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silveradept[Hey, look, it's a bonus entry! This is definitely one of the things I wasn't aware of in library school, for reasons that will become apparent soon enough.]
A very clear example of vocational awe, as applied to the librarian, in the form of a poem by Peg Johsnson, a retiring librarian on the Office of Intellectual Freedom blog. The order of the poem is first about the books, and then about the curation of resources, and then about the fact that librarians help people bridge gaps in their learning with regard to technology and the increasing digitization of everything. After all that comes the privacy part, which OIF would be most interested in. But I'm going to quote the last two stanzas, because there's where all that awe comes into play most clearly.
That's a pretty good example of the vocational awe idea. Libraries become sacred space, as part of a profession that seems mysterious and not all that well-known, or necessarily that prestigious, but it does all of those important things that people need. And the poem itself starts with the books, that terrible contradiction of what everyone knows the library for and what might be, arguably, the least important thing in the library when compared to things like privacy and assistance in finding relevant information and putting on free classes to help with technological divides. Even as librarians, we can't necessarily let go of the past well enough to be able to embrace our future roles. The sort of thing that Hi, Miss Julie talks about when describing the emotional labor of librarianship - very important things, but also things that have very gendered expectations and understanding (or lack thereof as to who is doing the labor and who is benefiting from it. Vocational awe often concentrates and ampllifes all of those demands, and doesn't necessarily provide any sort of meaningful way of recharging your reserves, either.
The meat of the post, though, is instead about these linked posts from In The Library With The Lead Pipe, "an open access, open peer reviewed journal" that likes to talk about things that probably don't make it into more prominent or more mainstream publications, such as Library Journal. Some of the "name withheld" letters in those publications do talk about issues in the profession - the May 02018 letters section had a white man grumbling about how everything these days turns up to be "patriarchy" or "racism" or other such things and that if people of color and women were doing more harm than good to the cause of gathering allies by constantly talking about these problems. I think they'd stop talking about it so much if actual progress were being made on the matter.
The posts are separate, but their topic is linked, and it's about diversity, inclusion, and the requirements that a member of a marginalized group have to go through to appear sufficiently White to be considered for a position. Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship is an interrogation of the hiring process and what librarianship states as both requirements and preferences for the job. Unsurprisingly, those requirements reflect White, generally cis, capitalist, middle class values.
(The article doesn't specifically mention this, but it might be taking as granted that a person reading the article knows that the biggest stonking requirement of this nature is the Master's degree for entry-level librarian positions, which requires that a prospective librarian have sufficient privilege to make it to college, pass college, then go to graduate school and pass that first. And then essentially be able to stick with the profession for at least ten years to either take advantage of loan forgiveness or to pay back the cost of all that college, while being underpaid for your work (because vocational awe). The article points out that negotiating for a good salary is likely to leave you without a job. Furthermore, there's not usually a path to start as a page and work your way up to the librarian position through experience, possibly taking a couple classes along the way to fill in gaps of your knowledge that you won't get through working in a library.)
Librarianship, much like technology, tends to be oriented toward the idea that a lack of diversity in the profession is a problem with a discrete solution and that you can throw sufficient resources at it through the use of diversity scholarships, fellowships, and the like to make it attractive for marginalized people to join. If there's all those resources out there, we reason, and people aren't taking advantage of them, then there must not be enough quality people available.
That cake is a lie. White Librarianship In Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS helps explain why.
Scholarship programs aren't enough, because, again, like the tech field, you can recruit all the people you like, but if you them put them in a toxic environment, there's no way they're going to stick around long enough to be helpful to anyone. The librarians of color need to not be mistaken for library assistants, the librarians outside the binary need gender-neutral bathrooms, and people need library jobs that are actually close to them, rather than having to chase jobs to whatever state happens to be providing enough funding that a library system can hire new librarians.
(This is tough to do, the article notes, when the entirety of the profession of librarianship has been very specifically about inculcating and spreading the values of White culture to all the non-white people.)
Both articles come to the same conclusion - libraries do their thing like tech does: lots of focus on quantity without any look at quality.
Getting back to the matter of a degree, the second point in Soliciting Performance is that the degree is really only the beginning point of pain for plenty of marginalized applicants. If an applicant went the route of a cheaper (or better-fitting their schedule) distance-learning program, rather than attending in person, search committees often fine them to be less of a librarian or unable to do team-based activities, even though their qualifications are the same and their coursework is presumably sufficiently rigorous to receive accreditation from the ALA. (And the distance learners that I know of had to go in person to a campus and work with other people on group assignments at least once a month anyway.) Plus, as the article points out, there's a lot of distance learning that happens after you get hired anyway.
