Articulating Our Very Unfreedom: The Impossibility of Refusal in the Contemporary Academy

This paper begins and ends with a provocation: I argue that refusal in librarianship is both impossible and necessary. Reviewing examples of crisis narratives which permeate both American and Canadian universities, I take a materialist perspective on the idea of refusal within academic librarianship. To do so, I draw on the work of Audra Simpson, Kyle Whyte, Eve Tuck, Mario Tronti, and Rinaldo Walcott to examine the sites of impossibility of refusal in the practice of academic librarianship within contemporary neoliberal education institutions. Then, I analyze the totality of capitalism in setting the limit for the practice of refusal through case studies of direct action, including the Icelandic Women’s Strike of 1975 and the 2020 Scholar Strike Canada. Finally, I identify private property and history as key frames for understanding the contradiction at the heart of refusal of crisis. As such, any refusal that does not address the centrality of labour and private property relations can thus be understood as harm reduction rather than emancipation. Ultimately, I argue that for librarians to refuse would require an abandonment of liberalism as librarianship’s guiding philosophy, and a redefinition of librarianship as such.

Towards an Ethics of Unity: An Ecological Approach to Overcoming Dispossession in Academic Libraries

Crisis narratives are stories meant to persuade that one exists in a state of emergency. Under extractive capitalism, crisis narratives frame the scope of ethical behaviour in response to crisis. Once set, these crisis ethics promote conformity in labour practices to avoid catastrophe. Surrendering the means to self-define priorities, values, and identity of the academic library profession creates a more pliable work force. This essay uses critical and philosophical methods to apply lessons learned from landscapes ruined by extractive capitalism to professional library practice fractured by alienation, diremption, and dispossession. A critique of the exploitation of ethics of fear and hope is offered, along with a method for identifying these as they appear in crisis narratives. The essay concludes with a recommendation to pursue an ethics of unity, predicated on promoting flourishing through professional mutualism, dedication to direct action, and a focus on sustainability.

Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries

In this paper, we consider what we identify as crisis surveillance capitalism in higher education, drawing on the work of Naomi Klein and Shoshana Zuboff. We define crisis surveillance capitalism as the intersection of unregulated and ubiquitous data collection with the continued marginalization of vulnerable racial and social groups. Through this lens, we examine the twinned crisis narratives of student success and academic integrity and consider how the COVID-19 pandemic further enabled so-called solutions that collect massive amounts of student data with impunity. We suggest a framework of refusal to crisis surveillance capitalism coming from the work of Keller Easterling and Baharak Yousefi, identifying ways to resist and build power in a context where the cause of harm is all around and intentionally hidden.

Genealogy of Refusal

Why can’t librarians “Just Say No”? To answer this question, we look at workplace refusal through the fine arts, literature, and popular culture to construct a genealogy of workplace refusal. In it, we also begin to trace a lineage of crisis narrative critique alongside the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe. We explore the librarian’s role and voice through the lens of both popular culture and academic publications. In our companion multimedia, hypertextual Scalar project also titled A Genealogy of Refusal: Walking Away from Crisis and Scarcity Narratives, we contextualize strategies of refusal in libraries through critical response to and annotations of film clips and illustrations. We examine gender differences in portrayals of workplace refusal. We laugh when in Parks and Recreation a stereotypical librarian ignores a stripper but warns noisy patrons: “Shh—This is a library!” We are horrified when aspiring librarians in Morgenstern’s Starless Sea, hands tied behind their backs, have their tongues torn from their mouths. Elinguation as a job prerequisite? No, thanks. The implications of saying “No” are many. We explicate ways librarians are made vulnerable by crisis narratives and constructed scarcity. We advocate for asset framing and developing fluencies in hearing and saying “No.” Looking forward, how long will it take librarians to reclaim “Yes” in a way that works for us?

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand’s lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Dangerous Aliens, Crisis Constellations, and Information Gaps

Chapter 4 shifts the analytical focus from elite claims made in the name of ‘the people’ to EU citizens’ vernacular knowledge of migration. Particular emphasis is given to the vernacular knowledge and categories used by citizens to discuss the issue of migration as it is perceived to impact and disrupt their everyday lives, the underpinning assumptions about hierarchies of race and gender used to position citizens in relation to perceptions about different ‘types’ of people on the move, and citizens’ awareness of/support for dominant governmental and media representations of the issue of migration in Europe. As well as offering a map of these contours, the discussion identifies three overriding themes. First, vernacular conversations problematize the notion of a linear transmission between elite crisis narratives and their reception among diverse publics. Second, the claim that elite narratives merely ventriloquize what ‘the people’ think about and want in regard to about migration is challenged by the complexity and nuance of vernacular narratives. Third, EU citizens repeatedly spoke of what they perceived to be a series of ‘information gaps’, which led to a widespread distrust of mainstream politicians and media sources, anxieties about their individual and collective futures, and demands for more detailed, higher quality, and accessible knowledge about migration from the EU, national governments, media sources, and academics. By taking vernacular views and experiences of migration seriously we can better understand how the propagation of misinformation, confusion, and uncertainty among EU citizens set the scene for populist notions of ‘taking back control’ to thrive.