Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies

Panopticism and Complicity

Ana Ndumu — 2023-02-10

Historically, libraries, archives, and museums—or LAM institutions—have been complicit in enacting state power by surveilling and policing communities. This article broadens previous scholars’ critiques about individual institutions to LAM institutions writ large, drawing connections between these sites and ongoing racist, classist, and oppressive designs. We do so by dialing in on the ethical premise that justifies panoptic systems, utilitarianism, and how the glorification of pragmatism reifies systems of control and oppression. First, we revisit LIS applications of Benthamian and Foucauldian ideas of panoptic power to examine the role of LAM institutions as sites of social enmity. We then describe examples of surveillance and state power as they manifest in contemporary data infrastructure and information practices, showing how LAM institutional fixations with utilitarianism reify the U.S. carceral state through norms such as the aggregation and weaponization of user data and the overreliance on metrics. We argue that such practices are akin to widespread systems of surveillance and criminalization. Finally, we reflect on how LAM workers can combat structures that rely on oppressive assumptions and claims to information authority.

Pre-print first published online February 10, 2023

Archiving Black Movements

Tracy S. Drake — 2022-08-05

With the move towards both critical information literacy and community-centered archives, cultural heritage and information professionals have been called to further interrogate our role as collectors and catalogers of materials. We know that the preservation and description of objects, records, and ephemera ascribe historical meaning, are culturally bound, and impact understanding beyond our lifetime. In this heightened time of social injustice, Black librarians, archivists, and curators are collaborating with community and organizing groups to select and preserve materials related to uprisings in real-time. However, there is a disconnect from the records and items selected for the archives and materials valued by the organizers themselves. There is also a lack of published texts centering the approaches and materials of Black people organizing for their own communities as a part of the archival record with few exceptions. Knowing there is power in the archives, there must be careful consideration to the prioritization and representation of Black communities in their own words.

In the following conversations, we thought critically about the provenance and authority of records found on the internet and how archivists should consider materials created by organizers and those created by the community at large. We facilitated three interviews with activists and organizers whose work focuses on the liberation of Black lives globally to both frame and interrogate current archival practices. These interviews explored our archival approach, specifically centering the narratives of the people on the ground. Through these conversations, we discussed the state of organizing and creating digital content as well as how cultural heritage professionals should prioritize the histories of various movements for Black life globally. The interviewees included activists and organizers from the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (1968-1970s), Black Nashville Assembly, and formerly of Black Lives Matter (2013-present), and End SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) movement (2020-present) in Nigeria.

In shaping this conversation, we considered these key questions: What objects speak to your “work”? What content do you think will help future generations understand past and present movements around Black life? How can cultural heritage professionals determine what is created by BLM, BPP, etc. versus what is contributed by the community-at-large? What does Black liberation look like to you?

This article outlines and reimagines archival work as community-based, highly collaborative, and iterative for professionals outside of Black social and political movements. With a focus on intentionality around the communities impacted, individuals involved, and the movements at large, we framed what archival materials are important to Black organizers of our time. With their insight, cultural heritage and archival professionals can create deliberate processes to get direct feedback from the creators themselves for the archives. Overall, this article aims to introduce ways of thinking to decentralize power in archival collections and provide agency to organizers through their own historical record.

Pre-print first published online 8/5/2022

Does It Matter

Sumayya Ahmed — 2022-09-30

The catalytic social justice events of the spring and summer of 2020 led to calls for a racial reckoning within society at large and also within the field of library and information science (LIS). This motivated us to capture the perceptions and voices of professionals across the field about changes they may have witnessed in their workplace, profession, and themselves. We consider the following questions: Have conversations, social spaces, teaching practices, policies, workplace dynamics, and demands, changed in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, and if so, how? Have institutional changes perceived as responses to BLM protests been witnessed? What are the nuances behind such behavioral changes (e.g., opportunity, compulsion, peer pressure)?

For this research, we used Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to explore how the 2020 BLM protests impacted the workplace environments of LIS faculty and professionals in libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). A 27-question survey was administered via Qualtrics and participants were recruited using LAM professional listservs. A total of 645 participants completed the survey. This research provides the preliminary analysis and discussion of those results and provides insights to the impact of the 2020 social justice movements in LAMs.

By capturing voices of LAM professionals, we explore participants’ perceptions of the impact that BLM protests had on their institutions and/or professional associations and document a range of responses at both the individual and structural levels.

Pre-print first published online 9/30/2022

Brazilian Black Librarianship

Franciele Carneiro Garcês-da-Silva — 2023-07-17

In Brazil, only recently has Brazilian Black Librarianship (Biblioteconomia Negra Brasileira in Portuguese; BNB) experienced renewed interest as an intellectual, professional and bibliographic movement that ranges from professional training and performance to theoretical and epistemological reflections on the critical reflections produced by Black librarians, as well as research on ethnic and racial issues, socioeconomic conditions, and the Black population within Library and Information Science (Biblioteconomia e Ciência da Informação in Portuguese; BCI). This article presents the BNB movement through its history, praxis, and curricular transformation of the library profession in the context of the epistemologies produced by Black librarians in Brazil. The justification for this study lies in debating how LIS as a field promotes and reproduces whiteness and the death of knowledge of Black librarians (and librarians belonging to non-white ethnic and racial groups), resulting in the exclusion of this knowledge in libraries, praxis, and librarian education training. In other words, whiteness in Brazilian librarianship is instituted as an exercise in epistemicide, nullifying or hiding other epistemologies. For the socio-critical construction of the framework of this research, we analyzed of books, articles, theses, dissertations, annals of scientific events in the field, and manuals published in the period from 1987 to 2020. Such information sources were drawn from databases, websites of scientific events, class councils and professional associations, graduate programs in information science, and the Brazilian platform for researchers' curricula, Currículo Lattes. In this theoretical framework, we sought to uncover the way that Brazilian LIS education promotes Eurocentric (white) thinking and renders racial debate and Black intellectuals invisible, drawing from the philosophies of Grada Kilomba, Sueli Carneiro and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Anchored in these theoretical references from different areas of knowledge, we debate the fight against the epistemicide of Black thought within the scope of scientific production in Brazilian librarianship. Finally, we bring the profile of Black Brazilian librarians and their performance with ethnic-racial issues, and the scientific production of Black librarians at BNB that gave rise to the movement to introduce Black epistemologies in LIS. The conclusion points to critical perspectives that bring the discussion on race to the center of the field and the formation of a Brazilian tradition of theories and methods through the struggles and resistance of the country's Black communities.

Pre-print first published online 7/17/2023

Dialogue: Shorish and Nowviskie

Yasmeen Shorish — 2022-05-12

This dialogue offers perspectives from two differently-positioned library leaders on their collaborative work to advance equity and racial justice in the context of a predominantly white academic library and educational technology organization. Topics covered include issues of scale and temporality in reckoning with structural racism; developing a workplace culture that supports growth and learning while mitigating harm; building and sustaining community both within and beyond formal institutions; developing personal and organizational accountability; and challenges in the use of data for assessing progress and working authentically toward change.

Pre-print first published online 5/12/2022

Black Lives Still Matter for LIS: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Tonia Sutherland — 2023-07-17

This introduction highlights the articles in the special issue Library and Information Studies and the Mattering of Black Lives.