critical librarianship | The Journal of Creative Library Practice

by Mark Eaton
Reader Services Librarian / Professor
Kingsborough Community College Library
Brooklyn, New York

Abstract

This paper, adopting a perspective from the recent literature of “postcritique”, finds that criticism in librarianship can be constructively supplemented with other methodological approaches. Instead of exclusively using criticism to analyze, dismantle and find fault with texts, librarianship can expand its perspectives to find new reparative possibilities of care. Following the work of Nicholas Holm, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Rita Felski and others, we can see that while criticism has thrived as a disposition in librarianship and elsewhere, recent scholarly interventions suggest that it is not the only possible approach. This paper ultimately argues that a postcritical disposition can sit alongside a critical disposition, not as a replacement, but as an additive.

Continue reading Critique, Postcritique and Libraries →

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. Continue reading In a lineage of friends: What Asian Humanities gives to critical librarianship →