By Brinna Pam Anan, Metadata Management Librarian and Collection Development Coordinator
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
and
Sarah D. Calhoun, Reference & Instruction Librarian for Humanities & Digital Scholarship
Carleton College

Abstract

We, as academic librarians, have chosen to practice interdisciplinary collaboration in our work in service of introducing more outside perspectives into the field of librarianship. From Asian Humanities, we learned about the concepts of kalyāṇa-mittatā, an active practice of auspicious friendship, and paramparā, an active transmission of knowledge through a lineage. While working at very different institutions, we have found these two concepts useful in guiding our understanding of colonialist, predominantly white hostile systems within area studies and area studies librarianship; academia; and libraries writ large. Using our own background in Asian Humanities, informed by the work of scholars of critical librarianship and Relational-Cultural Theory, we offer another parallel solution: We seek to establish academic friendships that are mutually beneficial and based on an ethic of care, while also thinking critically about our specific place within the trajectory of librarianship.

Introduction

The road to becoming a librarian is often not a direct or obvious one. We both began our careers in academia by studying Asian Humanities.^[1] After a few twists and turns, we found ourselves applying the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration that we had learned from Asian Humanities to our work as academic librarians.^[2] Two helpful concepts arose out of our experience with this interdisciplinary collaboration: kalyāṇa-mittatā, an active practice of auspicious friendship, and paramparā, critical reflection on one’s own academic lineage and the transmission of knowledge therein. With these two concepts in mind, we offer another voice to the current conversation interrogating academic librarianship as a field and its colonialist, predominantly white hostile systems.^[3] We want to contribute to the body of knowledge of critical librarianship by encouraging readers to engage with kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā and think critically about their own practice of librarianship.

As part of our work within Asian Humanities, we were introduced into a particular lineage of Buddhist scholars where we learned that the practice of applying Buddhist principles to other disciplines was not new. Buddhist thinkers have been involved in this sort of interdisciplinary collaboration for decades. We are pulling inspiration from a few venerable Buddhist monks who have done this work in other disciplines. For example, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu has written about science, socialism, and Buddhism^[4]; Phra Paisal Visalo has written about Buddhism and consumerism and COVID-19^[5]; Thich Nhat Hanh has written about Engaged Buddhism as it relates to war and the environment^[6]; and P.A. Payutto has written about the development of Buddhist Economics.^[7]  While we ourselves are not ordained, we are answering the call from these Buddhist monks and activists. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, “Engaged Buddhism is the kind of Buddhism that is present in every moment of our daily life…[and] is the kind of wisdom that responds to anything that happens in the here and the now.”^[8] We hope to use their model as we apply kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā to librarianship.

Although we are both academic librarians with double Master’s degrees, our current job descriptions and titles do not require us to know anything specific about area studies. Our specialized training — with our first Master’s in Asian Humanities (area studies)^[9] and the second in Library and Information Studies — has helped make us more aware of invisible systems of injustice and ways we can fight that oppression. It was during our Asian Humanities training that we began to encounter some of the structures within academia, including libraries, that are hostile not only to only area studies but also to our friends who are non-white, non-European/American, non-English speaking scholars and their work.^[10] We witnessed the ways that power determines who gets to be heard, represented, and who can call for change. Most academic library systems in the United States were simply not designed with these friends^[11] in mind. In a worst case scenario, library structures can actively work against area studies scholars and librarians. In most libraries, the day-to-day baseline is simply presuming that the systems in place will fail to support area studies work.  For decades, many librarians and scholars have pointed out these systemic design failures, but large-scale systemic change has yet to happen. Instead we are seeing change come at the individual librarian or institution level.

We propose that librarianship can be enriched and made less hostile through kalyāṇa-mittatā — auspicious friendship — and paramparā — transmission of knowledge. Libraries and librarianship are often the center of research, teaching, and learning at an academic institution, and librarians must be able to meet the information needs of all departments and their curricula. It is especially important that we think of ourselves critically because of this crucial role librarians have within academia and want to position ourselves within this conversation.  Calhoun, a white woman, works mainly as a humanities reference and instruction librarian at Carleton College, a small, historically white, liberal arts college in rural Minnesota with a healthy endowment. Anan, an Asian American woman, works mainly as a technical services librarian at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), a large, public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Southern California. Even coming from different racial backgrounds and experiences, we have both observed very acutely the ways that bias can perpetrate throughout a library system, making it more difficult to find, access, and cite the materials, scholars, and scholarship of area studies. When we were working within Asian Humanities, witnessing and experiencing that bias made it more difficult for us to do our own work — even if we personally were not the direct targets of the bias.

While working at very different institutions, we have found these concepts of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā useful in guiding our understanding of systemic bias. To help guide us in understanding power dynamics within these two concepts, we look to the work of our friends in critical librarianship and Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) as we examine the white hostile systems that have plagued area studies, academia, and libraries for years. Thus, our contribution to critical librarianship is the introduction of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā from Asian Humanities. We also look to our former professor to see an example of how the establishment of an academic and auspicious friendship can offer one path forward out of librarianship’s problematic legacy. We hope that other librarians will reflect on their own paramparās and will look to become kalyāṇa-mitta for others.

Kalyāṇa-Mittatā and Paramparā

From Asian Humanities, we learned about the concepts of kalyāṇa-mittatā, an active practice of auspicious friendship, and paramparā, critical reflection on one’s own academic lineage and the transmission of knowledge therein.  One way to think about these concepts is that kalyāṇa-mittatā is a lateral transmission of knowledge through space while paramparā is a vertical transmission of knowledge through time. We encountered these two concepts while studying Theravada Buddhism and the Pali language as part of our Asian Studies Master’s degrees at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pali is one of the main canonical literary languages within the South and Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhist tradition. Both kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā are woven throughout the Pali Canon, and also appear in many other religious traditions across Asia.

Friendship

In Pali, a kalyāṇa-mitta is a helper on the path toward enlightenment,^[12] a “friend” who can be supportive along the way. It often means the association with those who are virtuous,^[13] or the state of being in a supportive relationship. This friend is someone who works together with or alongside you — someone close to you in (even virtual) space. The converse is that if a person has become a detriment to you and is no longer being supportive or helpful, then the kalyāṇa-mittatā relationship ceases to exist. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t be reestablished later.

The concept of kalyāṇa-mittatā is explained more in the narratives within the Udāna, a description of vignettes of the Buddha’s words and teachings:

When a monk has admirable people as friends and colleagues, it is to be expected that he will get to hear at will, easily and without difficulty, talk that is truly sobering and conducive to the opening of awareness.^[14]

For our purposes within the context of librarianship, we want to highlight that kalyāṇa-mittatā involves listening to and helping other librarians, scholars, and teachers, and supporting and being supported by them. In other words, as our Buddhist Literatures professor Charles Hallisey asked, how can “we nurture our professional talents for the benefit of others?”^[15]

But not all kalyāṇa-mitta need to be friends or based on a personal friendship; the best lessons can also come from helpful colleagues whose work informs your own. Ideally, these colleagues or friends are able to be so deeply integrated into your paramparā (lineage) that they “can no longer think or speak [their] own story without thinking and speaking yours.”^[16] These friendships are reciprocal; both friends learn and grow because of their friendship. Each person benefits from the others’ knowledge and perspectives.

