librarypunk - 041 - Refusal in the Contemporary Academy feat. Lydia Zvyagintseva

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Lydia’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/lydia_zv  https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/36367 

Talk about good vibrations. These happy little crackers dance around up, over, and down. Hi, I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT in a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay.

I am an academic metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Lydia's Vagan-Sava. I'm a librarian in Edmonton, Alberta. at the University of Alberta. Right.

Yeah. So you were recommended to us by a friend of the show, Sam, who might come up again in our discussion. But you wrote a very good article in the Canadian Journal of Academic Libraries. It kind of like changed my whole life when I read it. It's so good. Well, I'm honored to hear that. Thank you.

Yeah. So how many times has Sam been on the show? twice, I think. Okay, okay. I figure, yeah, it's funny. I wonder how many times I'll bring up his name in this conversation. Yeah, so he got, his book got cited. So we brought him on to talk about his book one time, and I brought him on again.

About the intellectual freedom stuff with like the trance stuff in Canada. Yeah, because none of my other Canadian library friends wanted to talk to me about it. Yeah. So he came back on. Yeah, where it was like their version of their intellectual freedom, round table, whatever. Yeah. Because I couldn't figure out what was going on. And I was like, someone needs to explain this to me.

And he wrote like a blog post about it. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, before we start, we have, I don't know if I have a drop for this. Yeah, because it's not ALA nonsense. No, it's not ALA. It's Elsevier stuff. So I think probably everyone's seen this.

It's, wow, 2,600 retweets now. I've just pulled up the tweet. I think he's, what does he do? a systems neurostudier found that Elsevier embeds a hash in the PDF metadata that is unique for each time a PDF is downloaded supposedly.

I saw some people thinking that might actually be true. It might be done as batches. But yeah, there's PDF metadata in the PDF which basically marks the download ID. So possibly that would mean that any paper you've downloaded is going to be trackable back. to you in some way, which is something that I've never seen brought up in discussions about

like removing tracking data or contract negotiation. So a lot of people were just like, oh, strip out the metadata. I'm like, yeah, I mean, if you're going to send it to SciHub, maybe. But like, they already can figure how to get it. That's not the problem. When you're downloading it, because I, you know, assume it's like you're going through your university's proxy and stuff. And so you have to log in.

But then do they have your login information beyond that? Like, yeah, you've downloaded it into the unique hash and that's evil and I hate them. But is there other identifying information that's tied to you like in that document besides like maybe like time codes when you were logged in? It shouldn't be. Proxies should only send a token right now. But if if the tracking stuff in the easy proxy gets changed. to like verify users more. They could start sending more,

more personalized information, although it would still technically be, I think, de-identified. And I know J-Store has started, like, for a while now has pushed, like having your own account on top of you being able to go through,

like a proxy in order for you to do certain things or something. They're like, oh, you make a free account. Yeah, I feel like a lot of vendors do that. But it depends because it depends on like the authentication through the platform, really. Because I feel like ProQuest gets information from our Shibboleth that is like my email or at least the underlying email account with me. So it's like a whatever my P account is. It's like a series of letters and numbers. But it's unique to me.

I don't know. I'm playing around with that because I'm trying to fix how our Shibboleth talks to a service in the library. And it's not working. It keeps trying to send a local IP address. So Pressbooks doesn't like that. If they can't fix it, I'm just turning off single sign on. Everyone's going to have an email, regular account, of their own. Which honestly is it a problem.

I was just doing it. So users get managed by someone else other than me. But anyway, I thought it was interesting. I hope this moves into some of the contract negotiation stuff that people are working on. So that was Elsevivir. And fuck Elsevier. Yeah. Always.

Always fuck Elsevier. always fuck hells me. Not in the fun way either. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I could have done enemy the pod. You're not the ragged. Okay. Anyway.

So, let's get into the article, which I don't have pulled up, so I don't have the title in front of me. So, Lydia, you wrote articulating our very unfreatom, the impossibility of refusal in the contemporary academy. And so I think I was kind of trying to go chronologically through the way you explained it, but I kept jumping around. So I was like, okay, we should probably explain, like, capitalism as a totalizing force because we're going to be talking about that a lot. So what do we mean by this?

Or what do you mean when you say a totalizing force? I think. So the article really started as a walk in a dog park. And I knew that this issue was going to be created. And I was fascinated with the idea of refusal. And I think when I was thinking about how can I contribute fundamentally, I knew that. it's really hard to even approach the idea of refusal, right? So the title is a nod to that. And I think underneath it all, what I was trying to explore is this notion how capitalism is all encompassing. It is such a complex system and it sets up everything's connected and it sets up conditions that make it really hard to push against. So maybe at the time I did not have the

vocabulary to call it, you know, totalizing. I wasn't necessarily interested in an idea of hegemony as such, but, but yeah, I think underneath it all was this, you know, trying to articulate like why it's so hard to take any action in an increasing global world and in a profession like ours, right, where we can cross the border and work in libraries, you know, both in US and Canada and like we're increasingly dependent on each other and how hard it is to at the same time impact any kind of change. So that's how I understand that. Yeah, like, I think I really appreciated while reading this paper and just the way that you structured your main thesis and then each of the arguments was

pointing out that like the sort of impossibility of something while also the necessity of something at the same time, because I feel like that can sometimes be frowned upon bringing it up, like in leftist circles, like, well, we have to do this. And if you say, it's kind of not impossible right now, people would, no. So I just, I really, like, appreciated you bringing that tension, like, to the forefront. It made it just, like, cherry on top. It was great. Yeah, and I think he brought up Baudreard at one point when we were talking about inevitability.

