Tag: power

Agency, Not Use

The body is an agent, not a resource

-Donna Haraway

This quote appeared on a slide during Carrie Wade’s presentation at the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium last month. Her talk, Making the Librarian Body, was a part of a four woman panel, (Re)productive Labor and Information Work, which also included the excellent work of Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, Alanna Aiko Moore, and Chiméne Tucker.

I’ve not read Donna Haraway’s work, but A Cyborg Manifesto and Situated Knowledges are on my TBR list now (thanks, Carrie!). Her words resonated with me, as did all of Carrie’s presentation to be honest, as I thought about the language that we use to describe ourselves as library workers in academia. I’m working on a research project with Joanna Gadsby and Siân Evans on the pedagogical power dynamics between librarians and faculty, and there is so much common language among interview participants. Statements along the lines of…

I just wish faculty would use me in their classes.

I want students and faculty to see me as a resource.

Why won’t they take advantage of me and what I have to offer?

I’ve used words like these before. I’m sure we all have. Until recently I hadn’t stopped to think about the implications of these statements being used in a feminized profession, the gendered roots of those sentiments, and how they imply a problematic use of the body. I am not a resource; I am a person. I am a woman with agency, skill, experience, and talent. I do my work for myself and for my community. I am a teacher who facilitates learning. I do not go to work to be used. I go to work to educate, empower, and learn.

There’s a tendency towards eye-rolling whenever I get too far into the semantic weeds of our professional discourse, but I keep poking at our word choices because I think they matter. They reveal attitudes and reflect internalized values. They show us how we see ourselves and how we present ourselves to be seen by others. What would an empowered discourse of library work look and sound like? Could we replace the above statements with things like…

I am an educator.

I see myself as a facilitator of knowledge, learning and empowerment.

I do my job well for myself and my community.

I value my own expertise and the expertise of students, faculty, and staff.

Our bodies are our own and are a part of our being. We act in our bodies rather than provide them to others as a resource. As library workers we have an opportunity to challenge and change language that reduces our work to only being valuable if taken advantage of by others. Our work is integral, vital, and important. It works in tandem with and reproduces the academy in which we exist. We are agents, not resources.

Expectations of Expertise

With the slower summer days I’m better able to keep up with library and higher education news, blogs, and Twitter, though I have to admit that sometimes I wish I didn’t. I’m not going to link to the very snarky, and, frankly, mean piece currently making the rounds in which a researcher belittles the work of archivists. I guess it brings in the pageviews and ad dollars, though as a commenter noted, I can’t imagine that any archivist who comes across this essay will be welcoming to that researcher in the future. I’ve also been bothered this week by what seemed like a summary dismissal of a librarian’s concerns about textbook publisher access models in response to a faculty member’s question about the potential for student savings. The librarian pointed out that this very sort of vendor leasing model had often ultimately resulted in higher costs for libraries, as the vendors in question increased their prices every year.

All of which has me thinking about expertise. Librarians have it — why don’t many of those outside of the library seem to expect it?

Academia has a hierarchical structure, and academic librarians like all academic workers are embedded in it, which I’m sure influences perceptions of expertise. Last Fall Veronica wrote about the power dynamics in academia that affect the ways that faculty don’t recognize the information literacy expertise of librarians. This is a familiar and frustrating experience that I imagine all librarians who teach and do reference have found themselves in (myself included). Veronica noted that:

we are not necessarily seen as possessing valuable expertise until we prove ourselves worthy

Veronica specifically highlighted expertise in information literacy in her post, and I also think that there are many ways in which the expertise of workers in all areas of the library isn’t acknowledged. We’ve been trained and have worked to develop our practice in our libraries, often earning one or more advanced degrees as well. What is it about librarianship that leads otherwise smart people to assume that expertise is not required for our jobs? While I’d been a heavy user of libraries before becoming a librarian, I can’t ever remember thinking that librarianship was an unskilled job, or that librarians weren’t necessary in order for the library to function.

This summer I’ve also finally gotten around to reading Roma Harris’s book Librarianship: The Erosion of a Women’s Profession, which has provoked lots of thinking about expertise and gender. Harris notes that librarianship, like other female-intensive professions (examples include nursing and social work), has long had the perception of being low-skilled and requiring little training, and that low status and pay follow from these low expectations. Some aspects of librarianship that Harris discussed were less relevant to the current state of the profession, now 25+ years after it was published, though it was somewhat disheartening to see that some things have not changed. Not long ago I added “Dr” to my Twitter handle in solidarity with academic women in expressing their exasperation at having their research questioned or even explained to them by folks who assume a lack of expertise until otherwise demonstrated.

We have expertise as librarians, and I expect it of myself and my colleagues, who work hard to provide resources, services, and space for our academic community every day. I also expect that I will continue to need to share that fact with others to shine a light on the terrific work we do in and beyond the library.