Not everyone has the energy, patience, time, or fortitude to be a kalyāṇa-mitta at any given opportunity.  We should never assume that anyone is ready and able to answer a question at the drop of a hat or do extra work for us, including work such as emotional labor. Kalyāṇa-mittatā is a consensual relationship that is entered into willingly by both friends. Like a real friendship, it shouldn’t be forced. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu states, this relationship involves the “opening of awareness”; in order to come to this state, both people must trust each other and allow themselves to be vulnerable in order to learn and change.

While kalyāṇa-mittatā involves consent, many different power dynamics can still exist within this relationship. Steven Collins, one of the major scholars of Pali and Theravada Buddhism, reminds us that friendship is not always a relationship between equals: “Friendship [that exists] in both the vertical sense — patronage — and the horizontal — friendship between equals — is an extremely common motif throughout [Buddhist]…texts…”^[17] In other words, you can have a kalyāṇa-mitta who is a mentor or supervisor and in a position of power over you, or your kalyāṇa-mitta can be a peer. To understand better the tension between power and friendship, we can refer to our second concept, paramparā.

Lineage

The second concept that we are being guided by is paramparā.^[18] The literal definition of  paramparā deals with the concept of succession or one entity or idea coming after and building on another. It can also be used in very mundane ways. For instance, it is used to refer to the list of rules that ordained monks follow or to discuss the timing of monastic meals.^[19]

Paramparā also is often used to refer to the transmission of knowledge through time from elder scholar to junior scholar — or what is known as the guru [teacher] – śiṣya [student] relationship. The relationship between the two scholars in the same paramparā is not necessarily one of kalyāṇa-mittatā, though it could be. Because by definition there is an apparent power imbalance between members of the same paramparā, the relationship between them is complicated.

While paramparā is traditionally invoked in this sense of guru-śiṣya paramparā (the passing on of knowledge from teacher to student), there is a deeper teaching mechanism operating within this teacher-student relationship that is not simply a top-down transfer of knowledge. Monica Dalidowicz, an anthropologist who is herself a member of the Panditji Das guru-śiṣya paramparā,^[20] describes the experience of being part of the lineage: “The pedagogical work in crafting fidelity [of the lesson as it is passed from teacher to student] can, in fact, produce its own kind of knowledge, which, ironically, can add new elements to the tradition in unexpected ways.”^[21] She emphasized the importance of the background of the dancer in learning the lessons passed from the teacher: “Each disciple, like her guru, brought into the [dance] school her own personality, history, cultural background, and an embodied repertoire of knowledge which invariably drew on the local world, as well as their earlier training… all of which informed and inflected their attitudes and expectations.”^[22] Both student and teacher are changed by the paramparā and the paramparā is changed by the student and teacher.

However, Dalidowicz also highlights how this sharing of background knowledge and experience is, in fact, part of the traditional guru-śiṣya paramparā:

Das and his disciples have certainly adapted their own teaching, drawing on local… practices, yet they remain entrenched in the cultural institution they inherited, the guru-shishya paramparā… [S]ubtle scaffolding measures have been there all along, implicit in the give and take that is required in an Indian pedagogical model based on duty and the intimate relationship of a master with his disciple.^[23]

The changes that occur within the paramparā are not a watering down or an unfaithfulness to the tradition; the customized pedagogy based on the particularities of student and teacher is as old as the tradition itself. Paradoxically, the paramparā encourages creativity and new knowledge in upholding the fidelity of the tradition.  Each member of the paramparā has this space to contribute many different parts of themselves to the ever-changing conversation.

Since we know the concept of paramparā might not be exclusive to the realm of academia, we can apply this concept to how each librarian learns their craft; each of us comes from different paramparās, training, and backgrounds. With each new individual that enters the multitude of library paramparās, new sets of knowledge are added to the field. This could be a theoretical foundation that can help to reframe our work, such as postcolonialism, critical theory, Relational-Cultural Theory; or it could be seemingly “unrelated” knowledge or personal interests, like languages, nursing, DIY home repair, or fandom.

How kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā work together

Together, kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā help to give a foundation to our vision for librarianship, a lived version of transmission of knowledge with friendship as the root goal.  The two work in tandem, supporting each other. In order to have a healthy paramparā, you also need kalyāṇa-mittatā to prevent harmful practices, such as racism and discrimination, from taking over the conversation.  We want to promote an active practice of kalyāṇa-mittatā by forming lateral interdisciplinary collaborations in service of introducing more intersectionality into the field of librarianship. In addition to paramparās of critical theory, Relational-Cultural Theory, and others, which have shaped new perspectives within the discipline, our contribution is the application of Asian Humanities concepts to librarianship.

White Hostile Systems

As librarians with specialized skills, we aim to push back against an uncritical view of the system. In order to understand how Theravada Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, and Asian Humanities help us to understand librarianship and power better, we need to understand the system that we are operating within. To do that, we are going to look at systemic hostility within area studies and area studies librarianship; academia writ large; and libraries in general.

White hostile systems within area studies and area studies librarianship

Area studies librarianship is based on the structures of area studies scholarship, and both tend to be “othered” within academia at large. Edward Said, the author of Orientalism and a member of our area studies paramparā,^[24] has long studied this marginalization and “othering,” which is but one aspect of the Orientalist paramparā. This, in short, is his critique of European and American scholars’ interpretations and depictions of those who are of non-European/non-American identity. In doing so, he depicts what we have called a hostile system within academia. He writes:

My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage — and even produce — the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.^[25]

Perhaps unintentionally or without realizing, libraries have perpetuated this hostile system for area studies librarianship.  A “librarian” is an individual whose responsibilities encompass the American Library Association (ALA) Core Competencies^[26] and have widely accepted qualifications, but as mentioned before, these qualifications are broad. If a “librarian” has a geographic specialization, they are usually referred to as an “area studies librarian” who is a part of “area studies librarianship.”

The work that these area studies librarians do is often not centered in the field writ large; they become “othered” — intentionally or not — within their own discipline of librarianship. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another member of our area studies paramparā, reminds us, otherness “enforce[s] a colonialist mindset” and “…the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.”^[27]  There is a tacit assumption in some libraries that area studies knowledge is too specialized and may be perceived as less helpful.^[28]  This structurally hostile system manifests itself in many ways, including purchasing practices,^[29] call number systems,^[30] subject headings,^[31] staffing budgets,^[32] named library spaces,^[33] the curricula that these academic libraries support,^[34] plus others. As a result, many area studies librarians become marginalized within a system that favors English-language material coming out of the United States.

Area studies was originally conceived in order to help a wider group of people learn about the rest of the world, though as evidenced by the above examples, the field is still plagued by issues related to Orientalism, racism, and other structural inequities. Asian Studies librarian C. David Hickey, quoting anthropologist Arjun Appadurai from his 1996 work, Modernity at Large, delves deeper into the struggle between area studies and the rest of academia:

Area-based specialists center scholarship appropriately in geographically located histories and languages and reflect on sociocultural changes outside North America and Europe, often via interdisciplinary collaborations. Scholars with area studies backgrounds have been in a unique position to recognize that [as Appadurai describes,] “locality itself is a historical product, and histories through which localities emerge are eventually subject to the dynamics of the global,” thus tying formerly marginalized world regions to the larger global picture.^[35]

Hickey here points out that the scholarship within area studies is able to bring together and amplify marginalized groups that are often not able to get traction within academia. As former area studies scholars ourselves, and having worked in this “unique position”, we want to collaborate with colleagues within librarianship in order to undo the harm brought about historically-produced concept of “marginalized world regions.”