and the feeling of the inability to do anything in our current moment. But yeah, we talked about totalizing forces when we were talking with Sam about neoliberalism and contradictions. So we were getting into dialectics and like, what is dialectics? How does it work? And so all these things keep like pinging off of each other. So you start trying to talk about something and it creates a contradiction. It creates attention.

And so you're like, oh, we want. to do this. We want to fight back against, you know, the things that we see are problems in a profession, but we're doing it in the same terms that are causing the problems. So we just have to not do anything kind of refusal. Well, we've hit refusal in a minute. It's more complicated than that. That was, that was not a good way of explaining it. But there are, that's why it keeps pinging around and trying to get the order of the notes right was, I was like, We've got to talk about this first. We're talking about this just a lot of contradictions in...

No, I mean, you've captured it. And I think also I knew that possibly the article maybe would differ from other contributions because let's face it, I think we all see a lot of, you know, talks, chapters, you know, tweets that North American society is very good at making us look for that one thing. And currently, that's the vaccine, right? So the vaccine will save us. It'll be that magic bullet. So if only we tweak this one.

one thing. Somehow we can change the complexity of the conditions in which we are. And being a slav who appreciates the nature of contradiction, just how complex things are, but also how interrelated. And I'm glad you brought up that idea of dialectics. Again, I'm not interested in, like, I guess, classic Marxist terms. But this idea that many cultures understand themselves as embedded in history and kind of influenced by forces. And I firmly believe, the librarianship suffers from that. We do not talk about our history. We do not talk about our origins or kind of how even the short history of the profession has responded to a variety of historical events and other forces. So to me, that's the interesting part. So not to divert

the conversation. Should we give like a brief summary of what the article is talking about before we get into it just for listeners who maybe haven't read it? Sure. Well, we're going to talk but refusal next, is that what you mean? Or do you want Lydia to like explain? Well, I guess like refusal will then lead into what the thesis is, I guess. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think a big part of the article was about refusal. And this is a term you're trying to tie into a materialist perspective. I guess it already kind of had one, but you were working to specifically tie it to another thinker who I, Mario something. Mario Tronte. Yeah. I'm not sure he was the best. in retrospect, but you know, at the time it fit. I also saw that you were citing Sarah Ahmed as well.

Yeah. I can speak briefly, I guess, I don't know if it's a summary, but honestly, when I saw the call, I thought this would be my chance to write about the Icelandic women's strike. I was always fascinated by, you know, the fact that these things can happen, the fact that they took place. It seems like a dream. And I was also reading,

Rinaldo Walcott at the time. So yeah, I was trying to think through the, so I guess I don't know if there's a summary because granted, I probably walk through a bunch of different thinkers, but I use two scenarios as maybe examples, you know, you could call it case studies to think through like implementation, so rather than theorizing as interesting as that is. But to look at two, one contemporary, one, I guess historical example of action. So one is Icelandic women's strike in the as the scholar strike Canada, and then maybe connect them to some thinkers. So for me, actually, the ones who maybe influenced me the most were Eve Tuck and Rinaldo Walcott and thinking through the primacy, well, I've already mentioned historical forces and then

the idea of private property, how it's at the center of librarianship and pretty much all knowledge. So in our way that we do this work. So I would say those are the threads that. but stand out in my memory of doing this. Yeah, no, it definitely made sense to go through the, sort of walk through some of the issues because, like we said, there was a lot of contradictions going on. When you talk about the origin of the term refusal, where it comes from anthropology,

could you talk about that a little bit of what people are refusing to do and then how that, how you tied that into librarianship? Sure, yeah. So obviously I wanted to do some homework for the article, and I read through some, not the entire book by Audra Simpson, who is an anthropologist. And what was interesting there, and really I think a lot of, like this work and a lot of what I'm interested in is fundamentally about epistemology. So Audra Simpson is helpful in getting us to step back beyond kind of the practice of librarianship and all the things that were taught in school. towards that philosophy and like epistemology of knowledge. And so there she specifically develops the idea of ethnographic refusal, which is a very challenging, I think, concept,

especially for us as supposed that information professionals, right, where we are literally trained to, you know, provide access and facilitate and make things easy. So then to have a theorist advocate and develop this understanding of making things difficult or what is off-life. limits or what is not allowed. And not so much in that, you know, yes or no kind of binary way, but more of, again, what that, as she says in the book, the boundary in itself gives away, what the condition,

right? So the very setup of that refusal at a knowledge at a philosophical level, what it gets us to think about. So again, I think it's about framing a different paradigm. And I can give you one example, if you don't mind. because I was thinking you'll probably ask me. So recently I've been watching, try not to follow too closely, and then on the weekend I really got into watching the news about Ukraine.