The practicum is a major component of library education. Go out and get experience in the ways that libraries actually work, the student is told. Now that I've been in the profession for a little while, I think the real lesson from the practicum is "go out into the world and see how all the things you're learning in school aren't going to apply in the ways they teach in school." Because, as the December Days series takes as its premise, there's a lot that I didn't learn in library school.
The problem with the practicum is that for most students, the libraries around them are only accepting unpaid students for getting their necessary experience. If you don't already have income, or you don't have the privilege of being able to spend a semester or five working at the library for no actual pay, then you're stuck from getting to be a librarian.
After the problem with the practicum, Soliciting Performance also talks about the matter of the "profesional wardrobe." Yes, Librarian Wardrobe exists to show off the ways that one can do a lot, but much of that is already-hired librarians with latitude to show their style after they've made it through the process of librarianship. My first manager was absolutely insistent that jeans were not sufficiently proessional wear for a librarian, and that slacks were the minimum requirement. Which meant a quick emergency expenditure for new clothes. Thankfully, I had the means for that, but I can see a lot of people who couldn't afford that. I agree with the article that if you have to edeal with search committees that have a specific idea in mind of what a "professional" looks like, then someone is expending limited resources of time and money to try and match that idea. That requires greater outlays for people with marginalized identities, and they have to do more to hide their genuine selves to match the expectations of the likely-white women search committee. Or people reframe their experiences to make themselves fit a White Savior narrative, so that the seach committee can feel like the profession of librarianship has saved someone from an otherwise cruel fate as a minority.
That even happened at the PLA conference this year - one of the guests, Steve Pemberton, framed the library as the place that treated him like a person, when everyone else, including his foster family, treated him as a nothing, and with that, he was able to get a leg up and go from there. That's the kind of narrative a librarian likes to hear, because of the savior narratives. (Also, because so very few of the people that we help ever come back to tell us what happened.)
LIS Blackface has a list of what it takes for someone to get into one of the possibly diversity scholarship or fellowship programs: an application form, a resume, an essay, a letter of acceptance to an accredited program, official transcripts from all their previous college, and also two letters of recommendation, one of which has to be from an employer or a professor. The article points out that all of this assumes that your experience is with a single name and gender identity, only work experience that easily and directly translates to the program's requirements, and a sufficiently personable relationship with employers or professors that you can ask someone to personaly recommend you to the program. If you don't have that, then it assumes you have the skills to make your experience (and yourself) look like you do have the background that they're looking for.
But even when hired, librarianship follows many of the same problems tha tech does - the minority librarian is assigned to the committee of people that is trying to make diversity better in the library, because they have the lived experience and are visibly being minority in a white profession. The article notes, though, that the lived experience tends to get ignored when it comes to soliciting and hiring. Marginalized students coming to college tend to get framed as needing White Saviors to help them succeed where they could not on their own, and that framing extends out to libraries themselves, where the mostly white librarians do heroic (vocationally awesome) work helping the patrons of color achieve what they cannot do on their own. You can guess what adjectives might be attached to those same marginalized patrons in this narrative. Since the narrative fails to provide a space for marginalized patrons to see themselves as librarians, the article notes, they tend not to become librarians. When libraries further hide behind the idea that they are neutral spaces, they compound the problem by centering and normalizing white culture such that anyone who doesn't have that identity (and doesn't know how to perform it) gets pushed out, even if nobody is actively being an -ist to them. And search committees in librarianship will use the same dodges that those in technology do - "bad culture fit," for example.
The suggested improvements for making things better from here in both articles are things like: pay people for their work, or at least their professional development activities, let them do the work that you hired them for (including giving them the freedom to do the work, unencumbered by terrible policies around IT or administrations that don't understand anymore), figure out what you want from your interviews and then screen out bad questions, unchallenged vague responses like "bad culture fit," and people who seem to wield inordinate influence over the process, be flexible on the times of your internship offerings, and allow marginalized people to do work other than diversity committees. If they do want to serve, listen to them and take their suggestions on how to make things better.
And provide ways of feedback that don't require someone to disclose their lived experiences just so that someone will take them seriously. My own organization still doesn't really understand how to implement and maintain a robust and anonymous feedback loop that would really help them improve on the 101-level things they're being asked to do. Mentorship programs are a good way to help marginalized students get ahead by having contacts and having someone who's in the profession who can help them and provide them with references and resources. (Really, getting some allyship going would be very helpful.)
