Tribute Post for Fobazi Ettarh

With immense sadness, the writers of ACRLog acknowledge the passing of Fobazi Ettarh, library worker and influential LIS scholar. If you are able to contribute, there is a GoFundMe established for Fobazi’s wife, Elena, to assist with the significant medical and end-of-life expenses. This post will include some reflections from ACRLog members about their interactions with Fobazi’s influential work.

The highest form of intellectual contribution a humanistic scholar can make is to provide people a way of understanding themselves and their situation in a new way; to spotlight a widespread challenge by naming it and describing its facets; to give people language to discuss it and thereby work against it to make their lives better. So many of us who read Vocational awe and librarianship: The lies we tell ourselves can remember the revelatory feeling of being seen and understood; the feeling of when you finally find that perfect word you’ve been searching for, multiplied many times over. This type of contribution is both very rare and a true gift to the field, both in an academic and practical sense, and one that extends beyond librarianship. Thank you, Fobazi! You continue to make a difference.

– Sam Winemiller

Fobazi, Fobazi, Fobazi: thank you. Your work resonates across librarianship and beyond. You do not simply contribute to existing conversations — you offer a research framework that gave many of us new language, new questions, and new accountability. Through your scholarship, you illuminate how systems of labor shape who is permitted to work, to belong, and to be recognized as fully human.

I am proud to be part of a field that has learned to name vocational awe as a real and impactful concept — and to take seriously the ways our profession can romanticize service, self-sacrifice, and institutional loyalty at the expense of workers’ well-being. Your work, Fobazi, exists within that critical tradition, and also pushes further. Where vocational awe asks us to interrogate the mythology of librarianship, your scholarship asks us to interrogate at what cost. You make it clear that devotion to the profession cannot substitute for justice within it. That access to work is not simply about passion or calling, but about policy, protection, and power. In doing so, you expand how we think about labor in librarianship and whose experiences expose the limits of institutional narratives about care and service.

To honor Fobazi is to refuse the comfort of vocational awe when it obscures harm. It is to remain committed to building professional cultures grounded not in myth, but in accountability, equity, and material support. Her work continues to give us tools: to ask harder questions, to examine institutional complicity, and to imagine more just systems of work and knowledge.

– Caelin Ross

I first had the pleasure to hear about Fobazi’s work as a graduate student when I was also going through mental health struggles on top of the daily work that I had while working part-time in multiple libraries. Thinking about work as a source of stress almost felt forbidden, as I should have been so grateful to even have these kinds of opportunities and chances in life. I had honestly never thought to examine how my dream job, the industry that I dreamt of working in for so long, could be the stem of where I was feeling anything remotely negative. To be seen as radical, especially in a sector stereotyped as being so traditional, is such a courageous and personal action, and the impact that it has on early-career librarians and students, thinking about entering the industry is immense. To be introduced to these kinds of concepts so early and develop workstyles, work ethics, and enter the workforce with a strong and healthy mind is something I wish for all library students to have. To be seen in the workplace, to make a difference every day, and to remain in the profession upholding values such as the ones that originally led us down this path is a gift. Thank you Fobazi for all that you have done for the profession and for the librarians all over the world, you are dearly missed. 

– Lisa Shin

Fobazi’s life and work were deeply informed by her identity as a Black, queer, disabled woman. While Fobazi is rightly appreciated for her groundbreaking scholarship in coining and developing the concept of vocational awe, I would encourage those who have found her work with vocational awe to be eye-opening to explore her work and words that more directly relate to disability, in the hopes that you’ll find them equally revelatory. A great place to start is Fobazi’s Killing Me Softly, a choose your own adventure-style text-based game, where you can explore the cumulative impacts of microaggressions and acculturative stress by playing either as a white, able-bodied gay man or a Black, straight, disabled woman. Her blog posts about coming out as disabled and intracommunity violence within the disabled community are also must-reads. 

Fobazi was outspoken about the frustrations of being disabled in a world with too few accommodations. One way to honor her life and contributions to the profession is by considering how you can more fully consider the access needs of your disabled colleagues and patrons, by taking actions such as wearing masks, providing equitable access via virtual meetings/webinars, and regularly listening to and learning from members of the disabled community.

– Violet Fox

I started graduate school in Fall 2020, and one of the very first things I read in my classes was Vocational Awe and Librarianship. The turmoil of the world at that time was absolutely leading me to place librarianship on a sacred pedestal; continuing on that path would have burnt me out quickly, because as Fobazi said, “Martyrdom is not a long-lasting career.” It also allowed me to take many steps back and look at the field critically before I well and truly entered it, learning and asking about the ways that librarianship has either failed or actively caused harm to others. I cannot overstate the impact that this article and her work as a whole has had on not only my career, but in so many library workers’ lives, and for that, thank you. When we are discussing a new program, assessing and evaluating one we already do, or generally ranting about academia as a whole, my coworkers and I are always referencing Vocational Awe. Beyond her academic work, though, this is a deep and tragic loss for those who loved her. I did not ever have the privilege of meeting or talking with Fobazi in person or online, but from all the tributes I have read over the last few weeks, knowing her was a true joy. I am so sorry to Elena, Ysabel, and everyone else in her life; this is a tremendous loss. 

– Emily Zerrenner

I was gutted to hear the news of Fobazi Ettarh’s passing earlier this year. Like many of us I first became aware of Fobazi and her work on social media in the mid-2010s, when the website formerly known as Twitter was in what I’ll always think of as its librarian and higher education heyday. Her foundational article on vocational awe remains a piece that I return to again and again, and I was so lucky to have the opportunity to see her invited presentation at the ACRL 2019 conference, too. As I was educating myself about antiracism within and beyond the workplace, as well as critical librarianship, following Fobazi and her work was one of the ways I learned the most. And I’m so grateful for what I have learned by listening to Fobazi as she shared her lived experience at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. 

As a white able-bodied person I know that it is not the responsibility of folks of color to teach me about racism, nor disabled folks to teach me about ableism. Thank you, Fobazi, for sharing your experience and your research with us for so many years, you are already missed by so many.

– Maura Smale

Past ACRLog posts that directly reference Ettarh’s work: