  • Raina Bloom at Madison uses word “access” in a very different way than capitalist intentions
    person: gated community

Individual Presentations #

Romel Espinel, Information Literacy in the Time of a Neoliberal Regime

  • comments on how he’s been in librarianship for 10 years, remarks on how different the contexts were between then & now
  • internet was where we’d easily access information, but now helps harvest profit
  • neoliberalism is a mode of accumulating wealth within capitalism that uses divisions (identity & class) as part of that wealth accumulation process (I think I’m summarizing that correctly?)
  • neoliberalist regime, David Kotz (2018) “End of the Neoliberal Era: Crisis and Restructuring in American Capitalism” in New Left Review 113
  • drawing from this, 4 periods
    1. 1776-1940s primitive accumulation slavery / colonialism / industrial capitalism
    2. 1940s-1979, regulated regime
    3. 1979 - present, neoliberal regime
    4. Next? - that’s a real good question, could be bad (fascism…) or something better more wholesome society
  • 2008 neoliberalism almost did fail, but industries got bailed out although workers didn’t
  • Over the past 40 years, neoliberalism has crept into all aspects of life, consolidation of power & capital; falling / stagnant wages; diminishing power of unions and workers movements; dismantling of welfare state
  • 2009 Obama declared October to be National Information Literacy Awareness Month — notice that this is just after 2008’s crisis
    • we had hopes, it was coming from Obama
    • but the hallmarks of neoliberalism are all through Obama’s declaration of that month
    • “crisis” framing (shock doctrine)
    • information marketplace
    • competencies with the new modes of production / new tech
    • taking advantage of information themselves (individualization reinforced)
    • informed citizenry
    • nothing about information creators
  • Informed citizen no longer Jeffersonian (white men) informed citizenry for the survival of a nation, but instead now for survival of individual themselves
  • Promise of information literacy
    • better informed
    • democrative
    • reflective
    • social justice
    • class consciousness
    • liberation

Nora Almeida

  • A brief history in two texts
    • 1974 Paul Zurkowski’s “Information Service Environment: Relationships and Prioritie” might not have been the first coinage, but prominent in relation to libraries
    • 1989 ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy publishing a “Final Report” that formally establishes IL as a professional touchstone
  • 1974 paper has a crisis undertone
    • talks about the relationship between libraries & industry
    • instead of mutually beneficial relationship, now it’s libraries are threatening free access to information by becoming a monopoly
    • priority to make a national training thing for all citizens by 1984
    • being more information literate seems to increase the value of information in one of his
    • free speech as rationale for gov’t policies that regulate role of librarians, turn them into training; libraries as customer services arm of publishing
      “Government should not perform services for its citizens which the citizens are capable of performing themselves” (i.e. presumably purchasing, collecting, providing access to materials)
  • 1989 ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy
    • Institutionalization, information literacy is a survival skill in the information age
    • defines library service in terms of capital, has crisis feeling around technology
    • does a lot of problematic things, obscures socio-economic problems, implicates those who are disempowered already

Eamon Tewell, Capitalism and the Practice of Information Literacy Education

  • information literacy is a construct, is not static, is contested and inherently political
  • is a way to prove our value to our institutions, to combat our precarity within libraries & higher education, and market-driven majors and programs
  • Cathy Eisenhow and Dolsy Smith, “The Library as ‘Stuck Place’: Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University” 2010
  • the one-shot session
    • represents most academic librarians only chance at teaching
    • as Karen Nicholson points out, it’s all about time & the value of time
      • “‘Taking Back’ information literacy: time and the one-shot…”
    • database instruction is a huge request, but Eamon says his best sessions are usually when he talks about information primarily rather than databases
  • larger issue is replicating scholarly status quo, dutifully promote databases while we’re paying for them
  • Barbara Fister, “We willingly serve as the corrections officers for information prisons”
  • What we can do
    • recognize that information literacy education isn’t necessary a problem of time but of labor
    • move reacting solely to faculty or student requests for classes, and direct the conversation with them and other library workers
    • resist the division of labor to build collective knowledge and power across departments and professional statuses; division of labor is one of the most effective tactics for making a worker misunderstand the value of what they produce, so do team teaching, collaborating with other instructors to push against atomization of the workplace

Lisa Janicke Hinchiffe, And… They Need a Job

  • she was at a community college, then a comprehensive 4 year college, now a pretty elite university
  • we all face a societal context where in order to eat, we need a job or minimally need to be associated with someone who has a job
  • community college is often a path out of poverty… as long as you don’t leave without a degree but with lots of debt
  • American Freshman: Fifty-Year Trends 1966-2015 survey summary, https://heri.ucla.edu/publications-tfs/ currently top link there
  • many of our students are studying to BE capitalists
  • have to resist the temptation to neutrality and to accept the obligation of positionality
  • we can negotiate a slightly different relationship to students; we’re not giving them grades, we do one-on-one instruction at the desk, there are other opportunities we have that many instructors on campus do not
  • information advisor / information coach might be a better model than simple provisioner of information
  • pragmatic strategy
    • loaded examples; since you’re going to give a search example,
    • some obligation to not to damage to the course curriculum when we’re a guest in that space
    • do a women and/or POC search for authors figures relevant to the topic
      -she has an article on this in a Pagowsky & McElroy collection, I think also linked to her institutional repository
      0Lisa’s goal “information literacy instruction that prepares students for their careers while also developing their critical information literacy abilities”

Open invitation to write up some ideas for critical resistance at: #

https://padlet.com/eamontewell/Ilcapitalism
hope it’ll be an ongoing resource for sharing ideas & inspiration

Questions & Answers #

Q: intersection between neoliberalism and technolibertarianism? silicon valley ideology that’s also potentially take over libraries. how will that reduce our chances to do these things?

A: minimizing tech to instead foster different connections to students; dry erase boards are loved, and interrupt surveillance possibilities
A: tech often used as bandaid for labor underfunding, as PR stunt to draw attention away from funding shortages

Q: clarification between students “leave” capitalism or “lead” capitalism

(I missed this answer)

Q: wondering about higher education for free countries (northern europe) — do we see the same thing about information literacy there?

A: shift in those countries, increasingly capping tuition; free education movement sounds great but there are also interesting critiques, where people who benefit the most might be the people who could pay for tuition perfectly fine on their own
A: Kotz article recommendation again; retooling of the working class needs to happen, so has to be some kind of public education, question is how they’ll pay for it; we know they have money because they pay for wars; we have to figure out how to get that money shared back to working class people

Original Pad (read only)