And so Breyer Stewart, a Canadian journalist, gained access to the Donetsk city and went on a small tour of houses and suburban streets that were shelled and destroyed in the conflict. And so she asked this one resident who lost not only his son and his house and, you know, a lot of trauma too, to the conflict. And she asked him, you know, do you ever dream of coming back? Do you want this war that's not war to end? Do you know, do you ever envision a time where, you know, you can return to normal? And he says, don't even ask me that kind of question.

Don't even go there. And I immediately understood why. And it's a small example. I'm not trying to compare it to Audra Simpson work, but I can understand where and how he's coming from. So think of this Western journalist, English speaking, for what audience is this news supposed to be created? In her mind, in Breyer's mind, it's a perfectly legitimate question, right?

We're just asking. And I've experienced that a lot in librarianship, too. too. A lot of what we do seems so innocuous. It's so neutral. It's, you know, it's just the facts, ma'am. But of course they carry an implication and power. And what he's trying to do, like, it's too painful. He doesn't even want to approach that subject, and he's refusing to plan her terms. And so I appreciate thinkers like Audra Simpson and Eve Tuck with her collaborators to challenge us to even accept what's on the table. You know, how we approach knowledge and how we organize and how we discuss it. It's not a given.

And often it's really challenging to do this in our daily work and really where we can do it is in articles and podcasts and book chapters and, you know, reading circles. It's really hard to actually practice this. And I think that was also the guiding thread behind the article too is as much as we like to pontificate and, you know, it's easy to write these arguments and cite them. I've got sort of a similar situation because I work a lot with oral histories, and we get a lot of questions about, because they're normally like undergraduate-related programs. So they're doing oral histories in our community, and our community is overwhelmingly Hispanic, I think like 95, 98 percent in our county. And people are doing a lot of oral histories that include people who have tenuous either.

immigration status or are undocumented. And then so a big thing that I started doing early on when I got into my job was, what do we do when people approach us with these kind of projects? Like, when do we say, don't do that, which is basically our position is if someone might be put at risk by you talking to them, just find someone else to talk to. But then we also kind of created a presentation that we gave for the Society of Southwest Archivists that was in one sense it was a pain narrative of its own because it was like these stories are you know challenging to tell and record but there's also kind of like if you're going to do this like here are some things you should keep in mind to like properly de-identify it and so but at that same conference there was someone

from the University of Arizona I think who maybe was Arizona State I can't remember now but they had a Dreamers project, and then they had to completely, they didn't want to do the IRB process, which was a good thing they did because it forced them to de-identify all of their stuff. But then, I think this was 2019, they found that ICE was using their recordings

to find people who were in violation of either their dreamer status, which I don't remember how you do that, or something like that. And so they just took up the entire, project down. But this happens all the time with oral histories. It's really interesting. I wanted to write a paper about it, but the person I was working on with changed jobs, and I don't, I don't know. Then COVID happened. And so that paper just never happened. But I still have the Google alert for oral histories and politics and immigration, see if anything interesting comes up.

But it does once in a while. You'll get stories like this. So it makes sense. And it comes up a lot more often in my job than I kind of would have expected it did. Don't you think it points to the, like I wonder if you've observed it, you know, if you work in academic libraries, I ask our academic director this a lot is, I wonder to what extent it, you know, persist to this day, but this idea that really what academics do doesn't actually affect people's lives, right? It's just ideas. Like, what are the risks? Knowledge is just, you know, pure and, you know, for some, I don't even want to say ivory tower, but like fundamentally, it's just like a really nice intellectual exercise, but it doesn't actually matter that much.

It can't really hurt people. And here, you're showing that it does. And, you know, later you might ask me about labor, but I mean, I'm all for awakening and for just that consciousness and that reality that I think what academic libraries do absolutely touches people's lives. And some projects kind of shake us into that awareness and some of us want to push it back and we don't actually want to acknowledge it. It's sometimes too complex to actually deal with it on the ground, on, you know, what do we do about these digital collections? Sometimes it's just easier, you know, to pretend that they don't exist. So I hear you. Yeah, like the specific quote in your book, in your article, sorry, I've had a day. Like, oh,

Oh my God, I've had a day, that, like, I was reading your article, like, over my lunch break. There was this one pull quote I pulled out that, like, literally I read it and my jaw dropped. And I went like, oh, shit, like out loud by myself in my office. And it's the one where you talk about how, like, we should, like, view, like, academia and the university as, like, controlling and, like, arbiters of, like, private property and, like, protect. property and that like librarianship absolutely falls into that and reframing like knowledge organization and scholarly communication and reference services as ways of like controlling and yeah like controlling private property including like knowledge as as property and stuff and I was like because I'm a meditata person and I deal with like the ethics of metadata like all the time and I was literally just like blown away by the like all of what we do is about controlling private property and protecting the concept of private property to some extent. And I feel like if a lot of librarians were confronted with that, it would just like piss them off and people would fight against it. But I was like, oh, this makes more sense than anything I've ever read in my life. Because they think they are already on the good side, that they are only opening doors and only liberating minds? Yeah, I'm totally into like, I'm in this profession.

