Microaggressions, Faculty, and Academic Librarians: a study in intersectionality

I’ve been a follower of LISMicroaggressions on Tumblr for a while now, and even managed to pick up a zine or two in person at various library conferences. Their posts are a much needed reminder that as liberal and well-meaning as we all think/hope/claim/want our libraries to be, the day-to-day experiences of library workers can be fraught with all the -isms. There’s a strong desire, particularly in our current political climate, to make our academic library spaces welcoming and inclusive to students, faculty, and staff at our institutions. What I appreciate about LISMicroaggressions is that it is a mirror for the profession, one that–to continue this forced metaphor–provides a forum to critically reflect on our own prejudices and biases as well as the everyday (however unintended) acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. that occur in our workplaces among colleagues.

At the 2016 Conference on Inclusion and Diversity in Library and Information Science (CIDLIS), I learned about another microaggression project spearheaded by Joy Doan and Ahmed Alwan at California State University, Northridge: Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. Joy and Ahmed are specifically examining microaggressions against academic librarians by non-library faculty or “teaching faculty.” Their project is rooted in the widely held belief that collaboration between librarians and faculty essential to the integration of the academic library into a campus community. Yet the goal of their project is to investigate the “dissatisfaction” academic librarians feel “about mistreatment by some teaching faculty.”

Joy’s presentation at CIDLIS was, to me, oddly reassuring in the same way that I find LISMicroaggressions is a comfort. Both projects are validating. They take comments or moments in my professional practice that are so fleeting that I question what exactly just happened, and yet so present as to feel oh-so-heavy. The discrepancies in age, educational attainment, gender, and scholarly background between librarians and non-librarian faculty are real, but are rarely acknowledged in the “collaboration literature.” If we can’t honestly discuss the impact of these aspects of librarian identity on our relationships with our faculty colleagues, how can we begin to include the intersectional identities of our librarians of color or those who identify as somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the impact those identities have on collaboration?  If we want to take it a step further, why not look into the labor practices and classification of librarians in academia?

So much of practice-based LIS writing implores librarians to partner with faculty, but in doing so, puts all of the responsibility on the librarian. If we just do enough outreach, learn enough about faculty teaching and research, get that second master’s degree in a subject area, say yes to just one more class, and provide enough free snacks, then BLAMMO! COLLABORATION WILL HAPPEN! Instead of writing about the duty librarians have to fight for a seat at the faculty table (despite often being classified as faculty), we should be digging into the aspects of our identities that make our position within academic so tenuous.

That’s a large part of the reason I’m so drawn to both LISMicroaggressions and Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. I feel as though taken together, these two projects are investigating the culture of academic libraries and the prejudices that make library work so emotional-labor-intensive. I know based on her presentation at CIDLIS that Joy and Ahmed have plans to analyze the data they’ve gathered according to different demographic characteristics and identities of librarians. I’m curious to learn about how our intersectional identities as librarians impact our interactions with non-library faculty. I think our profession would be well-served by building on LIS intersectionality research like Fobazi Ettarh’s excellent article, Making a New Table: Intersectional Librarianship. If you have recommendations for additional reading–articles, blogs, websites, books–please share in the comments!