Abstracts
Abstract
The demand for perfect solutions to complex institutional problems creates excessive, ever-changing barriers for racialized peoples working toward transformative justice. The same demand is not made of the methods used to adopt the emerging technologies which appeal to the libraries desire to appear in perpetual growth. This paper employed autoethnographic analysis and Storywork to understand and make meaning from our lived experiences as racialized librarians in relation to the sociopolitical spaces in which we work. These methodologies allowed us to expose complexities and vulnerabilities in our experiences with community-led work to return sacred Knowledge and offered us a means to critique the systems in which we operate and call upon our colleagues to embrace solutions that are gradual, decentralized, and imperfect. In this article, we make a series of calls to our colleagues as a means of engaging their thinking on unchecked assumptions that create greater barriers, more labour and burnout racialized colleagues. These calls create an ethic in place of best practices that challenge our profession to be responsive to local issues in relational ways. We offer this defense of imperfection as a means of bringing attention to the labour of social justice work within our profession and to ask all of our colleagues to embrace and make imperfect solutions possible.
Keywords:
- Indigenous feminisms,
- invisible labour,
- social justice,
- racialized librarians
Résumé
La demande de solutions parfaites à des problèmes institutionnels complexes crée des obstacles excessifs et en constante évolution pour les personnes racialisées qui oeuvrent en faveur d'une justice transformatrice. La même exigence n'est pas imposée aux méthodes utilisées pour adopter les technologies émergentes qui répondent au désir des bibliothèques d'apparaître en perpétuelle croissance. Cet article a utilisé l'analyse autoethnographique et le Storywork pour comprendre et donner un sens à nos expériences vécues en tant que bibliothécaires racialisé.e.s par rapport aux espaces sociopolitiques dans lesquels nous travaillons. Ces méthodologies nous ont permis de mettre en évidence les complexités et les vulnérabilités de nos expériences dans le cadre du travail communautaire visant à restituer les connaissances sacrées, et nous ont offert un moyen de critiquer les systèmes dans lesquels nous opérons et d'appeler nos collègues à adopter des solutions progressives, décentralisées et imparfaites. Dans cet article, nous lançons une série d'appels à nos collègues afin de les inciter à réfléchir aux hypothèses non vérifiées qui créent des obstacles supplémentaires, alourdissent la charge de travail et épuisent les collègues racialisés. Ces appels créent une éthique qui remplace les meilleures pratiques et qui met notre profession au défi de répondre aux problèmes locaux de manière relationnelle. Nous proposons cette défense de l'imperfection afin d'attirer l'attention sur le travail de justice sociale au sein de notre profession et de demander à tous nos collègues d'adopter et de rendre possibles des solutions imparfaites.
Mots-clés :
- bibliothécaires racialisé.e.s,
- féminismes autochtones,
- justice sociale,
- travail invisible
Appendices
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