There's a lot that I've been learning about how things go in libraries, and the greater scope of the profession and the things that it has been doing as a history. None of which was really covered in school.
That can also shake your confidence, though. I went into the profession not entirely sure that anyone erally wanted to hire me for anything. (Yes, degree. But degree is not experience is not actually having anything to talk about other than coursework and many rejections already happening.) Partially because I wasn't sure anyone wanted to hire someone with my gender presentation for the job I was looking for.
Many years later, one of the people who was at my hiring interview said that the organization hired me on the strength of my storytelling. The more that I read and see things about the history of the institution, and the problems therein with marginalized identities, I begin to wonder whether the accumulated privilege of being me was a bigger factor in my getting hired than any skill I brought to the interview. That there may very well have been a much more qualified person for that job, but they didn't have the things that I did to get it. And there are plenty of other people around who would be fantastic at the profession, but the barriers to entry are so high that it's not even in their consideration.
That's the thing about institutions - they seem so large and indomitable and entirely not going to do anything at all in response to you, but you chip away at them in what way you can, (when that effort is being directed in productive ways) and at some point, there is actual change. Best I can do at this point is to stay willing to educate myself and to apply my efforts where they will do good. (And stop doing it if it turns out to not be good.)
And some of that comes from being a mid-career librarian - I got rattled early on by a terrible manager and basically went into hiding for a significant amount of time. I missed out on opportunitites because I was afraid of losing my job. I didn't have mentors available to me to not just keep me oriented in the right direction, but to have someone to bounce ideas off of.
So, yeah. I didn't learn how to do any of this, and not much of what I have learned about it has come from the people I work with or the mainstreamn publications. It's been you, all of you, being who you are, with the identities that you have, that give me insight into things I won't experience, how bureaucracy and institutions affect you, and what sort of places I should be reading more of what they're putting out.
If only I knew then what I know now...
A very clear example of vocational awe, as applied to the librarian, in the form of a poem by Peg Johsnson, a retiring librarian on the Office of Intellectual Freedom blog. The order of the poem is first about the books, and then about the curation of resources, and then about the fact that librarians help people bridge gaps in their learning with regard to technology and the increasing digitization of everything. After all that comes the privacy part, which OIF would be most interested in. But I'm going to quote the last two stanzas, because there's where all that awe comes into play most clearly.
Walk into a library and you can feel
The sacredness of this secular space
Available to you for the asking,
With librarians as the guides for the curious and the willing.
Walk into a library and think about who makes all that happen?
Those little girls and boys don't scream librarian
But they might if they knew that librarians, aren't the stereotypes,
No, librarians are actually the champions of knowledge, keepers of secrets,
And fearless warriors for freedom.
That's a pretty good example of the vocational awe idea. Libraries become sacred space, as part of a profession that seems mysterious and not all that well-known, or necessarily that prestigious, but it does all of those important things that people need. And the poem itself starts with the books, that terrible contradiction of what everyone knows the library for and what might be, arguably, the least important thing in the library when compared to things like privacy and assistance in finding relevant information and putting on free classes to help with technological divides. Even as librarians, we can't necessarily let go of the past well enough to be able to embrace our future roles. The sort of thing that Hi, Miss Julie talks about when describing the emotional labor of librarianship - very important things, but also things that have very gendered expectations and understanding (or lack thereof as to who is doing the labor and who is benefiting from it. Vocational awe often concentrates and ampllifes all of those demands, and doesn't necessarily provide any sort of meaningful way of recharging your reserves, either.
The meat of the post, though, is instead about these linked posts from In The Library With The Lead Pipe, "an open access, open peer reviewed journal" that likes to talk about things that probably don't make it into more prominent or more mainstream publications, such as Library Journal. Some of the "name withheld" letters in those publications do talk about issues in the profession - the May 02018 letters section had a white man grumbling about how everything these days turns up to be "patriarchy" or "racism" or other such things and that if people of color and women were doing more harm than good to the cause of gathering allies by constantly talking about these problems. I think they'd stop talking about it so much if actual progress were being made on the matter.
The posts are separate, but their topic is linked, and it's about diversity, inclusion, and the requirements that a member of a marginalized group have to go through to appear sufficiently White to be considered for a position. Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship is an interrogation of the hiring process and what librarianship states as both requirements and preferences for the job. Unsurprisingly, those requirements reflect White, generally cis, capitalist, middle class values.