I want to burn it downstage, but like in a scholarship of way. So I was like, oh, right, this is great. I appreciate that, and I saw that in the notes. So I'm glad. Well, and look, you began this episode with a very specific corporation that has in giant profits, right? So how much of our life is about that? What truly open source technology can you think of that is wide enough to go to market, you know, sort of sophisticated enough to be employed?

and I'll cite my friend Holly Arnes and a makerspace librarian who says, you know, at a public library, it has to be military grade. So, you know, there may be small-scale open-source and kind of, you know, hacker, underground, under commons. I know you've cited that in the notes, projects. But really, there are so few options. So all I'm advocating for is to keep it real, not to pretend. That's all. And that's the, in some ways, I call it intellectual maturity, right?

And it absolutely does affect people's lives. not in this like kind of abstract, oh, like, well, the flow of knowledge and information and like the way, whatever, like, but it's like, like, no, you pointed out in the article, like the vaccine patents. And then I'm also thinking of like Aaron Schwartz and like all of the stuff. It's like, no, like these direct instances where like people have lost their lives because of the way that are profession and related professions to it, like are sort of like in service to and like protectors of private property. And how many students have not made it to the university doors in the first place?

Education is prohibitively expensive in the United States and it's becoming the same way in Canada. So I realize a lot of your notes are about skull comms, which I know nothing about. But we are so in tuned in that economy of knowledge. But already that's such a privileged field, right? how few don't even get to that stage. So anyway, sorry, I don't mean to derail your thing. No, no, no, no. Those were just the examples that came off the top of my head.

But yeah, no, it's... Yeah, I think I knew I was going to go out of order. So this is near the bottom. But I wanted to mention you said that librarianship must foresee itself in a role of a reestablishing colonial knowledge in order to refuse it. And like we are wrapped up in all these processes. And that was what we talked about with Megan two weeks ago about critical infrastructure studies.

So a big thing was the knowledge reification and propagation and propagation and the social replications that we carry out in our day-to-day life. So like we help people back on their feet so they can just get a job and make someone else wealth in return for a wage. So, you know, what really is liberatory about that in any way? It's not a very, you know, on the one hand, you want to make people's lives better. And on the other hand, you're stuck without sort of giant mass movement, which I think is the contradiction that we're dealing with with this refusal is if you wanted to refuse to take part of this, you would start looking at the abolition of academics entirely or just a refusal to even take part in any of this. And that's just not something librarians can unilaterally do, even if we could get all librarians on board.

It would have to be a mass disruptive thing, which, you know, whether we like it or not will probably happen eventually. Yeah, it's like how we talk about with the sort of how the decolonized decolonial insert thing here has just become like an academic buzzword cliche. And then like people have to keep pointing out like, no, if you were really wanting to decolonize this thing, you would get rid of it. And not just like write a paper about how you can, I don't know, make it diversity. I'm like, that's not, like, yeah, it's like, gender? What is this? Soviet Russia? You know, I struggled maybe before this article.

I definitely there was a year, I think, yeah, it was during the pandemic as it started, with this notion of, you know, should we write off universities, right? So it's this notion, do we burn it down? What do we do with this thing? So I'm less confident in advocating or even exploring this idea of colonial knowledge that's, you know, maybe the next project. And, you know, not all librarians will agree, and I've received some criticism in the feedback to the article.

But the question remains, right, what do we do about these institutions that have certain histories that have, you know, were built for specific purposes? Do they still serve the same purpose in the contemporary age? And one conversation that has been helpful was Adam Godry, who's a, you know, Métis researcher here in University of Alberta, who did remind me, he said, Lydia, the project of Canada is not going away anytime soon.

And there are more people pursuing PhDs and pursuing education still. So despite everything, people still strive for both the credential, but I think also the opportunity to meet other like-minded people, which is what we're doing, to benefit from insight and work of other thinkers who came before them. So I think that's also indicative of just the, maybe contradictory reality in which we exist. So as maybe cathartic, as it seems to say burn it all down,

start something new, there seems to be a reason, or at least for now, you know, universities, yes, absolutely they are the credential factor in the sort of the ticket to a job. And, you know, I think all I'm trying to say is for LeBerns to be a little bit more realistic about us greasing that wheel, if you will. but the other side of the contradiction is the emancipatory aspect of education. And so recently I had a chance to do a similar spiel to like a pedagogy class to a library school. And I wanted to, like if there was one key message I wanted to share with them,

it's that to think of education as consciousness, right? So it's this, it's both individually liberating process of, you know, opening your mind, whatever, all of those metaphors, but also connecting you to others, to that scholarly community, to other thinkers around the world, something larger than just this, you know, current condition that is in front of you and the possible. So sorry, I don't know if it's completely on topic, but what I'm trying to say is that it's, it's always complex and yet it's finding kind of what we're here about, what we stand for. So, yeah. That makes sense to me. I, I, you're, Your Canadianness is showing through because you've apologized like four times right now for making good points.

