Decolonizing the Academy

To decolonize is to challenge what is not working, how to challenge my practice. The history of higher education has been shaped by colonial impulses and the history of imperialism. While there has been work underway to decolonize collections, not enough emphasis has been put on decolonizing our traditions and process in academic libraries. While studying the lack of diversity in staffing or Library of Congress Subject Headings or exclusion in citation practices is important, decolonizing is simply not the same as antiracism.

As an individual in an academic institution, I'm aware of the long history of its colonial model.  In the United States, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the 1862 Homestead Act collectively solidified the colonial myth of terra nullius (uninhabited land) enabled the states to acquire and legitimize the taking of westward lands. The subsequent Morrill Land-Grant College Act in 1862 enabled the American states to collectively claim Native homelands in the name of “democratization” of education. Native Americans were subjugated in public policy, and made into caricatures in popular culture.   Canada too has its colonial past and some universities have direct connections to colonial figures, such as McGill University in Montréal.   It's named after James McGill, who was an owner himself of Black and Indigenous slaves. His death resulted in the founding of McGill after his wealth was donated on the condition a college was founded under his name.   While the history is often downplayed, colonial remnants are never really erased but rather continues through other traditions.  

Theresa Rocha Beardall’s “Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant” insightfully argues that such indigenous stereotypes at college and university sporting and student events demonstrate that anti-Indigenous racism is interwoven into the fabric of North American higher education. At McGill University, some argue that the history of the nickname ‘Redmen’ was originally written as two words (i.e. ‘Red Men’), in reference to the red school colours and red jerseys worn by McGill teams, but the problem with this argument is that McGill University used stereotyped Indigenous iconography for the Redmen for a full decade. Sports teams around the world have historically exploited offensive indigenous names. Even though it denied the original intentions of its moniker, ‘Redmen’ is widely acknowledged as an offensive term for Indigenous peoples, as evidenced by major English dictionaries.

In fact, at my institution, UBC, the university wasn’t actually permitted to use the name Thunderbird until 1948. A term that symbolizes a significantly deep meaning in Indigenous cultures, the moniker Thunderbird was used for a decade and a half without any consultation or permission with Musqueam Indigenous communities until 1948. The community and Chief William Scow of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people gave the school permission to use the name with a traditional ceremony. The land grant universities that exist today could not be possible without this intentional violence. Historical subordination manifests and how racialized organizations profit from this violence.

Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua have argued that the “failure of Canadian antiracism to make colonization foundational has meant that Aboriginal peoples’ histories, resistance, and current realities have been segregated from antiracism.” It’s critical to understand that the histories of racism and exclusion cannot be untied to the removal of indigenous from their land. There is a danger that the decolonizing process within universities is a branding process. We need to be sensitive, aware, and call out the marketing and branding of using EDI as a buzzword. This is a trap that academic libraries must be wary about. We need to discern between intentionality and moments of performative racial consciousness.

One recent piece of scholarship is Ashley Edward’s “Unsettling the Future by Uncovering the Past: Decolonizing Academic Libraries and Librarianship,” which argues that location is a barrier to many indigenous students. Whether to attend in-person programs or relocate for a job, leaving one’s community creates the sense of isolation, and can bring up trauma from the residential school and practices of separating families. Edwards poignantly points out that “moving away from your family and support can cause stress, in particular when entering the world of academia which continues to be modeled on Western European ideals.”

I still remember vividly in graduate school that professors and almost any practicing librarian would emphasize that “geographic flexibility” was critical for finding employment, for landing that penultimate first position. A sense of community is a universal feeling for BIPOC individuals from historically marginalized populations, and we forget the trauma of dislocation that happens in finding work. While decolonizing libraries and the library profession means that library services, collections, and classification systems need to be “sanitized” of colonial oppression, whatever we do, we need to critically integrate the elements of humanity.

The Contested Space in Diversity

Audrey Lorde has said that “much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other” and Canada has historically and socially influenced me as an individual working in the library, literary, and publishing fields.  Subsequently, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang assert the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted. What I find disconcerting is that despite a lot of work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, much of the intentions are superficial and do not intend to undo deep systemic racism. One recent example is the CBC’s adaptation of “Son of a Trickster.” Another is curator cheyanne turions, who has been mired in controversy since she publicly acknowledged she was unable to substantiate her claims of Indigenous identity, and recently resigned from her position at SFU Galleries.