One example of a way to start undoing this harm is through friendship, as we learned from Hallisey.  He reflects on friendship as described by John Ross Carter, a professor of philosophy and religion, in his 2012 work: “[I]n the blossoming of friendship, in that inchoate orientation in which we are fully human, it is there that we can best see ourselves as we are when we are engaged in the activity of understanding….[It gives us] the always needed reminder: friendship gives.”^[36] Using the skills we learned from our paramparā, we can become a kalyāṇa-mitta and give to those unlike us.

Tapping into connections within a paramparā and networks of kalyāṇa-mittatā is a skillset that is a fundamental part of librarianship. Embracing the work of connection-building and networking (through paramparā and kalyāṇa-mittatā) can help to develop a more critical view of of our own practice and scholarship.

White hostile systems within academia

As academic librarians, it is impossible to discuss our work without also looking at the larger academic system that we operate within, including the names of majors, departments, academic titles, course design, syllabus design, and other aspects of the current structures in place. As we have observed, American academia is organized around American whiteness. Many scholars have commented on this from different directions and in different fields. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American Studies, points out that this whiteness, “the invisible ‘center’ against which everything else is compared,” allows white people — and scholars — to be “unmarked by race […,] reap the benefits [of that whiteness, and] escape responsibility for [their] role in an unjust system.”^[37]  Michelle Caswell, a professor of archival studies and Asian American studies, informed by Hope Olson, a professor of information studies and Marika Cifor, a professor of archival studies and digital studies,^[38] describes this assumed “normal” within academia as WEBCCCHAM, or “white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, [cis, citizen] heterosexual, able-bodied, male.”^[39] Sara Ahmed, scholar of feminism, critical race theory, and postcolonialism, describes the damage done to bodies, such as bodies of scholarship, as “‘out of line’ with the institutions they inhabit.”^[40] The inherent whiteness of academia acts as “a straightening device: bodies disappear into the ‘sea of whiteness’ when they ‘line up’.”^[41] These structures and systems within colleges and universities force conformity to a white norm of scholarship.

The majors and departments that benefit from these structures of whiteness are generally the American and European subjects; all others are frequently modified with adjectives like “ethnic,” “world,” or “area.”^[42]  Ahmed illustrates that non-whiteness is then equated with the negative or abnormality; the “other” cannot exist on their own or does not exist until whiteness defines them with these modifiers.^[43] Scholarship from and about the United States or Europe can remain the unmarked standard; scholarship from and about the rest of the world needs some sort of modifier to fit into the categories set by these structures of whiteness.

We still see this tension between the unmarked (U.S./European) and the marked (the rest of the world) play out in, for example, musicology, as scholar of music history and theory Erika Honisch points out: “Not to put too fine a point on things, but if I study the music where my dad’s from (Central Europe), I’m doing ‘musicology’ and if I study the music where my mom’s from (India), I’m doing ‘ethnomusicology.'”^[44] In response to this demonstrated tension between fields, scholar of ethnomusicology and popular music studies Luis-Manuel Garcia suggests a solution: “I refuse to leave #ethnomusicology until it has fixed or dismantled itself. Until then, my loud Latino self will keep showing up at your conferences and making you uneasy.”^[45] Many of us under the unmarked US/European umbrella recognize this whiteness in our different corners of academia.

As we have seen, these ethnomusicologists and many, many other marginalized scholars like them are trying to find an escape from the systemic and harmful binary of “us versus them” that is deeply coded into academia. As they point out, attempting to cultivate a relationship or friendship with the “other” without understanding that “other” on their own terms — their priorities, histories, backgrounds, and stories — still perpetuates the hostile system of academia.  Doing so results in the tokenization, marginalization, and orientalization of the “other.” In order to develop kalyāṇa-mittatā with another person, they must have the agency to define themselves positively in their own voices, and not be labeled as someone who is lacking “normalcy,” which is often mapped to whiteness.

Particularly at schools that are more teacher-scholar or teaching and learning-focused, syllabi and course structure can also have a big impact on the work of the library. The choices that faculty make when building their syllabi, such as choices about authors and readings, often reflect the values of their department. The paramparā that is perpetuated through the syllabus is the mechanism through which many of these systems are sustained. While this pattern is starting to change, we can still see the echoes of “the Western canon” throughout many classes.

We want to use these two concepts of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā that we learned about in our Asian Humanities studies to help other librarians learn more about the history of hostile systems at work in libraries.  These hostile systems within area studies scholarship have a legacy of whiteness and colonization that will continue to devalue the work of connection and networks unless they are questioned and therefore changed. We can see many ways that the outdated, colonial mindset of Orientalism has permeated many structures in academia and libraries that are still around today.

White hostile systems within libraries

Similarly, for decades, libraries have relied on a singular white vision of order and structure, informed by a European colonialist history. This vision of order is both passed onto end users through organizational structures like call numbers and subject headings, but is also explicitly taught to future librarians in graduate school. As members of this paramparā, we are recipients of this instruction, but in our work as librarians who have studied Asian Humanities — itself also a product of centuries of colonial influence — are able to bring in a few other voices from our own kalyāṇa-mitta to help counter and enrich the lessons that we learned in library school. While we see that there is progress being made within librarianship and library school education, there are still many practicing librarians in the field, like ourselves, who never had overt exposure to critical theory while in school.^[46]

In part, this may stem from ALA, the national arbiter of libraries and librarianship, which has published their “Core Competencies of Librarianship”^[47] in 2009. This document is still in use and is referred to as a way to understand the work that is considered important in the field. It is part of our library paramparā. However in that 2009 document, there are only some vague hand-waves to the concepts underlying equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Nowhere does it ask librarians to be critical about the structures and systems that we work within.

This statement is not just a “product of its time”, though, since its Canadian equivalent, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), released a similar document just a year later. Item 1.a in their list of core competencies for librarians states that “all CARL librarians should have a strong foundational knowledge of the social, cultural, economic, political, and information environment within which they work.”^[48] While this may not be the strongest or most specific statement, it is at least an indication of moving toward acknowledging the diversity within libraries and librarians. There are certainly librarians all across the United States who are engaging in critical discussions of the field, though these conversations tend to be happening in smaller groups, whether within divisions of ALA, local communities of scholarship, or librarians who are themselves already historically oppressed.

From our experience, usually only area studies librarians are expected to have knowledge of non-U.S. or non-European history and culture. Academia also is structured in such a way as to keep the area studies specialists, like librarians, separate from the rest of their colleagues. This has a knock-on effect of preventing their knowledge from spreading. In part, this stems from the “symbolic annihilation,”^[49] as media studies scholar Gaye Tuchman calls it, of area studies librarians and their area studies backgrounds from all aspects of the library system.

While we recognize that distinction and sometimes separation can be useful due to the specialized and sometimes very unique type of work that is done by area studies librarians, we are calling out the exclusion of their academic work and contributions to librarianship itself. Their paramparā is not as widely recognized or valued by the rest of the library community. One major lesson we learned then from our Asian Humanities backgrounds is how to be critical about inherited structures.  We have applied this lesson to inherited library structures, such as the existing and questionably arbitrary divisions within classification schemes.