Analyzing Authority @ the ACRL Conference

On the last morning of my last day at the ACRL Conference I tweeted out a quick observation:

I got a couple of retweets and even started up a Twitter conversation with @nancyeadams, who shared a preprint of an article she’s written that discusses authority (among other topics), which I’m looking forward to reading this summer. But then it was time to head home.

I’ve never done any textmining before, so I tried to dip my toe in the pool by using Storify to pull together tweets that included the word “authority” and the hashtag #acrl2013. But I was tired after the conference and somewhat impatient. I couldn’t get Storify to simultaneously display tweets with the other hashtag (#acrl13) I saw being used occasionally, so I gave up pretty quickly; it also seemed like Storify wasn’t pulling in every single tweet from Twitter. I tried using Zach Coble’s fascinating ACRL Conference social media archive, but I couldn’t manipulate the tweet text all at once. I was also worried that as the conference receded into the past, tweets would become more difficult to find. So I went for the bash-it-with-a-rock strategy: I did a search in Twitter for each of the two hashtags, then I cut and pasted all of the tweets into a text file.

And there the text file sat until Memorial Day weekend, when the semester had ended and I finally had a chance to get back to it. I should stress that this is (still) a fairly basic analysis — I’ve gone through the text of tweets from the beginning of the conference to the end to find all instances of the word “authority” to see whether anything particularly interesting stood out. I’m certain that there are better tools to use for this task, but I’m (still) impatient so I’m plowing ahead with my rocks. (If you’ve used any tools that seem like they’d be useful in this context, please let me know in the comments!)

So, what did I find? I pulled 8,393 tweets (including retweets) with the hashtags #acrl2013 and #acrl13 dating from April 3 through April 16 at around 10:30pm. There were 60 occurrences of the word “authority” in the tweets I pulled.

Some of the patterns are easy enough to see and explain. First thing Thursday morning was the panel session “Questioning Authority: Standard Three and the Critical Classroom” with Jenna Freedman, Emily Drabinski, and Lia Friedman. This session had its own hashtag — #qacrlauthority — which made the tweets even easier to spot (and which I really appreciated since the wicked weather made me miss the session). There were 41 occurrences of the word “authority” in the tweets and retweets from this session. Laura O’Brien created a Storify of the panel which looks to have captured the session well. As librarians we should examine the authority embedded in controlled vocabularies, sources, and other library systems we use, and consider the ways we can empower students as authorities.

Chronologically, the next mention of authority was a tweet from Alison Head’s invited paper on Project Information Literacy, a multi-year, multi-institution study of college students’ information seeking and use. They have a nifty infographic created from their data on how college students seek information.

I missed that presentation (and haven’t read the paper yet) so I can’t offer any extra context around this tweet. But it’s an interesting comparison to the tweets from the Questioning Authority session, especially this one:

And in comparison to Henry Rollins’ mention of authority in his keynote (there were 5 tweets that referred to the thematic links he drew between Thomas Jefferson and punk rock):

And in comparison to the three tweets from the Feminist Pedagogy panel session on Sunday morning, especially:

Taken together, all of these tweets seem to point to a tension between librarians (and libraries) and our patrons, especially students. We have authority in the information realm, authority conferred by education, by experience, by knowledge. Is there a down side to having that authority? Can looking for ways to enable students and patrons to seize some of that authority enhance their learning? And are there reasons not to share or transfer that authority?

A couple of tweets from the libraries and publishing discussion at THATCamp ACRL hinted at the relationship between authority and prestige, a relationship which seems to be growing increasingly fraught as scholarly communications continue to shift and change.

Finally, three tweets discussed the nature of authority in our own library workplaces. Two were from the session “Think Like A Startup: Creating a Culture of Innovation, Inspiration, and Entrepreneurialism,” including one from my fellow ACRLogger Laura Braunstein:

Another seems to have been from the session “Curb Your Enthusiasm? Essential Guidance for Newbie Academic Librarians,” and pairs well with Laura’s tweet above:

I’ve found it interesting to see the various points of the conference where the topic of authority was discussed and considered. I confess that I’m not a big fan of the word authority. When I teach students about evaluating information I always use the term expertise, and in writing this post it’s been easy to see why: in looking through these tweets I’m struck by the underlying theme of power. Thinking on this more drove me to seek out some definitions. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists this as the first definition of authority:

an individual cited or appealed to as an expert

and this as the second:

power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior

which for me comes uncomfortably close to authoritarian:

1. of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority
2. of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people

This as opposed to the more egalitarian nature of the term expertise, from expert:

having, involving, or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience

As librarians we aim to increase access to information, to share it, and ultimately to promote expertise among our patrons and students. The words we use when we describe our roles and relationships — both within and outside of the library — matter. When we use the term authority, is it possible to get away from power? And do we want to? After all, power can be used for good as well as for ill. Do we lose anything by shifting our use to expertise instead of authority?