Yang and Tuck call this type of settler nativism, when “settlers locate or invent a long lost ancestor who is rumored to have had ‘Indian blood,’ and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradication of Indigenous peoples.” This obsession with “race-shifting” of course, most oftentimes benefits those who seek to profit from their supposed ancestry. In Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, Darryl Leroux describes this “obsessive” search by some heretofore non-Indigenous Canadians for long-ago Indigenous ancestors who can justify them identifying as Métis by Canadian "white settlers" have redefined themselves as Métis over the past fifteen years is done within the absence of a verifiable Indigenous ancestor, and using gaps in ancient records, such as the unknown parentage of some early European women settlers.

I’d like to share a quote from Lee Maracle's First Wives Club who poignantly said, “I am not a partner in its construction, but neither am I its enemy. Canada has opened the door. Indigenous people are no longer ‘immigrants’ to be disenfranchised, forbidden, prohibited, outlawed, or precluded from the protective laws of this country.” Sadly, Maracle passed away this past month, and I’m pained to think of the challenges she faced as an indigenous author and scholar and the experiences of racism she faced in her journey throughout her life.

I’m fully aware of being a settler on this land and despite the struggles as a racialized person of colour, I am cognizant of the privileges of my intersectionality of identities. In my work, I collect, review, and purchase literature but now realizing the need to decolonize practices reinforces my need to be vigilant in acknowledging my own privileges and biases knowing that one can never shed their neutrality, but to show humility and continuous learning. The “supremacy of objectivity” that is embedded in Western thought and education is merely a wishful illusion.

Retention of Racialized Academic Librarians in the U.S. and Canada

This research team invites academic librarians that identify as racialized or members of the BIPOC community to participate in our survey related to retention. The purpose of this study is to identify organizational barriers that may impact the retention of racialized academic librarians in predominantly white institutions such as colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada.

The study focuses on structures in the library organization that may impact the experiences of racialized or BIPOC librarians.

The study will focus on the experiences of racialized or BIPOC librarians working in academic libraries as well as former librarians that identify as racialized or BIPOC who have left the profession due to challenges with organizational practices listed above.

COMPLETE THIS SURVEY

If you would like more information about the study, please feel free to contact us. This study has received a Research Ethics Board approval at the University of Toronto (RIS-41402) and the University of British Columbia (H21-02220). Your participation would be greatly appreciated in understanding organizational barriers in retaining racialized or BIPOC librarians.

INVESTIGATORS

• Allan Cho, Community Engagement Librarian, University of British Columbia
• Elaina Norlin, Professional Development/DEI Coordinator, Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
• Silvia Vong, Head of Public Services, University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto

Equity and Inclusion at the BookNet Canada's Tech Forum

 

One of the outcomes of Covid has been the migration of in-person events to online.   I've enjoyed my fair share of conferences and workshops this past year.   I've been following the BookNet Canada's Tech Forum, which is one of the country's largest book industry conferences with a focus on technology, data, and collaboration.   In recent years, like many industries, it's focused a lot on EDI topics, and 2020 highlighted some excellent sessions, one which particularly caught my attention.

Cynthia Pong, Feminist Career Strategist & Founder at Embrace Change, is a lawyer turned career coach whose passion is helping women of colour realize their ambitious career goals.   Her webinar at the conference, "Be seen be heard: A workshop to help you reclaim power in your career," however, is for anyone who is a minority and wants "actionable, high-impact tools and strategies to empower themselves in their day-to-day" — and in their overall career trajectory.  A few strategies I found extremely useful: 

1)  Make room for yourself to interject and be heard

2)  Seize the moment or pause the agenda

3)  Use non-verbals

4)  Pre-meet and amplify each other

5)  Demonstrate your leadership 

6)  Make yourself visible to sponsors and champions

7)  Identify allies

8)  Sharpen your communication

There are some fabulous sessions on EDI that I'm sharing here with you from the Tech Forum.   It's heartening to see that there's a real sense of inclusion, which is an evolution from previous conferences.   As libraries, publishing, and creative writing are all intertwined, these webinars are all so relevant and important.  