For example, in the B class (Philosophy, Psychology, Religion) of the Library of Congress call number system. Christianity is given five subclasses: BR, BS, BT, BV, and BX. Islam has one subclass, BP; as does Buddhism: BQ. Hinduism, however, only has one small section of one subclass: BL1100 – BL1295. Similarly, the Pali Canon, called the Tripiṭaka in library systems, the canonical text of most Buddhists, can contain anywhere from 30-100 volumes and huge amounts of paracanonical literature and commentary, but has the limited call number of range of BQ1100 – BQ3340.^[50] The Bible, a single volume, and all its commentary have the entire BS subclass that is established between BS11 and BS2970, but could expand if necessary up to the BS9000 range. BS is extensible; the Tripiṭaka range of BQ is less so. The Buddhist section on general works follows immediately after at BQ4000, meaning the Tripiṭaka’s classification range can only expand from BQ3340 up to BQ3999. The amount of space in the LC Classification allotted to Christianity as compared to the other religions is disproportionate, and reflects the systemic bias in favor of material from and about Western Europe and the United States that is published in English.

We recognize this disparity because we were trained to see connections through the transmission of knowledge and networks of friendship through our Asian Humanities background. Libraries do not need to be defined by old structures, like colonialism or nationalism, and instead should consider, as historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam said, “contaminat[ing] … such neat categories,”^[51] so as not to become “blinded … to the possibility of connection.”^[52] Knowing more about Asian Humanities was additive; it helps to keep our eyes open to this possibility of connection in our work as librarians. We can start to broaden librarianship and de-center the United States, Europe, and the English language. However, ours has not been the only approach within the field.

Methodological approaches

We are coming out of hostile systems that have mainly been built on white colonial ideals and structures within area studies, academia, and libraries. We look to the work of scholars of critical librarianship and Relational-Cultural Theory to help us find a path forward.

Critical librarianship and hostile systems

One way to do this decentering is to look at the work being done by our colleagues in critical librarianship. Building off the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, our work here is to “unpack and disrupt the racial foundations of [our] discipline,”^[53] namely, librarianship. There is a large and ever-growing body of scholarship on critical cataloging,^[54] information literacy,^[55] and critical librarianship at large^[56] that continues to inform our thinking.  In our own paramparā, LIS professor Christine Pawley wrote in 2003 about the many inequities in library systems. She brought up issues of neoliberalism, saying, “we are hampered in our search for a more critical discourse by a tradition in LIS that uses managerial language as a matter of course and that pays almost exclusive attention to technical and administrative issues.”^[57] While she saw the work that needed to be done, she also saw how difficult this work would be to do. In the decade and a half since, many other scholars have continued pointing out and trying to change these inequities. Emily Drabinski, Interim Chief Librarian and former Critical Pedagogy Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY describes the current state of critical librarianship as “a persistent longing for a librarianship that looks and acts in ways that disrupt the status quo, that center a commitment to social justice and social change, that elevate and amplify the voices of a diverse group of librarians, and that grapple directly with the problems of power concentrated in the hands of a only a few.”^[58] Michelle Caswell; Sandra Littletree and Cheryl A. Metoyer; and Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis have all been doing this work of critical librarianship in the space of less commonly taught languages and cultures.^[59]

Michelle Caswell — whose academic paramparā overlaps with ours — has written extensively^[60] and taught about critical archival studies, and challenges current archival practices that perpetuate injustice and the violation of human rights. Caswell is one of many scholars who has been doing much heavy lifting to explore, highlight, and teach about the hostile systems of libraries and how they can be understood through the lenses of critical theory, critical race theory, queer theory, feminist ethics, Orientalism, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism.^[61] Even in the construction of her syllabi, Caswell reminds us to look to our academic friends — these scholars and authors who are well-established and flourishing in other fields — in order to re-envision and thus dismantle current library, information, and archival studies paramparās. These other scholars can potentially act as kalyāṇa-mitta and help us examine the aspects of librarianship that are structurally unsound, and have for centuries perpetuated unfairness, marginalization, and colonialist ideologies. This deconstruction is not to eliminate librarianship completely, but instead to remake it into something better for all that welcomes the oppressed into the space that had formerly been reserved exclusively for the oppressors.

We can see this dynamic playing out in the creation of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in 2008.^[62] It was founded by librarians Samip Mallick and Caswell in order to “counter the silences, under-representation and misrepresentation of South Asians in mainstream American archives and historical narratives through a publically accessible digital archive that reflects the community’s century-old history in the U.S.”^[63] Caswell wrote later, along with co-authors and archivists Marika Cifor and Mario H. Ramirez, about ameliorating the representation and presentation within libraries and archives dedicated to specific communities — in their case, the South Asian American community — with a history of misrepresentation or no representation at all. At the conclusion of their project, they propose, while invoking Gaye Tuchman,^[64] the following:

In this way, mainstream archival repositories and professionally trained archivists would do well to take a page from the community archives movement to counteract more profoundly the effects of symbolic annihilation and instead to work to invoke feelings of representational belonging for the communities and individuals they exist to serve.^[65]

Through their interviews with South Asian American scholars, Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez continued to highlight the difficulty for South Asian American scholars to access materials related to their ethnic background. Due to that lack of access on the part of faculty, South Asian American students were also being denied the opportunity to learn about their background. With the founding of SAADA, the South Asian American community reported feeling like they belonged, or, as Interviewee 9 put it, that they “suddenly are able to discover themselves, existing, being documented.”^[66] It is through careful cultivation of this connection between libraries and communities that friends can be made and knowledge can be transmitted onward into the future. People should be able to see themselves properly represented in the archives and libraries that they have easy access to; it should not be a gift only to the few.

Dismantling these colonalist structures can only be done by learning about the power structures of colonialism itself and “imagining” decolonization as Duarte and Belarde-Lewis contend in their paper about creating spaces for Indigeneous knowledge.^[67] They suggest that non-Indigenous readers learn from and allow those with Indigenous backgrounds to lead in new endeavors and partnerships and that those Indigenous individuals must also remain open-minded to new approaches aimed to increase their accurate representation.^[68] Similarly, Littletree and Metoyer also write about Indigenous communities.  They describe how their thesaurus — a general knowledge project — was informed by the “power” of Indigenous words and philosophies, and illustrate how word choice can misidentify, misinform, or stereotype the targeted group.^[69]

Both Littletree and Metoyer, and Duarte and Belarde-Lewis, then, highlight the fact that libraries are staffed by many different types of people: those who are descendants of the colonizers, who have also unwittingly benefitted from centuries of injustice; and those who are descendents of the colonized, who have inherited centuries of trauma. Todd Honma and Sofia Leung separately situate library staff within power structures, reminding us that “libraries have historically served the interests of a white racial project by aiding in the construction and maintenance of a white American citizenry as well as the perpetuation of white privilege in the structures of the field itself”^[70] and that “[b]y only centering knowledge that reaffirms whiteness’ normativity, LIS has disrupted the knowledge passed down through BIPOC generations.”^[71] All staff members, then, are embedded in the same unjust library system that has been passed down to them. By shining a light on these uninterrogated systems, all of these authors promote understanding between different types of people and show a way to make connections in order to dismantle that old system.

