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IUI Department of Library and Information Science IU Indianapolis

MLIS grad Liv Graham presents weekly essay series on libraries, prisons, and abolition

Posted on by caiello

The first piece in a three-part series by Liv Graham (MLIS ’20) is now available by clicking here. Liv’s introduction to the series follows below:

My name is Liv, and I am a recent graduate of the MLIS program at IUPUI. The following is a three part series I have written on prisons, libraries, and abolition in conclusion of my coursework. Each Friday for three weeks, a new piece will be linked on the DLIS blog. The first piece is a guide for library workers who have limited experiences with the prison-industrial complex, providing an overview of prisons, jails, and detention centers in the U.S.; examining the intent and effects of increased incarceration rates; and defining some core tenets of/broad approaches to abolitionist thinking. The second piece focuses on the library as an institution that, produced under the forces of moralistic reformatory thinking, inevitably influenced the operations and procedures of the institution maneuvered under american racial capitalism. It aims to expand our creative thinking on repair work by looking towards how we can disrupt these systematic processes, such as smashing the professional tenet of neutrality and restructuring LIS pedagogy to be led by the most oppressed, as well as what decolonization and anti-violence strategies could look like for caring, sustainable futures of information institutions. The third piece will focus on practical applications of abolitionist, expansive initiatives you can undertake as someone trained in library work, both as an individual outside your job and as a worker within an institution, in order to work in coordination with incarcerated people in autonomous building and movement by facilitating access to information. It will examine the current pressing information crises specifically inside Indiana prisons exacerbated by the Digital Divide; offering programming and outreach ideas; and elaborating on or critiquing contemporary offered solutions/reforms in LIS like employing social workers in the library or divesting from police partnerships inside your library. I currently work as a part-time web services and reference librarian at a community college; because my work experience is primarily in public and academic libraries, these are the institutions which I will mainly focus on in the following pieces.

I want to preface these writings by saying that my viewpoint is based on my embodied experiences and as a result is axiomatically siloed. I am a nonbinary transgender person (they/them pronouns, I appreciate you asking) who has undoubtedly experienced the carceral connections between healthcare mistreatment and anti-queer bigotry among everyday social antagonisms. However, I have never been incarcerated or detained against my will. I am a euro-american/white person—a young, mostly-able-bodied adult raised with access to more financial, physical, educational resources than many americans and most of the globe. I do not wish to speak from the vantage point of Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC), who are targeted by the State by the very intent of its hostile design, nor to the experiences of those outside the U.S. who are undoubtedly targeted by this declining regime. I do not wish to contribute to a saturated commentary culture of white ogling at exhibitions of white supremacist violence against and murders of Black/New Afrikan peoples, nor to espouse my prison abolitionist vantage point as the One True Only Way Forward. I do not wish to weaponize my thinking as another way to torture and violate Black folks with white & educated abolitionist “empathic identification”, thereby further pepetuating “the circulation of dead and tortured black people produces in nonblack people not disgust or raised consciousness, but pleasure” (Boko, 2020). From where I am positioned, inside LIS and in other social-spatial surroundings, I wish to demystify key functionings of the carceral state, in order to: introduce the field of LIS and other cultural institution/GLAM workers to the abundance of pressing information needs of the many people impacted and disappeared by the expansive prison-industrial complex; and to illustrate that we who manage information can and must play valuable roles in fighting for open access and information liberation, namely through an abolitionist, radical, generative framework of thinking, being, working, and interacting with one another.

Joshua Briond (2020) writes, the project of social categorization is a colonial, hierarchical one, one that renders us divided into binaries existing in antagonization. Through rigorous study of race, whiteness, movement, and liberation, we can make daily choices that “get to the root of the power, betray them, and build from there” (Briond, 2020). LIS is a glaringly white, predominantly gender-conforming field; after decades of institutional austerity and begging for funding scraps, the continued crises of professionalism implore library workers to not challenge the market-oriented wills of bosses and boards. As I speak to in the second piece, libraries repeat DEI verbiage while refusing to change an aggressive workplace culture, for example. This contributes to what Ervin describes as sustaining a Progressive Plantation, which fuels burnout for BIPOC library workers and library workers at the margins who are expected to push the field forward while carrying more than their fair share. Those of us who would be able to open up many more doors through our presence in these institutions cannot sustain this work without the ability to shape and change our organizations to prioritize care. This starts with, and is not limited to, guaranteeing all library workers living wages and healthcare, among other salient and overdue needs.

White hegemony in LIS is reinforced through LIS education, which by and large in pedagogy does not examine meaning in difference, just instructs a professional culture of non-critique against ALA and DEI initiatives outdated demands from library workers of the 1960s and 1970s, as I speak to in my subsequent writings. Information workers can be uniquely educated and empowered to think outside the box (ie Institution) to build open systems of access to information about, for, and by us, working towards an attainable vision of collective information literacy, empowerment through access. Through intra/interpersonal reflection; studying the past and the speculative; relying on one another; and committing to and sustaining projects that build, rather than shrink, our worlds. We can undertake these approaches to critical librarianship through collective support, foundational to transformative justice. Assessing our strengths, that are afforded to us through birth, class, presentation, choices, we can then work together for the care needed after committing to the challenging answers found from asking: “how can this condition be redressed?” (Boko, 2020).