• Foreign object in the house of Canadian literature with Annahid Dashtgard, Chelene Knight, and moderator Léonicka Valcius.
• How to combat racial gaslighting in the workplace with Keni Dominguez
• Don't believe everything you think: How to spot and overcome your hidden biases at work with Michelle Grocholsky 
• Why are women always talking to men in novels? A conversation about debiasing books with Andrew Piper
• Diversity benchmarking: Improving diversity and inclusion in library collections with Laina Kelly

Turning from "Being to Doing" Anti-Racism As Action at Work by Iones Damasco

I highly respect Ione T Damasco for the work she's done in the area of equity, diversity, and inclusion.   Her talk urges us to view anti-racism as action, rather than using the word anti-racist as an identity.   While she questions whether we can change how we define organizational culture in library workplaces be an example of anti-racist action, she frames the challenge that certain hallmarks of white supremacist culture inform our notions of professionalism and workplace norms.  

There are many hurdles.  Quite likely, I won't see great change within my lifetime both within my profession and certainly in society.   I wish to be more optimistic, but based on the experience in my brief fifteen years in this profession and my volunteer work in the community, I've just seen it all and the tokenism and performativity.   One of Ione's message is that having mentorship and a supportive network is necessary to navigate the uncertainties and injustices that racialized and (in)visible minorities face in the workplace.   I've been part of a number of mentorship programs, offering my wisdom and support to graduate students and new information professionals.   I've been heartened at how I've been able to make a difference in their lives and how they've been able to use my advice and person experiences (gathered through years of trial by error).   From We Here, to ViMLoC, to the many ethnic caucuses, change will happen, though at a glacial pace.    

Reviewing "Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies Through Critical Race Theory"

I’ve been working with the Visible Minority Librarians Network of Canada (ViMLoC) in creating a journal club that highlights pieces in the BIPOC/diversity LIS literature. There are some books that I hold tightly both physically and intellectually long after reading, and Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory is one of those titles that I had to read, re-read, and reference in my research. 

 Knowledge Justice features some of the strongest voices of BIPOC writers who are both academic scholars and library practitioners, composed of fourteen chapters that each draw from critical race theory (CRT) in countering foundational principles, values, and assumptions of objectivity and neutrality, long-cherished in Library and Information Science and Studies (LIS) teaching and practices. While it’s no surprise to anyone that LIS is a predominantly white profession, the systemic inequities that historically marginalized groups face are often concealed behind colour-blind policies. 

 With a focus on the counterstory, the book deconstructs the comfortable and clean history of the library and archival collections, scholarly communication, hierarchies of power, epistemic supremacy, children's librarianship, teaching and learning, digital humanities, and the education system, Knowledge Justice challenges LIS to reimagine itself by throwing off the weight and legacy of white supremacy and reaching for racial justice. They propel CRT to center stage in LIS, to push the profession to understand and reckon with how white supremacy affects practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies.  I'm deeply moved by the stories shared in this book.   They're poignant, emotional, and at times, and impassioned.   If there's a title that I would recommend for 2021: this is it.  

It's Time To #DecolonizeLIS

I was invited to take part in a panel as part of the Canadian Academic Research Libraries (CARL) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion webinar series.   It was an exhilarating panel discussion and rewarded me with a lot of deep reflection over my years as a racialized librarian.   In my preparation to the talk, I had re-read Dorothy Kim's article piece, “How to DecolonizeDH: Actionable Steps for an Antifascist DH” is one of the best I’ve come across addressing the historic white supremacy in DH and what some DH scholars have proposed to initiatives and issues with openness, race, disability, LGBTQ, feminist, and other kinds of non-normative bodies in the field.    Dorothy is a professor of English, and is one of my favourite DH’ers.   In this article, she outlines a set of practical steps to #decolonizedh, to make it less white, to begin working on an antifascist DH.   I thought it would be interesting to adapt her proposal to LIS.  What if we were to integrate her ideas from one very white field to another?   How do we de-whiten LIS?   Here's what I came up with, with inspiration from Dorothy.

“If you build it, they will come” is a myth - LIS needs to be more intentional in recruiting and retaining scholars of colour and scholars working by incentivizing their presence.

LIS needs to stop being defensive about its whiteness - Instead of insisting on compiling a list of “projects” about communities of colour, LIS needs to protect those at the margins who are being attacked. It’s necessary to be proactive and digging in to help, fight back, and do the work against white supremacy.

LIS must stop ignoring critical race theory and postcolonial/ decolonial theory - LIS needs to ask how to dismantle and decolonize its standard histories, epistemologies, and methodologies. It needs to question its stance on science, which neutralizes the intersectionalities. Scholars have challenged the neutrality of ‘science’ in LIS and one even has suggested that LIS education itself has become “technocentric, male-dominated and out of touch with the needs of practitioners”.

LIS must have separate funds for inclusive projects - LIS needs to earmark separate money for projects related to and run by communities of color, graduate students, faculty and researchers of colour. It must be separate and specifically geared to expand this range of work, give credit, give funding, give resource help.

LIS must stop writing narratives that ignore other entire fields - LIS has often had difficulty defining itself, and within these identity crises, it’s had a tendency to subsume topics, methodologies and scholarship and pass them off as LIS’ interdisciplinarity.

LIS must stop excessively citing white men - It's time to stop creating conference and panel structures that replicate white genealogies.  From its inception, LIS has glorified the likes of Melvil Dewey, Eugene Garfield, John Cotton Dana.

LIS must decolonize its conferences and panels - LIS must decolonize its biggest conferences in the field and start to apportion out panels and presence by a different standard of inclusiveness. Organizing committees must find participants and panelists that represent the larger populations of their worlds.

LIS methods must not be only about tools - LIS classes must stop being just about technology. They must include a balance of discussing critical issues like race, gender, disability, multimodality, sexuality, etc.

LIS must fund developing scholars of colour - LIS training needs to directly give scholarships and particularly try to assemble groups to help potential scholars of colour to learn new skills but also these groups can allow people to talk to each other about some of the issues they see at stake and potentially find other collaborators.

LIS and the Rooney Rule - First started in the NFL as a requirement that at least 1 minority must be interviewed for every senior position. Some companies have begun using this hiring rubric, but LIS needs to institute the Rooney Rule for every position, every major grant, every major conference keynote and panel.    Some disciplines, such as Communications and Sociology, is currently tackling this problem of perpetuating citational segregation and the ghettoization of research.   LIS must address this as well.

Outreach and Programming: A Three-Pronged Model to Community Engagement

There's much in the research literature about community engagement and outreach for libraries, some of it interesting case studies of partnerships, others are interesting programming stories with some tips and tricks for best practices.   But one of the more interesting pieces that I came across recently is from the Oakland University Beaumont School of Medicine which reviewed the last seven years documents its outreach program's initiatives targeting both members of the university as well as the local community.  What's interesting is the thoughtful approach by its library in the form of a three-pronged outreach model that it suggests could be adopted by other libraries.   The authors of Community Engagement at an Emerging AcademicMedical Library: A Three-Pronged Outreach Model share a very useful and practical three model:

Integrate - Library services and information resources are shared between existing institutional activities.  

Partner - Between relevant stakeholders and groups to co-develop and host outreach activities.  

Create - These are library-driven initiatives, where the library is the primary driver of an outreach project or activity.  This puts the greatest strains on library time, staff, and resources but provides the library with the greatest degree of control and the least difficulty with issues such as coordinating schedules.  

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But as good as models can be, the authors suggest two areas of best practice that should be considered when developing a community engagement plan, which I find to be truly appreciate and can find useful for my own work in this area:

Assessment - The methods and quality of assessment used by libraries in outreach activities vary drastically.   While metrics could include things such as participant attendance, money raised, student application of information literacy skills, how does one measure success in engagement?  

Long-term planning - Succession planning is difficult with staffing and leadership changes.  While the literature points to long-term goals early, initiatives do sometimes just naturally fade away.  

Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement

Karim Tharani's Shifting Established Mindsets and Praxis in Libraries: Five Insights for Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship is an interesting piece of scholarship about library engagement.   Tharani is the IT Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan who helped develop the Ginan Central digital collection.   As an initiative to digitally curate an oral tradition, the project shows how librarians can improve discoverability of non-Western knowledge materials in libraries.  In the context of the Ismaili Muslim community, the term ginan is used for the community’s collection of oral tradition of gnostic and devotional hymns.

Canada, as in most Western societies, the primary medium to codify knowledge continues to be written text, whether in print or electronic format.  Consequently, bibliographic standards and practices in academic libraries have evolved to be very efficient in managing textual knowledge materials and making them accessible.  This specialized operational efficiency, however, comes at the cost of marginalizing non-textual, and by extension non-Western, knowledge carriers, including oral traditions.  

1. Value Relationships Over Tasks - Establishing trust with community elders, leaders, and youth is vital in uncovering and understanding the needs and challenges of the community.   As this may be counter to the efficient workflows and tasks of academic institutions used to one-off projects that have predetermined timelines, librarians need to sustain relationships that are forged as part of these projects.