Relational-Cultural Theory

Another known approach that we can employ to fix the current hostile systems in libraries is Relational-Cultural Theory. We are working off the Stone Center relational model of Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) that was originally developed by psychologists Jean Baker Miller, Judith V. Jordan, Irene P. Stiver, Janet L. Surrey, and Alexandra G. Kaplan. According to their definition of RCT, “[i]solation is seen as the primary source of human suffering, and that beings grow through and toward connection.”^[72] Instead, the ideal relationship within RCT is based on “authenticity, mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment.”^[73] This emphasis on connection was seen as a way to dismantle the predominant theory at the time that human development was based on independence.^[74]

These are qualities that are missing from hostile systems that often make up our library workspaces. The workspaces end up as hostile or appear hostile due to not only an overt use of power and privilege but also a lack of action to fix or even to acknowledge the inequities and barriers in this system. Maureen Walker, a psychologist and practitioner of Relational-Cultural Theory, applies RCT very directly to the issues of racism within a system:

It is not, however, the differences that plague us. It is rather that the differences are profoundly stratified. This stratification is the consequence of systematic miseducation that teaches us that white is superior and black is inferior. The stratification, not the difference, constrains our capacity for authenticity and undermines our desire for connection.^[75]

We can see this stratification playing out in multiple ways in libraries.  As we have discussed above, there is ample evidence of this happening on a structural level.  But as David J. Hudson, a Learning & Curriculum Support librarian at the University of Guelph, reminds us, this stratification is also personal. He reflects on his work in libraries, noting that he is “alienated” and a:

…racialized subject in an LIS environment that reproduces narratives of the inherent civilizational inadequacy of the communities of which [his] ancestors and living relatives are a part. If we understand the decolonization of information work to involve a recognition that colonial discourses of difference have profoundly influenced whose ways of knowing and speaking the world are considered legitimate, whose ways illegitimate, and whose altogether inconceivable, we might also extend such work to inquire into how these discursive dynamics operate within LIS to enable, constrain, and foreclose particular spaces of identification from and through which to speak.^[76]

So while the classic LIS paramparā can feel big and pervasive, Hudson reminds us that it is still grounded in and driven by individuals.  Not everyone has the same power, access, and privilege of contributing to this paramparā because of this stratification within library structures.  In the same way that RCT was intended to dismantle the structures of isolation within therapy, we are hoping to use Asian Humanities to bring a new perspective on librarianship.

One way that we can see the “systemic miseducation” that Walker calls out playing out at both levels is in the many static paramparās that intersect in our work — area studies, academia writ large, and libraries. Issues within specific paramparās that remain unfixed or unquestioned therefore are passed onward to newer scholars and students; the concept of “power over” goes unchecked and therefore, the RCT goal of mutuality and relationship-building is unable to be attained:

[L]ike all concepts and actions of a dominant group, power may be distorted and skewed. This distortion is manifest in a constant need to maintain an irrational dominance [that restricts] another group [and also both] engenders conflict and simultaneously seeks to suppress it.^[77]

However, the movement of RCT and our proposed approach of forming kalyāṇa-mittatā have challenged this “systematic miseducation” and these paramparās that have perpetuated this “culture shaped by a legacy of race-based stratification.”^[78]  Similar to RCT, kalyāṇa-mittatā is built on mutual connections and empathic relationships, but Walker adds to our understanding by reminding us to simultaneously be open and vulnerable to face and work through conflict. It is through this productive challenge that Walker discusses that both friends can grow and start to break down the stratification.

In the same way that working in a library made Hudson a “racialized subject,”^[79] we can see how interpersonal relationships are impacted by the position and identity of the individuals within a system, and in this case, especially hostile ones.  These individuals who do not conform to what is considered the “dominant culture,”^[80] or as mentioned before, the WEBCCCHAM culture, must continue to struggle against “the original violation [racism, sexism, etc.] perpetrated by [that] dominant culture.”^[81] Similarly to the way we see this tension play out in academia through marked and unmarked disciplines and subjects (i.e., musicology versus ethnomusicology), we have also seen the same tension play out within libraries.^[82]

Walker proposes a solution of how to address whiteness and the disproportionate power dynamic issue. For people who are a part of the dominant culture, she suggests “learn[ing] about [yourself] and the other person, thereby enhancing [your] capacity for self-empathy and empathy for the other.”^[83] Reflect, and see if there are needed changes that should be made to your paramparā. Do you need to rethink who you cite? You may have friends who help you along the way, but ensure that you do not abuse your relative position of power to wrest help from them. In short: use your power for good, help your friends, and be vulnerable to conflict.^[84]

RCT adds to our understanding of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā by giving us the language to investigate power dynamics and the way these power dynamics affect both the individual experience and the group experience.  We have put critical librarianship and Relational-Cultural Theory in conversation with Asian Humanities in order to enrich and transform the library’s paramparā. To get a glimpse of what this might look like in practice, we will now look back again to our own paramparā, specifically our teacher Charles Hallisey, from whom we first learned of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā.

Another approach: Reading with friends

One way to help to break down old hostile institutional structures is by building up friendships, specifically academic friendships, as demonstrated by our professor Charles Hallisey, the Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures, and his work with Carolyn Jones Medine, Professor of Religion and African American Studies. We would like to emulate this type of model of friendship and implement it within librarianship.

Hallisey, in his foreword to John Ross Carter’s book on interfaith dialogue, reminds us of one of the key features of friendship: “[O]ne thing that we come to know in friendship, that good friends (or in Pali, kalyāṇa-mitta) teach us afresh again and again, is that the bedrock of our individual experiences and personal realizations lies not only within us, but also beyond us.”^[85] Although he is speaking within a religious studies context, the same concept equally applies to other fields, including librarianship: we cannot make the field better without paying close attention to the “individual experiences” of our friends in our lineage. We should rely on our friends to help us see that we are in an unjust system and can potentially break free from it.

Hallisey and our other teachers were seeing the endgame of what Subrahmanyam foreshadowed in his 1997 article: “Area studies can very rapidly become parochialism. … Having helped create Frankenstein’s monsters, we are obliged to praise them for beauty, rather than grudgingly acknowledge their limited functional utility.”^[86] The separation between area studies departments and geographically unmarked disciplinary departments ends up hurting both groups. Instead, our teachers were trying to build more complex relationships between disciplines — relationships that were built on communication and friendship.

We could still see Hallisey’s intentionality of relationship building across disciplines when, as part of the Womanist-Buddhist Consultations, he read with a group of Womanist scholars, including Medine. The emphasis of their conversation was not on conflict or persuasion, but instead was on learning. Medine described the experience: “Together, we enter a kind of interstitial or liminal space, in which Womanist thought and Buddhism meet over particular concerns… We meet, then, in a posture of humility, as beginners, in encounter or/and diaspora, and in a variety of processes and movements.”^[87]  The process of reading is active — especially reading together. Any time you read, and especially in community, others are changing you and you are changing them for the benefit of the paramparā. It is good to look to these new friends and embrace the humility to learn from others and to wield the power of creativity with care.

