These notes are for the ACRL2019 Invited Presentation:
Becoming a Proud “Bad Librarian”: Dismantling Vocational Awe in Librarianship
{I arrived a little late, so these notes start a bit into the talk}
Invited Presentation #
- Setting up scenario & consequences of vocational awe
- Firmly believes in work-life separation
- Vocational awe sets up unhealthy expectations, overwork feeling is almost a badge of honor
have little work/life separation -
It wouldn’t work for Fobazi to be at work as much as the profession would like to believe
- Why a bad librarian?
- I don’t want to catalog! I love catalogers but would be bad at it
- Job creep has become norm in libraries; “other duties as assigned”
- Social worker, EMT, therapist, legal consultant, accountant
- these jobs are creeping up on us, things we were never trained to do
- Leads to burnout
- burnout is “…a state of exhaustion in which one is cynical about the value of one’s occupation and doubtful of one’s capacity to perform”
- emotional labor
- invisible labor
- job creep –> heavy workloads
- lack of institutional support
- “whole-person” librarianship
- expected to juggle all these additional duties, additional labor without actual help who are meant to protect us
-
therefore we can’t do the expected “whole-person” librarianship
- Bad librarian because won’t be silent about inequality and injustice in our field
- shows photos of a student of color being profiled (I believe this incident is from the last couple days at Barnard or Columbia library
- also the instance where a library student was blocked from studying in a library
- vocational awe says that highlighting these injustices at work, speaking out about them, makes her a bad librarian
- anyone who speaks out about injustice is what we as librarians should strive to be
- White supremacy culture
- The ways that organizations and individuals normalize, enact, and reinforce white supremacy
- characteristics that Jones & Okun include
- defensiveness
- right to comfort; comfort seen as more important than the realities of situation being shown
- worship of the written word; cataloguers job is to write the written word, do define the “right way” to access, define, represent information. when hold those systems above what we see in daily lives, that’s white supremacy culture; terms change & the written word will never be more important than human beings
- What kind of bad librarian are you?
- every one of us is a bad librarian in some ways, in the words of Rhianna: being bad can feel so good
Questions and Answer session #
Q: Sarah at U Baltimore, question about the idea of generational norms, leadership enforcing vocational awe components. Do you have ideas or suggestions for how we as individual librarians can move change forward?
A: Thanks… first things first, bad management is everywhere, unfortunately. But small acts can have the most impact. If you know yr institution doesn’t give support, then get support from your peers. If everyone decides not to answer emails on nights & weekends, then there’s not just a single outlier who will go “above.” There’s usually a single manager but many more workers.
Q: Questioner came from ministry before librarianship, he appreciates librarianship as a possibility for secular vocation. To him, the things you present as “bad” are part of my vocation. Is this framework too either/or thinking?
A: Thanks Brian, a lot of people probably also have that question. I didn’t include this, but either/or thinking is a characteristic of white supremacy culture. I’m a pastor’s kid, firmly religious, firmly believe in God & Jesus & what he hopes for us to do… But as a black queer christian woman, I’ve perhaps seen a lot of christians who don’t act as those in your circles—you’re very lucky in that way. (I missed a couple great sentences here) It’s the stagnation that happens when there’s narrative scarcity that makes librarianship as it currently is not just unhealthy but literally physically safe, both in here & in libraries abroad.
Q: (I missed this)
A: Being a loudmouth isn’t necessary to be a bad librarian
Q: I hear a lot of presentations that say “of course as librarians…”, I remember someone who was an inter who was told by supervisor “If you think that way, you’ll never be a good librarian.” What about people who think there are correct political beliefs in the proession?
A: “Correct political beliefs” is such a loaded phrase. We’re currently juggling many types of being a librarian—social workers, accountants, etc—but at core we’re here to help patrons find and evaluate information and to create diverse collections. Whatever your personal politics, that’s what we sign up for we when become librarians. I think that muddying the field by thinking of us as last bastions of democracy to be everything to everyone. When you feel like you’r enot doing / being the right thing, then go back to the core of the profession, not the “other duties as assigned.” Exploitation will always exist. if you drop dead today, you’ll be replaced, regardless of your views. The institution can produce person for the position, you cannot produce another you.
Q: As MLS student, still learning a lot about the field. Do you have any thoughts about when to decide when something’s a growth possibility and when it’s job creep. Do you have any strategies about how to talk about job creep at early, underemployed, precarious stage.
A: Something we need to think about in our profession. For those with least about of power in profession, collective action is . There are networks for POC like We Here made by some of the lovely people in the front row
Q: I’d like to say that I have been a good librarian, but today I’ll start being a bad librarian. Your talk today was brilliant. Ironically, I’m a labor archivist, points to Chinese laborers using GitHub for social media protest. 8-8-8 labor slogan. Can you talk about… union…?
A: For myself, when it comes to actions, Charlotte Roh is one of my colleagues and is an amazing ScholComm librarian. In her email signature she includes “I do not respond to email on nights and weekends.” How fantastic to include your boundaries & show that you will not cross them. There are a lot of ways you might set boundaries for yourself. Even if you’re not doing it visibly putting it in your signature, you can at least delete Outlook from your phone. I also occasionally look at my job description, so then when evaluations come up, you can check whether you’re doing what you’ll be evaluated against. It’s hard for me to not want to be helpful, but saying yes to so many things can have bad consequences; being up until 3am getting things done so that you can get things accomplished for the next day. Management’s job is to evaluate you on the duties they hired your for… if pushback happens, that job description is a correction against job creep. So even just saying “you hired me to do this, so if you’re not going to compensate me for these new duties, it is not my job”
Q: About to graduate mls, I like to think of myself as a bad librarian. What do you look for in job descriptions if they’re so useful in protecting life-work balance?
A: Usually, job calls make it easy by saying “essential duties,” or “required qualifications vs preferred qualifications” Also, I think we tend to forget as workers that when you’re on an interview, you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. You can start to ask questions to see how they react / engage to sound out the culture, ask multiple people to see who answers in what way. You can learn the cultural expectations. Usually you’ll also speak to the dean or the director, who sets the culture of the workplace. Ask that person how they set or don’t set boundaries. How do they manage their own various “other duties as assigned.” That can help you gauge what you’re walking into as you begin.
Q: It’s so refreshing to hear from you, a Millenial and I’m a Baby Boomer librarian. Two comments: I wrote a book to address what I felt I should have learned. Your title is very catchy and makes me think, the word “bad”… how did that come about? Did someone make you feel bad? Are there other ways to feel?
A: Two reasons I chose “proud” “bad” as descriptors. One, as you said, sometimes one is negatively impacted by (…) example of black librarian in Evanston, ILL put on social media that although library has posters claiming to be open to all, but she saw patterns of discriminatory practice against patrons of color. Our library values should say that this was great to do, but she was almost fired and only stopped from retaliation by community members going to Board meetings to protect her. Also community people said that she should have said what she meant more nicely. Sought to bury the information to keep library’s image of “place of good work” Also decision to have conference in Orlando after Pulse shooting and the claims about “lots of people are technically unsafe” idea that kumbayah can stop people from being shot by the police. The people of color aspect, the queerness aspect was erased. Some might claim that race and identity factors are outside of our work, but they do impact our decisions. Also my friends love the “Bad Moms” movies, kind of raunchy movie rebellious movie. Connection between librarianship & all the expectations of emotional & other labor. So both that libraries make us feel bad & to rebel against that paradigm