2.  Accept Community Engagement as a Continuum - Communities are like families and consists of individuals with different personalities, experiences, and perspectives.  Though a community may share a common history, their opinions, preferences, decisions, are not monolithic.   Librarians need to be appreciative and sensitive to these varying sentiments in order to be productive and successful in their work with communities.  

3.  Learn to Appreciate Rather than Appropriate Materials - The history of colonization is embedded in appropriation, including the practice of physically relocating materials for processing which can be a culturally traumatic process.   Librarians need to demonstrate an appreciative mindset by exercising flexibility in processing community collections, which again counters a typical operational workflow of libraries in which materials are selected, acquired, and described before being made available through discovery systems and catalogues.    For true collaboration to happen, librarians need to shift their mindset from physically gathering collections in libraries to one that prioritizes work to happen off-campus locations in the community.  

4.  Consider Oral Sources to Be As Important as Textual Ones - Libraries are used to working with tangible, text-based knowledge carriers grounded in physical convenience that is contrary to the value of orality of knowledge based on traditions that are alive and current.   Librarians need to shift their thinking that Indigenous knowledge as 'static' to one that is as continuing.  

5.  Accept Community Materials as Credible Knowledge Resources -  As Western scholarship tends to reduce oral traditions to textual renditions for research, such as prioritizing ancient manuscripts, this questionable practice is inconsistent with how communities prefer to render oral traditions to text and other media to complement rather than replace their traditional ways of transmitting oral knowledge.  Librarians need to be cognizant and respectful of these traditions when working with their communities and integrating these communal materials into scholarly discourses.

I value Karim Tharani's contribution to this area of scholarship and appreciate the best practices he's laid out when working with communities.  As I move into the deep and enriching work of library engagement with our diverse communities in British Columbia and Canada, this will be a strong reminder of the continuing evolution of programs and services and how they fit in the paradigm of community engagement.   "Outreach" is an outdated terminology that activates and transmits knowledge in a very surface-level contact with a community, community engagement continues to evolve not as a   'model' so much as by a framework of guiding principles, strategies, and approaches, one based on principles that respect the right of all community members to be informed, consulted, involved and empowered.   Things move quickly; certainly, my research and scholarship in this area has changed so much that many of my earlier thoughts as a librarian need to be updated.

Broken Publishing Gone Wild - Time for a Change

The recent shock on Wall Street amateur investors used Reddit to challenge the investment establishment, stocks in GameStop rose suddenly from about $18 dollars a share to $347 dollars within hours.   When the dust finally settles, scores of business and history books will emerge about the saga.  GameStop will forever be remembered as a 'meme stock,' a reminder that the power of social media can challenge big money corporations.  While some deny it is nothing more than a symptom of the 'infodemic' of conspiracy theories and false claims, I instead argue that this is an evolution of the deep distrust of 'elitist' capitalism.   The argument has been that these too-big-to-fail institutions have taken advantage of investors, often bilking them of fees and talking down to the so-called 'uneducated' everyday investor while reaping profits at their expense.   The GameStop incident is the 'wisdom of the crowds', and I think the financial industry is undergoing a tectonic shift, and long before GameStop happened, discount brokerages have already given autonomy to individual retail investors.    But it's not the only industry that is about to be shaken.

Currently, the current academic publishing industry is dominated by monopolies.  Academic libraries have cut subscriptions over the past two decades with journals often consuming sometimes more than half of their budgets.  While other industries, such as the news, tend to pay their staff and writers for the content they sell, academic publishers don't even need to do that and, instead, getting their articles, their peer reviewing, and even much of their editing for free.  Something doesn't quite look right with this model.  Content funded by the government and student tuition goes directly to these publishers while universities are locked into buying their products. Academic journals are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their research areas. 

Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases, the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all.   They refer to this as journal bundling, and no one really knows who is paying what.  The monopoly of for-profit publishers Routledge, Elsevier, Springer, Elsevier, Emerald, Sage, and Wiley-Blackwell have a dominant grip on even the open-access market, as Shaun Khoo's piece in Liber Quarterly argues that article processing charges (APC) have opened up huge opportunities for big publishers by "going gold OA" to grow their revenue base even more.    This is unsustainable, but faculty and researchers are complicit as they need the publishing houses to secure tenure and promotion.   Academic libraries are on their own for the most part to resolving this, and it's happening one way or another.    The publishers know timing is running out, but they're prolonging the inevitable fall of this vicious cycle as long as possible.