Hallisey also cares about how his own academic field can be improved.  This care comes through in the form of academic friendships.  As he states, “Womanist analysis invites Buddhist Studies on a productive journey and suggests new interpretive possibilities. Womanism opens up a critically self-conscious space that helps us to reflect upon what we want to know and how we do know.”^[88] In the same way, Medine also learns and benefits in her work as a Womanist by reading Buddhist texts in the company of Hallisey; we can be “critically self-conscious” because we have a friend who allows us to be that way or has shown us how to do it.  Medine, in talking about a collaborative friendship between scholars of Buddhism and Womanism, illustrates what kalyāṇa-mittatā looks like in practice: “The scholars of Buddhism surrender the text, and the Womanists open for them the multivocality of the text, to which the scholars of Buddhism can return refreshed.”^[89] Reading with friends and including the points of view and scholarly histories from different paramparās, can help remove “claims of ownership and of a ‘right’ way to interpret, which might block our seeing.”^[90] This opening can help refocus a scholars’ perspective, enrich the paramparā, and change what is transmitted to future scholars. In describing this event, she is also pointing at the issues of proscriptive interpretations of a text. Having one single norm imposed upon all readers hides other meanings that are now lost.

Through care, humility, and creativity, and conversing with our kalyāṇa-mitta in such a space as Hallisey and Medine demonstrate, we learn more about ourselves by being friends with others, and seeing ourselves through their eyes.  Medine, quoting Hallisey, says that we all benefit because “we need a friend to help us overcome what we can and to begin to see what we cannot.”^[91]  As Hallisey’s students, we have seen him develop friendship with other scholars outside of his immediate discipline in order to use his power as a teacher for good, mutually help his friends, and also be vulnerable to conflict.  These relationship-building or friendship-building techniques are also reflected in the writings of other scholars such as Thanissaro Bhikkhu and Maureen Walker.

In turn, we hope to pass on and teach other librarians this same approach of kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā to rethink the fundamentals of and power structures within librarianship; we, too, should care first in the same manner. We can see in his practice that Hallisey cares about someone else’s experience, words, and perspectives, and the lessons he can learn from them, and thus can pass those lessons along to us. Together, we can give to each other as kalyāṇa-mitta the gift of insight in order to see things about our paramparā that we couldn’t see by ourselves. To quote Hallisey again, “friendship gives.”^[92]

Conclusion: Friendship Gives

We have pulled together the theoretical concepts of Relational-Cultural Theory and critical librarianship along with kalyāṇa-mittatā and paramparā to view librarianship through an Asian Humanities lens. Libraries are often hostile systems for area studies and have the potential to be even more so due to COVID-19 and other circumstances.^[93] Scholarly paramparās, historically, have tended to be defined by geographical areas and languages. Subjects outside of area studies tend to center around an unmarked geography (United States and Western Europe) and unmarked language (English). We have experienced the ways these unmarked systems have negatively impacted the work of librarians and other scholars. As librarians and Asian Humanities scholars with experience of being outside of these unmarked areas of study, we drew from a particular paramparā that includes scholars like Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Phra Paisal Visalo, Thich Nhat Hanh, and P.A. Payutto to inform our work.  We have seen how this “outside” knowledge about the importance of friendship or kalyāṇa-mittatā has provided us a different perspective on the current structure of librarianship. Through this friendship and forging these new connections, we have shown how to broaden the lineage of librarianship and scholarship within librarianship to make it more inclusive, equitable, and diverse.

Asian Humanities itself, while definitely not a perfect field or even perfect concept, has still produced some good scholarship and scholars critical of the field. We took the useful concepts from the area studies and librarianship paramparās, and where they converged, we found a rich overlap that can make both disciplines better. At that intersection, we found Charles Hallisey and Carolyn Jones Medine having a conversation. They showed us how this conversation bridged disciplinary and methodological gaps, and how they were able to listen as kalyāṇa-mitta to each other. Just as Hallisey bridges the scholarship between Womanists and Buddhist Studies scholars, we hope we have emulated that same method of bridging area studies, particularly Asian Humanities, and librarianship.

In the same way that Charles Hallisey asked, “what good is Buddhist Studies for anyone else besides those who engage in it,” we could also ask what good is this paper about librarianship for anyone else not in the field?^[94] Why should non-librarians care about a librarianship that, especially as we have seen in this very paper, is a product of white hostile systems? On the other hand, why should librarians care about these concepts from Asian Humanities? Using the theoretical base of critical librarianship and Relational-Cultural Theory, we examined these systems within area studies, academia, and libraries, and were inspired by our former professor to establish our own academic and auspicious friendship (kalyāṇa-mittatā) with each other to help transform our problematic academic legacies (paramparā) of Orientalism, colonialism, and structural racism.

Remembering that kalyāṇa-mittatā is reciprocal and remembering that a paramparā is not set in stone, we ask you to reflect on past experiences. Who has been in your paramparā? Who has been your kalyāṇa-mitta? You may have been surrounded by helpful people; you may have been in a dysfunctional system that was unwelcoming — or both may be true. Regardless of the situation, how can we all become better librarians and better friends?

We can learn from excellent thinkers both inside and outside academia. There are many unacknowledged specialists — our potential friends — who we need to see and hear. As Hallisey reminds us, “friendship gives:”^[95] friendship is most powerful and beneficial when it is reciprocal.

In tangible ways, we become better librarians when we support those who are already doing and engaged with the work.  We become better friends or kalyāṇa-mitta by trusting in each other.  Clearly there is still work to be done within the field of librarianship to build these new relationships and reframe old hostile structures. We hope this paper provided one way for you to begin to create a new lineage for yourself that you can use to survive within or change the system around you. Hopefully you are able to find good friends along the way. In the spirit of growing our own paramparā, we are more than happy to begin cultivating a friendship with you!

Notes

^[1] Asian Humanities is a shift in the area studies field of Asian Studies. Instead of centering scholarship on the historically white fields of Philology and Orientalism, the goal is to center it around humanists in Asia. From the scholars we draw on, it is easy to tell that the field — and our own work — reflects this ongoing process of shifting.

^[2] In this paper, we use the term “librarian” in a broad way that is not tied to degrees. Although we are academic librarians and frequently talk about academia, we intend to include librarians in all types of libraries.

^[3] Dismantling Racism Works, “White Supremacy Culture in Organizations” (COCo (the Centre for Community Organizations), November 2019), https://coco-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Coco-WhiteSupCulture-ENG4.pdf.

^[4] Buddhadasa Indapanno, Natural Cure for Spiritual Disease by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu: A Guide to Buddhist Science, trans. Santikaro Bhikkhu (Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives, 2017), https://www.suanmokkh.org/books/90; Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Dhammic Socialism, trans. Donald K. Swearer, 2nd ed. (Bangkok: Thai Inter-Religious Commission for Development, 1993), https://www.suanmokkh.org/books/83; Donald K. Swearer, “Bhikkhu Buddhadāsa’s Interpretation of the Buddha,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 2 (1996): 313–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1466104.

^[5] Phra Paisal Visalo, “Buddhism for the Next Century: Toward Renewing a Moral Thai Society,” Visalo.Org (blog), n.d., http://www.visalo.org/englishArticles/nextcentury.htm; Craig Lewis, “Senior Thai Monk Offers a Buddhist Perspective on Dealing with COVID-19,” trans. Somboon Chungprampree, Buddhistdoor Global, March 25, 2020, https://www.buddhistdoor.net/news/senior-thai-monk-offers-a-buddhist-perspective-on-dealing-with-covid-19.

