In November 2018, Melanie Cassidy, Ali Versluis, and Erin Menzies hosted a roundtable at the Critical Librarianship & Pedagogy Symposium (University of Arizona). Their discussion, titled “Disrupting traditional power structures in academic libraries: Saying no, how to do it, and why it matters,”centers the framework of resilience narratives and how they are used against librarians and library workers. Commonly posited as “doing more with less,” resilience narratives are connected to emotional labor, vocational awe, and low-morale experiences in academic librarianship since they posit organizational and system failures – especially where support is concerned – on individuals (Farkas 2017; Berg, Galvan & Tewell 2018).
They continue their discussion, promoting the creating of a resilience taxonomy allowing library workers to resist the damaging effects of resilience demands. A worksheet accompanies the presentation.
Works Cited
Berg, J., Galvan, A. & Tewell, E. (2018). Responding to and reimagining resilience in academic libraries. Journal of New Librarianship, 3(1). Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2J29Lwf
Farkas, M. (2017, November 1). Less is not more: Rejecting resilience narratives for library workers. American Libraries. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2hdznul