Each time you're fine. I mean, it takes a lot to go on like a leftist podcast and be like maybe burning it down isn't what happens right now. So, no, I get it. Yeah, no, nobody's feeling the burn anymore. Sorry. No, I mean, abolitionism isn't always just tearing it down. I like using the language of abolitionism. I think it's a very helpful way of talking about things,

but a big part of it is just like deconstructing extremely pervasive systems. Like when we talk about abolishing the police, I saw that infographic that was going around and just how much the United States spends on police. Like federal money is barely a drop in the bucket compared to every single city putting half of its budget into its police force. So that's trillions of dollars, hundreds of million dollars a day in policing. So that's a big project, and there's very little to think that it's going away anytime soon, but it's worth being aware of it and trying to do it.

It's like the people who are just like, revolution, smash, and then they don't think about how that revolution comes about or what's involved in it and all of that. They're just like, no, revolution. It's like, and. It's like improv, yes, and. you just do a contrapoints reference right after we specifically have never done one before until Steve brought it up? Oh, really? Yeah, he brought up today in that when I made that meme earlier.

It was a little bit of a reference. Yeah. I don't know, maybe I'm a bad trans because I like contrapoints, but whatever. It's fine, like whatever you want. Go ahead, Citi. Well, yeah, Jay, kind of like how you're just saying it. It reminds me of people who, like, jump to, you know, boycott or whatever about different labor strikes.

Like we have to boycott this whole brand when that's in fact maybe not at all what the people who are striking want to happen. It's just that sort of we have to go to the most extreme thing here as opposed to, you know, really looking at the specific instance that's happening and what actually context to the people who are going through it need as opposed to just, yeah, that burn it. it all down, it all sucks kind of thing. I'm glad you bring that up, Sadie. I wanted to ask you, do Americans still use the term vote with your wallet? Yes, they do. So I don't know if I had it in the article, but it was at the back of my mind in terms of strategies, right?

So I think Mario Tronte brought him up earlier. Granted, he was operating at a particular time. And, you know, his handbook is probably a little bit dated for our, you know, digital post-neoliberal age. I wish it were that easy to just lock ourselves into a factory where things are analog and things aren't networked and information can be interrupted. We are at a different age. But, you know, he is advocating for tactic and strategy, right, to think about what we want

and how we do it. And often in libraries, we don't have either. We don't really know what we want. But okay. But this notion, I've definitely heard it from my American friends, that it's funny how voting with your wallet is seen as the extent of radical action, right? That money fundamentally talks and that's the only way to influence action and how we think that we small consumers can influence when when influences are ready in the room making deals and, you know, circulating

capital. So it's, it's interesting that you bring up this notion of, you know, just don't buy that product and then their cause will be solved. It's like when like that one person tried to like go a whole day without using anything by like Amazon and they like or on the internet like where they would avoid anything by Amazon and anything by Google and they could not use the internet because everything just didn't work. Yeah, I think that's probably particularly peculiar to like Americanism that both like most people of any political stripe will have that because it's built into our founding mythology of boycotts and things like that as part of the revolutionary strategy, which is really a very small thing, honestly.

The individualism, if you can't do an individualist action, is it really action? You know, if I don't recycle every bit of plastic that comes through my house, I'm the one poisoning the ocean, not, you know, Nesley, who's draining California dry kind of thinking. It's like, you know, for a profession that is about knowledge and like information systems and organization, we're really bad at seeing how like the connection of information. and knowledge outside of our little like infolet bubbles. So can I complain about this? Where the hell did this all the sudden wash with cold water thing come from? Because I saw like an ad for this in like the UK on like a subway platform and I'm like, those silly people in Britain.

Oh, I've heard about that for years. And it's like, yeah, make sure you wash with cold water. We've got special cold water detergent we can sell you. I've heard that. for cold water detergent. I was fucking lost my mind. I was listening to a goth playlist for like five hours. I haven't heard those ads,

but like that's been like an adage I've known since I was like an undergraduate of like, it's better for the environment if you wash your clothes in cold water. I saw it twice in the same day and it was freaking me out. Send me that goth playlist, by the way. Okay. It's from the cat viking to post-punk account. So I,

it was that one. So you retweeted that and I got on there. So we talked about like ideology. You mentioned vocational awe. You know, we had Fabazian to talk a little bit about like the religious implications for a lot of it. And you mentioned something, it kind of in passing, which was service ethic. And that just struck a chord with me because it came up in my work recently where we were talking about like all these problems we're having with IT. You know, like things just get lost.