^[6]Thich Nhat Hanh, “History of Engaged Buddhism: A Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh-Hanoi, Vietnam, May 6-7, 2008,” Human Architecture : Journal of the Sociology of Self – Knowledge 6, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 29–36. https://www.okcir.com/product/thich-nhat-hanhs-sociological-imagination-essays-and-commentaries-on-engaged-buddhism/

^[7] P. A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, trans. Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans, 1994, https://www.urbandharma.org/pdf/Buddhist_Economics.pdf.

^[8] Nhat Hanh, “History of Engaged Buddhism,” 31.

^[9] While our degrees were conferred from different departments (Anan’s in Southeast Asian Studies; Calhoun’s in Languages and Cultures of Asia), we enrolled in many of the same courses that dealt with Asian Humanities. While we recognize that Asian Studies and Asian Humanities have a problematic Orientalist history, our goal is to take the lessons we’ve learned from this type of divisive and colonialist paramparā to create newer, more inclusive paramparās and kalyāṇa-mittas, such as one between Asian Humanities and librarianship.

^[10] We acknowledge that there are many other important intersecting aspects of identity that can also make academia a hostile place, including gender, sexuality, disability, class, citizenship status, etc.

^[11] However, even as we use the word “friend” here, we recognize that we must critically self-examine our own language. As Calhoun has earlier argued, “[T]he word ‘friend’ implies an ‘other’—my friend is not myself. We-all have much in common—but not everything.” We still need to think critically about ourselves and our positionality within the larger library system, and how to include everyone, we-all, in the conversation so that it’s no longer a hostile us vs you. From: Sarah D Calhoun, “Learning to See the Satsana as a Religion: Latthi Kho’ng Phu’an (Beliefs of Friends) by Sathiankoset and Nakhaprathip” (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006), 45, https://www.zotero.org/zoya888#EPVKZM39.

^[12] Steven Collins, “Kalyanamitta and Kalyanamittata,” ed. K. R. Norman, Journal of the Pali Text Society XI (1987): 51, http://www.palitext.com/JPTS_scans/JPTS_1987_XI.pdf.

^[13] Pali Text Society, “Mittatā,” in The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary (London: Pali Text Society, 1925), Digital South Asia Library.

^[14]Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans., “Meghiya Sutta,” in Udāna, Khuddaka Nikāya  4 (dhammatalks.org), 4:1, v8, accessed September 22, 2020, https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/Ud/ud4_1.html.

^[15] Charles Hallisey, “‘It Not the Only One’: Womanist Resources for Reflection in Buddhist Studies,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, Issue 32 (2012): 74, https://doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2012.0025.

^[16] Carolyn M. Jones Medine, “The Womanist-Buddhist Consultation as a Reading Community,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 32, no. 1 (October 3, 2012): 53, https://doi.org/10.1353/bcs.2012.0013.

^[17] Steven Collins, Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 30.

^[18] Pali Text Society, “Paraŋ,” in The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary (London: Pali Text Society, 1925), Digital South Asia Library.

^[19] Hermann Oldenberg, ed., “Suttavibhaṇga: The Pacittiya Rules,” in The Vinaya Piṭakaṃ: One of the Principle Buddhist Holy Scriptures in the Pāli Language, vol. 4 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1879), v. 33:3, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001002748.

^[20]Greg Downey, Monica Dalidowicz, and Paul H Mason, “Apprenticeship as Method: Embodied Learning in Ethnographic Practice,” Qualitative Research15, no. 2 (April 1, 2015): 183–200, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794114543400.

^[21] Monica Dalidowicz, “Crafting Fidelity: Pedagogical Creativity in Kathak Dance,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 4 (2015): 838.

^[22] Dalidowicz, 844.

^[23] Dalidowicz, 851.

^[24] To be clear, we don’t dictate or dominate the paramparā; by “our” we mean we belong to and participate in it. Likewise, we belong to and participate in multiple overlapping Venn diagrams of paramparās.

^[25] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.

^[26] American Library Association, “Core Competences of Librarianship,” January 27, 2009, http://www.ala.org/educationcareers/sites/ala.org.educationcareers/files/content/careers/corecomp/corecompetences/finalcorecompstat09.pdf.

^[27] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 24–25. While Spivak also raises important questions about gender as it relates to subalternity, that is out of scope for this paper.

^[28]C. David Hickey, “Area Studies Libraries in the Global Studies Milieu: Implications for Non-Roman Script Print Resource Management and University Library Budgets and Staffing,” Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 30, no. 1/2 (2006): 82, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649055.2006.10766108.

^[29] Mara L. Thacker et al., “Establishing the Impact of Area Studies Collections and Exploring Opportunities for Collaborative Collecting,” Library Resources & Technical Services 63, no. 1 (2019): 46–61.

^[30]Zita Cristina Nunes, “Remembering the Howard University Librarian Who Decolonized the Way Books Were Catalogued: Dorothy Porter Challenged the Racial Bias in the Dewey Decimal System, Putting Black Scholars alongside White Colleagues,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 26, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remembering-howard-university-librarian-who-decolonized-way-books-were-catalogued-180970890/; Lindell, Karen, “Down with Dewey,” Slate.Com, September 27, 2019, https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/09/melvil-dewey-american-library-association-award-name-change.html; “119th Chat: Melvil Dewey,” Twitter chat, Critlib, October 1, 2019, http://critlib.org/melvil-dewey/.

^[31] Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 677–702, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396; Sandra Littletree and Cheryl A. Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 640–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1010113; Pauline A. Cochrane and Monika Kirtland, “Critical Views of LCSH–the Library of Congress Subject Headings: A Bibliographic and Bibliometric Essay; and An Analysis of Vocabulary Control in the Library of Congress List of Subject Headings (LCSH),” An ERIC Information Analysis (Syracuse University, 1981), https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396.

^[32]Nancy J. Schmidt, “Proceedings of the Future of Area Librarianship Conference” (Indiana University, Indianapolis, 1995), https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3052.

^[33] Eamon Tewell et al., “What Named Spaces Tell Us About Academic Libraries” (ACRL 2021, Virtual, 2021), 10, http://www.ala.org/acrl/conferences/acrl2021/papers.

^[34] Dennis Looney and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than En­glish in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Final Report” (Modern Language Association, 2016).

^[35] Hickey, “Area Studies Libraries in the Global Studies Milieu: Implications for Non-Roman Script Print Resource Management and University Library Budgets and Staffing,” 78.

^[36] Charles Hallisey, “Foreword,” in In the Company of Friends: Exploring Faith and Understanding with Buddhists and Christians, by John Ross Carter (Ithaca, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2012), xxi.

^[37] Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019), 2.

^[38] Hope A. Olson, “Patriarchal Structures of Subject Access and Subversive Techniques for Change,” Canadian Journal of Information & Library Sciences 26, no. 2/3 (June 2001): 4.

^[39] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Radical Empathy in Archival Practice (Pre-Prints), 3, no. 1 (August 25, 2019): 7, https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/113.

^[40] Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 159, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139.

^[41] Ahmed, 159.