(The article doesn't specifically mention this, but it might be taking as granted that a person reading the article knows that the biggest stonking requirement of this nature is the Master's degree for entry-level librarian positions, which requires that a prospective librarian have sufficient privilege to make it to college, pass college, then go to graduate school and pass that first. And then essentially be able to stick with the profession for at least ten years to either take advantage of loan forgiveness or to pay back the cost of all that college, while being underpaid for your work (because vocational awe). The article points out that negotiating for a good salary is likely to leave you without a job. Furthermore, there's not usually a path to start as a page and work your way up to the librarian position through experience, possibly taking a couple classes along the way to fill in gaps of your knowledge that you won't get through working in a library.)
Librarianship, much like technology, tends to be oriented toward the idea that a lack of diversity in the profession is a problem with a discrete solution and that you can throw sufficient resources at it through the use of diversity scholarships, fellowships, and the like to make it attractive for marginalized people to join. If there's all those resources out there, we reason, and people aren't taking advantage of them, then there must not be enough quality people available.
That cake is a lie. White Librarianship In Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS helps explain why.
Scholarship programs aren't enough, because, again, like the tech field, you can recruit all the people you like, but if you them put them in a toxic environment, there's no way they're going to stick around long enough to be helpful to anyone. The librarians of color need to not be mistaken for library assistants, the librarians outside the binary need gender-neutral bathrooms, and people need library jobs that are actually close to them, rather than having to chase jobs to whatever state happens to be providing enough funding that a library system can hire new librarians.
(This is tough to do, the article notes, when the entirety of the profession of librarianship has been very specifically about inculcating and spreading the values of White culture to all the non-white people.)
Both articles come to the same conclusion - libraries do their thing like tech does: lots of focus on quantity without any look at quality.
Getting back to the matter of a degree, the second point in Soliciting Performance is that the degree is really only the beginning point of pain for plenty of marginalized applicants. If an applicant went the route of a cheaper (or better-fitting their schedule) distance-learning program, rather than attending in person, search committees often fine them to be less of a librarian or unable to do team-based activities, even though their qualifications are the same and their coursework is presumably sufficiently rigorous to receive accreditation from the ALA. (And the distance learners that I know of had to go in person to a campus and work with other people on group assignments at least once a month anyway.) Plus, as the article points out, there's a lot of distance learning that happens after you get hired anyway.
The practicum is a major component of library education. Go out and get experience in the ways that libraries actually work, the student is told. Now that I've been in the profession for a little while, I think the real lesson from the practicum is "go out into the world and see how all the things you're learning in school aren't going to apply in the ways they teach in school." Because, as the December Days series takes as its premise, there's a lot that I didn't learn in library school.
The problem with the practicum is that for most students, the libraries around them are only accepting unpaid students for getting their necessary experience. If you don't already have income, or you don't have the privilege of being able to spend a semester or five working at the library for no actual pay, then you're stuck from getting to be a librarian.
After the problem with the practicum, Soliciting Performance also talks about the matter of the "profesional wardrobe." Yes, Librarian Wardrobe exists to show off the ways that one can do a lot, but much of that is already-hired librarians with latitude to show their style after they've made it through the process of librarianship. My first manager was absolutely insistent that jeans were not sufficiently proessional wear for a librarian, and that slacks were the minimum requirement. Which meant a quick emergency expenditure for new clothes. Thankfully, I had the means for that, but I can see a lot of people who couldn't afford that. I agree with the article that if you have to edeal with search committees that have a specific idea in mind of what a "professional" looks like, then someone is expending limited resources of time and money to try and match that idea. That requires greater outlays for people with marginalized identities, and they have to do more to hide their genuine selves to match the expectations of the likely-white women search committee. Or people reframe their experiences to make themselves fit a White Savior narrative, so that the seach committee can feel like the profession of librarianship has saved someone from an otherwise cruel fate as a minority.
That even happened at the PLA conference this year - one of the guests, Steve Pemberton, framed the library as the place that treated him like a person, when everyone else, including his foster family, treated him as a nothing, and with that, he was able to get a leg up and go from there. That's the kind of narrative a librarian likes to hear, because of the savior narratives. (Also, because so very few of the people that we help ever come back to tell us what happened.)