Things never get finished. And this was like a new associate vice president. And he was saying, you know, oh, you know, this service ethic hasn't really permeated. And so whenever someone in power says that, I'm immediately like, okay, no, hang on, like back up. I'm not like, like, I've never once read it on anyone in IT, no matter how much they have, like, ruined my day. I've never once said who the person was. So it's, it immediately I started thinking when I was reading a little bit about service ethic. And when you mentioned that it's built in a proper.

relations, not in an ethics of care, reciprocity, and the commons, I immediately thought of Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic. I don't know why that was on my mind, but Max Weber just sits in the corner of, I think, a lot of people's minds that just pops out once in a while. But it seems almost like a service ethic is also a semi-religious idea. Do you think that ties in? Do you think we could build on that? Oh, I think the institution will use any tool to get the worker to do what is needed. it as one of the tools in the toolbox. However, I am curious, I think in the notes you said, academic piracy often is, I'm guessing,

rooted in the ethic of care. You talk about that more. I'm curious. So, you know, I think, you know, you're mentioning something about pirate librarianship. So is it because of that sort of underground and caring for the collective? Is that what you mean?

It's very specific. So we actually had on to people who did the article finder network on Twitter. So you send them a DOI and then they retweet it. And then another, someone who has access will go through their academic library, get the PDF and send it to you. So it's like, I can have PDF, but it's, it's an account. And it's really not as automated as I thought. It's just someone is just kind of sitting there retweeting the requests as they come in as they get tagged. And it is specifically about just, I think we just said it was like bros help and Burroughs was how we ended up finalizing the discussion was you just tell people up because

it's a normal thing to do. And I think a lot of, because we talk about SyHub, which is like a centralized service that a lot of people use. But if that went away, people would still just be emailing articles to each other and just emailing a friend who has access. The sort of stuff we did before SyHub really became popular. So it's a form of mutual aid. Right. Right. Yeah. Also, I learned the other day that the term strike comes from like pirates and sailors doing labor actions because they would like strike their flags down or something. So pirates strikes, it all connects together. Of course it does. Yeah. It feels honestly, it feels embarrassing to even take on or challenge or

to dare even approach the topic of service ethic because so we had a journal club opportunity at U of A, and I wanted to talk about Eve Tuck's refusing research. And what was interesting to me was the way my colleagues understood refusal. And most of the examples, at least in that initial meeting, were very much small-scale acts of, you know, say no to specific faculty requests or, you know, whether it's not taken on a consultation or not purchasing a particular book. So what was interesting to me at the time was how we are conditioned to think about the work in individualistic terms. And so even to, and I've tried to bring this up with, you know, leaders. I struggle with the idea of purchasing textbooks for loaning them to students who can't afford textbooks. Because I understand it's a larger, seeming logical solution to a complex,

problem, but we only dig ourselves into a further corner because we can never afford enough for everybody. It's the same with, you know, like I work in a digital scholarship center. We can never purchase enough technology for all. So, but this notion of, well, helping the children or helping, how can you not help? If you don't dare help, you're not a good librarian and you, you can lose your license. There's no license to lose. But you know what I mean? Like to even bring that up and put it on the table, risks of being cast out of the club. So it is absolutely hard to talk about, like, what do we mean by help? The problem is the unaffordability of knowledge in the first place and the fact that

tuition is so expensive and that there's no stipends. It's not that, you know, we're not purchasing the right amount of textbook or technology, etc. So I think all of those are on my mind and how it's really hard not to be a helper. But sometimes the right thing to do or maybe a thing that sends a message because it's precisely where it hurts is to not help, right, and not do the things that in the short term may be absolutely meeting that, you know, making a bridge for learners. But in the long term, what we're trying, well, what I believe is is the larger solution. So I hope that that makes sense. Totally.

And like I fully admit to struggling with that too, especially when any time. discourses about, you know, Narcanon libraries or even the like as a warming center thing. Because I'm always like, yes, I understand we don't want the job creep. And I know it's not our responsibility, but also people might die if we don't right now. And so it's like, I understand like, yes, we have to push back. But also, like, I do want to help somebody. So that's something I honestly, like, struggle with. I agree with you.

but I'm like, ah, I want to help. So I'm totally like still. Yeah. Yeah. No, Jay, I'm totally in the same place, especially with, yeah, the Seattle and warming centers thing because, you know, that's the area I live in. And even though I don't live there, I love Seattle dearly. And just sort of that, it almost feels like we're reduced to being reactive because of this. Yes.

We can only respond. we can't plan because there's so many people in so much trouble everywhere. And like recently, one of our very small communities started being the place where people could get COVID tests. Because there's literally no other distribution point that makes sense in that community. Everybody knows where the library is. We have a drive-thru window. We were one of the few places that could do it safely. So like, that's part of that scope creep.