^[42] While we are using this language ourselves in this paper, it highlights how difficult it is for non-white scholars and scholarship to exist within these white systems without using this type of marginalizing language.

^[43] Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

^[44] Erika Supria Honish, “Not to Put Too Fine a Point on Things, but If I Study the Music Where My Dad’s from (Central Europe), I’m Doing ‘Musicology’ and If I Study the Music Where My Mom’s from (India), I’m Doing ‘Ethnomusicology.,’” Twitter (blog), July 21, 2020, https://twitter.com/DrCanonic/status/1285726219586154497.

^[45] Luis-Manuel Garcia, “I Refuse to Leave #ethnomusicology until It Has Fixed or Dismantled Itself. Until Then, My Loud Latino Self Will Keep Showing up at Your Conferences and Making You Uneasy.,” Twitter (blog), June 12, 2020, https://twitter.com/LMGM/status/1271541798209572874.

^[46] After the murder of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many other BIPOC Americans, many library groups are starting to create statements, documents, and working groups around anti-racism. However, most of this work only began in earnest by institutions and became more visible in 2020 and is still in a nascent phase.

^[47] American Library Association, “Core Competences of Librarianship.”

^[48] Canadian Association of Research Libraries: ABRC, “Core Competencies for 21st Century CARL Librarians,” October 2010, https://www.carl-abrc.ca/doc/core_comp_profile-e.pdf.

^[49] Gaye Tuchman, “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benét (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3–38.

^[50] The term ‘Tripiṭaka’ originates from Sanskrit. Because of a bias within library systems for Sanskrit over other smaller South and Southeast Asian languages, it is not referred to by its own Pali name. The number of volumes is dependent on Buddhist lineage, language, and other printing details. There also is not a common agreement on which volumes make up the Tripiṭaka — some Buddhist traditions include some texts that are considered non-canonical in other Buddhist traditions.

^[51] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 759, https://www.jstor.org/stable/312798.

^[52] Subrahmanyam, 761.

^[53] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw et al., “Introduction,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, ed. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw et al. (University of California Press, 2019), 1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwp0hd.4.

^[54] Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” The Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (April 1, 2013): 94–111, https://doi.org/10.1086/669547.

^[55] Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy, Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook (Chicago, Illinois: Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, 2016).

^[56] Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, eds., Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (MIT Press, 2021), https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5114/Knowledge-JusticeDisrupting-Library-and; Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2017); Ian Beilin et al., eds., In the Library with the Lead Pipe: An Open Access, Open Peer Reviewed Journal, 2008, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/.

^[57] Christine Pawley, “Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 73, no. 4 (October 2003): 443, https://doi.org/10.1086/603440.

^[58] Emily Drabinski, “What Is Critical about Critical Librarianship? [Accepted Manuscript],” Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 2 (April 2019): 7, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/537.

^[59] While the term “Less Commonly Taught Languages” itself invites robust discussion about why and where these languages are not being taught, it is a metric often tracked and used in higher education. For instance, here are the number of institutions reporting fall enrollments in 2016 in selected Less Commonly Taught Asian Languages : Chinese/Mandarin: 812; Classical and Premodern Chinese: 17; Japanese: 680; Classical Japanese: 4; Korean: 162; Hindi/Urdu: 74; Sanskrit/Vedic: 28; Indonesian/Malay/Bahasa: 21; Thai: 20; Pali: 2; Sinhala: 1. See: Looney and Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than En­glish in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Final Report,” fig. 10.

^[60] Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives : Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, Routledge Studies in Archives (New York: Routledge, 2021), EBSCOhost; Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia, Critical Human Rights Series (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

^[61] Michelle Caswell, “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives,” Library Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2017): 222–35; Michelle Caswell, “Critical LIS Praxis Course,” accessed November 25, 2019, https://michellecaswell.org/teaching.

^[62] Michelle Caswell and Samip Mallick, “Collecting the Easily Missed Stories: Digital Participatory Microhistory and the South Asian American Digital Archive,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.880931.

^[63] Caswell and Mallick, 73.

^[64] Tuchman, “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media.”

^[65] Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 76.

^[66] Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, 70.

^[67] Duarte and Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining.”

^[68] Duarte and Belarde-Lewis, 679.

^[69] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective,” 654.

^[70] Todd Honma, “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (June 21, 2005): 31, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp.

^[71] Sophia Y. Leung, “Knowledge Justice,” https://www.sofiayleung.com/thoughts/knowledgejusticekeynote.

^[72]Judith V. Jordan and Maureen Walker, “Introduction,” in The Complexity of Connection: Writings from the Stone Center’s Jean Baker Miller, ed. Judith V. Jordan, Maureen Walker, and Linda M. Hartling (New York: Guilford Publications, 2004), 2.

^[73]Judith V. Jordan, Relational–Cultural Therapy, 2nd ed. (American Psychological Association, 2018), 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1chrsst.

^[74]Jordan, 3.

^[75]Maureen Walker, “Race, Self, and Society: Relational Challenges in a Culture of Disconnection,” in The Complexity of Connection: Writings from the Stone Center’s Jean Baker Miller, ed. Judith V. Jordan, Maureen Walker, and Linda M. Hartling (New York: Guilford Publications, 2004), 93. Emphasis in the original.

^[76]David J. Hudson, “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies,” Journal of Information Ethics, Special Issue: Information Ethics and Global Citizenship 25, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 74, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1806969429/abstract/8F353D3163B44271PQ/1.

^[77]Walker, “Race, Self, and Society: Relational Challenges in a Culture of Disconnection,” 93.

^[78]Walker, 101.

^[79]Hudson, “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides,” 74.

^[80]Walker, “Race, Self, and Society: Relational Challenges in a Culture of Disconnection,” 94.

^[81]Walker, 98.

^[82]Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna Gadsby, “All Carrots, No Sticks: Relational Practice and Library Instruction Coordination –,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (blog), July 10, 2019, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/all-carrots-no-sticks-relational-practice-and-library-instruction-coordination/; Meredith Farkas, “Is ‘Fit’ a Bad Fit?,” American Libraries Magazine, June 3, 2019, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2019/06/03/cultural-fit-bad-fit/; Chris Bourg, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Librarianship,” Feral Librarian (blog), March 4, 2014, https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-librarianship/.

^[83]Walker, “Race, Self, and Society: Relational Challenges in a Culture of Disconnection,” 98.

^[84]Walker, 101.

^[85]Hallisey, “Foreword,” xvi.

^[86]Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories,” 742–43.

^[87]Medine, “The Womanist-Buddhist Consultation as a Reading Community,” 48–49.

^[88]Hallisey, “‘It Not the Only One’: Womanist Resources for Reflection in Buddhist Studies,” 73.

^[89]Medine, “The Womanist-Buddhist Consultation as a Reading Community,” 50.

^[90]Medine, 50.

^[91]Medine, 49.

^[92]Hallisey, “Foreword,” xxi.

^[93]Joint Area Studies Task Force, “Equity and Access in Higher Education and Academic Libraries amid the COVID-19 Pandemic,” August 17, 2020, https://www.eastasianlib.org/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Equity-and-Access-in-Higher-Education-and-Academic-Libraries-Final-August-17.pdf.

^[94]Hallisey, “‘It Not the Only One’: Womanist Resources for Reflection in Buddhist Studies,” 73.

^[95]Hallisey, “Foreword,” xxi.

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