LIS Blackface has a list of what it takes for someone to get into one of the possibly diversity scholarship or fellowship programs: an application form, a resume, an essay, a letter of acceptance to an accredited program, official transcripts from all their previous college, and also two letters of recommendation, one of which has to be from an employer or a professor. The article points out that all of this assumes that your experience is with a single name and gender identity, only work experience that easily and directly translates to the program's requirements, and a sufficiently personable relationship with employers or professors that you can ask someone to personaly recommend you to the program. If you don't have that, then it assumes you have the skills to make your experience (and yourself) look like you do have the background that they're looking for.
But even when hired, librarianship follows many of the same problems tha tech does - the minority librarian is assigned to the committee of people that is trying to make diversity better in the library, because they have the lived experience and are visibly being minority in a white profession. The article notes, though, that the lived experience tends to get ignored when it comes to soliciting and hiring. Marginalized students coming to college tend to get framed as needing White Saviors to help them succeed where they could not on their own, and that framing extends out to libraries themselves, where the mostly white librarians do heroic (vocationally awesome) work helping the patrons of color achieve what they cannot do on their own. You can guess what adjectives might be attached to those same marginalized patrons in this narrative. Since the narrative fails to provide a space for marginalized patrons to see themselves as librarians, the article notes, they tend not to become librarians. When libraries further hide behind the idea that they are neutral spaces, they compound the problem by centering and normalizing white culture such that anyone who doesn't have that identity (and doesn't know how to perform it) gets pushed out, even if nobody is actively being an -ist to them. And search committees in librarianship will use the same dodges that those in technology do - "bad culture fit," for example.
The suggested improvements for making things better from here in both articles are things like: pay people for their work, or at least their professional development activities, let them do the work that you hired them for (including giving them the freedom to do the work, unencumbered by terrible policies around IT or administrations that don't understand anymore), figure out what you want from your interviews and then screen out bad questions, unchallenged vague responses like "bad culture fit," and people who seem to wield inordinate influence over the process, be flexible on the times of your internship offerings, and allow marginalized people to do work other than diversity committees. If they do want to serve, listen to them and take their suggestions on how to make things better.
And provide ways of feedback that don't require someone to disclose their lived experiences just so that someone will take them seriously. My own organization still doesn't really understand how to implement and maintain a robust and anonymous feedback loop that would really help them improve on the 101-level things they're being asked to do. Mentorship programs are a good way to help marginalized students get ahead by having contacts and having someone who's in the profession who can help them and provide them with references and resources. (Really, getting some allyship going would be very helpful.)
There's a lot that I've been learning about how things go in libraries, and the greater scope of the profession and the things that it has been doing as a history. None of which was really covered in school.
That can also shake your confidence, though. I went into the profession not entirely sure that anyone erally wanted to hire me for anything. (Yes, degree. But degree is not experience is not actually having anything to talk about other than coursework and many rejections already happening.) Partially because I wasn't sure anyone wanted to hire someone with my gender presentation for the job I was looking for.
Many years later, one of the people who was at my hiring interview said that the organization hired me on the strength of my storytelling. The more that I read and see things about the history of the institution, and the problems therein with marginalized identities, I begin to wonder whether the accumulated privilege of being me was a bigger factor in my getting hired than any skill I brought to the interview. That there may very well have been a much more qualified person for that job, but they didn't have the things that I did to get it. And there are plenty of other people around who would be fantastic at the profession, but the barriers to entry are so high that it's not even in their consideration.
That's the thing about institutions - they seem so large and indomitable and entirely not going to do anything at all in response to you, but you chip away at them in what way you can, (when that effort is being directed in productive ways) and at some point, there is actual change. Best I can do at this point is to stay willing to educate myself and to apply my efforts where they will do good. (And stop doing it if it turns out to not be good.)
And some of that comes from being a mid-career librarian - I got rattled early on by a terrible manager and basically went into hiding for a significant amount of time. I missed out on opportunitites because I was afraid of losing my job. I didn't have mentors available to me to not just keep me oriented in the right direction, but to have someone to bounce ideas off of.
So, yeah. I didn't learn how to do any of this, and not much of what I have learned about it has come from the people I work with or the mainstreamn publications. It's been you, all of you, being who you are, with the identities that you have, that give me insight into things I won't experience, how bureaucracy and institutions affect you, and what sort of places I should be reading more of what they're putting out.
If only I knew then what I know now...
no subject
Date: 2018-05-29 06:57 pm (UTC)Fiefdoms are certainly not limited to city government, either. Places you might go could be...unfriendly to you if you seemed to have skills that might intrude in their domains, or even improve them.