But at the same time, it's that whole, if we don't do it, no one will. but sometimes that's the lesson that needs to be learned. If we don't do it, no one will. And libraries don't need to do it as a big thing all of the time. But we're all very helpful. Yeah. We're all very helpful people. And that's generally why we come to the profession.

And then to be told, don't be helpful strategically, yeah, is very hard thing, I think, for us to comprehend. Yeah. And I think the point you make about it for. us to be reactive. It's very well into what we're talking about with Lydia and that like, like, here it's like we're not necessarily talking about like individual library workers, but we're talking about like the library, like a library system, like a town library, city library as an individual, where like the individualism turns into that specific library or something. So even like not just the librarian as the individual. I love that you specifically say in your article,

like this is about librarianship and not about librarians, like to sort of force that like we are talking about like a bigger thing here. But yeah, like when it's forcing like certain organizations to even be reactive, like that's that individualism creeping in as well. And like turning librarianship into the librarian, even though it's like a building and like a, a, a city organization or something. Yeah, I mean, speaking of reactive, that actually is exactly what I was going to talk about next, because you had a part in the paper where you talked about library policies

are not agile and flexible enough to pivot towards fulfilling the imminent needs of their communities. And I think, I don't know if I added COVID or if you did. Yeah, you were talking about COVID. And this was something I was struggling with or just really annoyed by as someone who supervised people and was getting no information on what to do when COVID started. I was like watching other universities go remote and I was like, okay, when am I sending my team remote? And I heard and there was just absolutely no plans. And so I just wrote up my own plans and just waited for someone to say, you can make them

remote. And I said, go. And this is how we're going to do it. And then the university came up with like half past plans like a month later, like, oh, here's this timesheet work tracker document that was a huge pain and they asked for everyone. So it was very annoying to kind of, it just happened again with this latest wave. You know, we had one week back after the break. And then Friday at 5 p.m., they sent out an email saying, we're going to spend all of January remote. I was like, you could have told them on Monday.

You could have made this decision Monday and just gave them a week to redesign their courses. You know, I know faculty were being told to prepare to go remote if they had to. But like, you know, an extra week helps. And that kind of tied in with what I was thinking about the senior administration at the university just doesn't do anything except follow trends and instructions from the state. So, you know, they were just kind of waiting for their bosses to tell them what to do. And no one was really taking any initiative. And so it's just really frustrated me.

So right before I think we went on winter break, I just told my whole team, we're going to be remote in January. Don't worry about those remote work agreements that we signed. like just stay home and work remotely for a month until. Well, because the strategy of risk mitigation is fundamentally not interested in ethic of care, right? So it's their posing priorities. And I, it wasn't a major point, this, you know, this notion of agility and flexibility, but there's definitely research that has been conducted to show, especially in times of crisis.

So the issue was about crisis. And I knew that there would be taught, you know, discussions of the pandemic. I didn't necessarily want it to be about that because I feel like it's everywhere and it's almost like what is there to add. But absolutely there have been previous publications about other types of crises, maybe less deadly, but earthquakes happen, floods like natural disasters and with the cost of climate change rising. There's more and more on that. But again and again, we see this pattern of not playing in enough, not being reactive because, at the heart of it, which is where the last part is, what we are prioritizing is preserving private property.

That, you know, we want to preserve stuff over people. And so I genuinely hope that by the time the article would come out, I would be wrong, that the patents would be, you know, broken and vaccines would be readily available around the world. That as far as I know hasn't happened yet. So, yeah, what is that? You're signaling me off. No, it's just a sad air horn.

Justin Lex drops. I haven't been using as many recently. I feel like I needed to throw more in. I hoped I'd be wrong, but again and again, we have evidence of this, right? So why should we expect otherwise? And of course, it's frustrating. Like, what you're saying resonates strongly.

Yeah. I realize we're getting close to the end. Did you want to? Because, yeah, I guess the real part, it was just crisis after crisis and, you know, we can talk, we could probably spend more time talking about crisis capitalism and exploiting crises to further privatize things. But I think it's all something that people who listen to this are well aware of. We don't have to retread it. I really wanted to go into the whole concept of refusal more. So I guess when the main

drives was this refusal is sort of contradictory and almost impossible. It is impossible to do. also is something that we should be considering. So where do we go from here to kind of close out? How do we, I think you said something like creating a present that builds the future where we want to see or something like that? I got it wrong. I wrote it while I was laying down. I wish someone, I wish I said that.

Probably some other thought thinker said that. Yeah, I mean, that's the question of refusal is so fascinating because it's so difficult. I wish we could say, well, if you'd follow this formula, we would have liberation and freedom and everything would be okay, but it's not. And so to me, that's also why it's so rewarding and interesting and the fact that many others have been thinking about it. What did I want to say? Refusal. Yeah, one of the reasons also I thought, okay, an article would be a good opportunity is to play around approach the question of sabotage. So at that time, in early, I believe it was early 2021,

Andreas Malm published How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Now, granted, you know, he's a very white European, Leninist scholar. Talk about good vibrate. Yeah, he has limitations. But this notion of sabotage, so he's writing from a specific point of climate change and extinction, rebellion,

and all those fairly privileged concerns in Europe. But he has a point. Ex-R cops. Don't hang out with them. Yeah. But the notion is like we have several strategies. Some things have been implemented. So how come so little is done? And so if private property is at the center of this problem, well, can we go after that?