Mia Mingus (2016) writes, “community” is a word that we use all the time, but “many people don’t know what it is or feel they have never experienced it” (Mingus, 2020). Sustainable community endeavors require solid relationships between people maintained through trust. Building and growing connections between people where they already exist or can exist can lay the groundwork for the conditions required to support people without these connections, those who are violently targeted by the state and moralistic charity and nonprofit initiatives. In our everyday lives, the nourishing choices we make, like to care for one another or commit to reflection and growth together, can expand the number of people who can “recognize, talk about, prevent and respond to violence” so that people “in need of support will find it in their daily lives” (Mingus, 2016). These small steps towards a larger transformation will “help us gradually move away from the structures that keep people isolated… [which is] not only useful for ourselves and the people in our immediate circles, but has the potential to… support anyone experiencing violence” (Mingus, 2016). I believe, like nina de jesus advocated for, that libraries are one of the few state institutions that offers some capacity for emancipatory potential. As information gatekeepers, we hold an immense power that any ALA pep speech can never address the nefarious, material underbelly of. Each one of our individual struggles is bound up in the larger fight for collective liberation from the forces of white patriarchal supremacy that plague this state, the U.S. at large, and fortify racial capitalism. This is not the mainstream approach in our field, yet critical librarianship continues opening up the doors for library workers and users alike. When ALA named Seattle Public Library as the recipient of the 2020 Library of the Year award this summer, trans library workers and advocates for us critiqued ALA for valorizing a library that continues allowing violent transphobes to take up meeting room space on the basis of being “taxpayers”. Far too often, the safety, health, and continued wellbeing of library workers from the margins are ridiculed and neglected under the threat of white supremacist hegemony embedded deep within our workplaces. This is not new to the american public library, which, in its most basic form, is the raison d’être for the imperialist assimilatory project. The new information age, and how many people are being left behind in its wake, necessitates radical new approaches to our work.

Juliana Huxtable and American Artist recently said in a panel on abolitionist technologies and aesthetics that those of us who spent time or grew up on the mid-1990s—mid-2000s internet remember the gilded promises of a New Information Age: of empowerment, liberation, community despite physical distance, and all the goodness associated with your optimized, quantified self. In this era of the social media-induced Tertiary Information Age, a time of accelerated, genocidal global capitalism; demolished regulations of massive internet and telecommunications corporations; and the staggering scope of our stolen privacy or personal data as surveillance capitalism is weaponized and brutalized upon us, it is true that in many ways we are stifled from this oligarchy of information. Black/New Afrikan peoples, people with disabilities, trans and queer folks: those of us who lost out on the utopian hopes of the New Information Age were the most poised to gain from these new systems, and our loss was by design. One question now I aim to pose in these pieces is: how do we fight these racist technology systems, ones that we are equipped to understand from our LIS background? Is it that we are stuck with these digital technologies, in which case what can we do with these systems that accommodate more of us rather than being terrible, violent experiences? I speak in my writing on intentionally unfriendly user design, from the SNAP application or writing to a loved one on carceral electronic communications systems like GTL or JPay. An ostracizing online experience that makes users throw up their hands in frustration is beneficial as a shadow purpose for these systems that profit from and enable social disappearance of our loved ones.

In LIS, a sizable portion of folks like myself grew up acculturated in the world of big data; and even more of us in LIS generally are equipped with the acuity to recognize, articulate, and deploy these tools. With the oft-cited Digital Divide widening deeper, how can we support people from all backgrounds to meaningfully understand and choose their relationships with these digital tools, that can lead to both pitfalls and self determination? I offer this writing to newer and older-career library workers; students studying libraries and information maintenance, literacy, and empowerment. Abolition is about envisioning a world without cages; what more can we imagine after the premise of abolishing the institutional library in response to our current failings to truly instruct in information literacy and the transparency that our networks need? I believe we can approach library, archive, and information work in a radically new way, one that does not valorize the unattainable, violent notion of neutrality, and does not accept any repressive situation as fixed.

A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which people feel themselves to be in control. If people, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization—the people’s historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be Human. Precisely because it is necessary, some people’s having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others having, must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter (Freire, 1970).

If you are interested in learning more or talking about: prison abolition; abolitionist frameworks within libraries/LIS/GLAM; critical histories of the unceded lands of the Miami and Lenape peoples known as Indiana; or dialectical, radical critiques of the library as an institution, please reach out to me! I would love to engage with you on this work, let’s work together envisioning the future of the information spaces we know we can build. Reach out by email at logra5@protonmail.ch. Lastly, here is a reading list outside of the works I cite in the pieces that outline some of the many roadmaps for abolitionist thinking and practice. Again, this list is by no means complete and is subject to my personal relationship with prison abolition. Beyond the superficial approaches of white folks who profit off DEI writings (Tim Wise, Robin DiAngelo) and reformist, profiteering mainstream liberal Black voices who co-opt radical Black theory; profit from continued state violence against Blackness; and implore us to support those politicians who will still ensnare us (DeRay McKesson, Shaun King), I encourage this list as a starting point to engage with the folks who are most impacted by the forces which they write about. Some sources are more academic in nature, and I try to include a variety of formats in this list:

Recommended Resources

Books:

Articles/reports:

Videos:

Audio/podcasts:

Visual guides/worksheets/posters:

Study guides/resource lists:

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