And again, that's a very problematic point. I listened to, you know, CBC interviews with people who literally blow up pipeline. who are trying to shut down infrastructure. All of those are problematic and they're not neutral actions. But I don't know. Can we even have sabotage in intellectual educational sphere? What would that mean? Right.

So I think this topic of refusal is really interesting and challenging. And I don't mean to be defeatist and, you know, Slavic in nature to say. say, well, nothing's to be done just accept your condition right now. But also maybe to remind us that we function, so this job that we do is, first of all, a job. Second of all, it has a certain history. It doesn't come out of nowhere and it won't remain forever in a state. So there's other forces that have shaped it and will continue to shape it. And the main thing I think that we can do is, to me, it's the consciousness.

It's, I still have hope in reading other people. And that's why, you know, you're hopefully energized by articles and people are still publishing books. Sometimes I think about, geez, how many can there be? Like, will we ever reach a point where there'll be enough and we can't keep up? And still, people pursue degrees and they write books. And they want to think and connect with others who are interested in that. So to me, that gives hope and that, you know, human beings want to,

I don't know, continue, become more conscious, more aware, even if, you know, the climate trajectory is not on a good path isn't not a positive way to, I don't know, find liberation in this sort of deeper understanding. And I guess the other argument is like labor and collective action, that we're not alone. So I'm advocating against thinking, we're limiting ourselves into thinking that the only options are individual choices.

they'll never be rewarding enough. And there's so much meaning in that collective action, but it's also very hard. Yeah, I think it would probably be, you know, there's times when these crises entrenched sort of neoliberal logic more, but they also provide the same sort of openings that allow for mass action and community building and consciousness raising. So I think there's probably something that's going to stick with people

because COVID took so long in terms of having a personal effect on a lot of people and it had a big economic impact. But I mean, there have been more crises in the past. There will be more in the future. There will be terrorist attacks. There will be wars. There will be things that are used to sort of galvanize. I'm thinking about 9-11 recently and just sort of like how long of an impact that was because it immediately launched several wars and it was, you know, used for massive propaganda and also had the largest protest movement in the world against it, and it did absolutely nothing. And now he hangs out with Michelle, you know, George Bush hangs out with Michelle Obama, and he's a cool guy who paints dogs and people are just fine with this, even though

now that Trump is long in the past, we can see objectively, like, he was nowhere near as bad as Bush by a long shot in terms of just body count. Absolutely can't compare him. So I don't know, thinking about it a lot. And anyway, I'm really glad you came on so that we could talk about this. I'm sure if you have more articles in the future, you can always come back on and talk about them too. And do you have anything you want to plug your social media or any upcoming work? Or do you want to leave you alone? Well, thank you. That's very, very professional.

Here I thought, oh, it would be selfish to ask. Well, I mentioned just how many books are published, right? how much is coming out. I'm, I'm so pleased to see so many of my friends and colleagues, you know, editing books and contributing to, I guess, that consciousness raising and, you know, the discourse, whatever you want to call it. But I think it's important for us to have a body of work that's our own. And I can see that, especially with early career and librarians and students, they respond to that. They year yearn for other ideas. So one thing I was hoping that, you know, if listeners of this podcast may be interested, my colleague and friend, Mary Greenshields and I are

editing a volume for Library Juice Press called Land and Libraries. And we would be more than happy to have help with peer reviewing some articles. We should have chapters coming in. So the volume's kind of, you know, the name kind of gives it away. But I was thinking through this idea of, you know, why is there so little discussion of climate change? And also that relationship to land and history in our profession. So if some listeners are interested in, you know, reading chapters and providing feedback, they'd be welcome to get in touch with me.

And I don't know if you give, I don't know, my email or whatever or Twitter thing, but... I can put whatever you want in the notes. I'll definitely link to your Twitter if that's okay. Yeah, or you can find me by searching, you know, University of Alberta Library. I'm in the directory.

So just to consider helping out. And I've encouraged some other friends and colleagues to consider peer reviewing because it's a good way to contribute to scholarship without feeling like you need to write, you know, a brilliant thing. It's to see how other people tackle it. And it's, I found a rewarding. So thank you for them. We have a lot of students who listen.

So I don't know if that's like if you would consider students, like library school students doing that kind of work at all. Absolutely. Yeah. We have guidelines. And, you know, we find that early career folks have time and interest. Just people later in the careers. I get it.

They are so busy. There's so many commitments. So yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Landon Libraries, reach out to Lydia, and I will link to the paper, and I'll link to your Twitter. And if there's nothing else, good night. And then note to myself in the future, put in Beastie Boys' sabotage at the end.