When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Making Room for Imagination
Posted on February 17, 2026 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Jamia Williams
I have admired Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s work for years, so her opening keynote at the ACRL 2025 Conference was both an inspiration and a reckoning for me. As she spoke, I felt something quietly but urgently resurface: the realization that my imagination was necessary and that I needed to be intentional about setting aside time to let it run wild. It was a reminder that imagination is truly a superpower and a necessary force for dismantling or interrupting oppression. In a profession and academic culture that constantly demands efficiency, innovation, and measurable outcomes, Benjamin’s words reminded me that imagination is not expendable; it is essential, especially for those of us navigating institutions that were not designed with us in mind. That reminder stayed with me long after the conference ended, compelling me to turn to her book Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) to nurture my imagination. This blog post presents some takeaways I think will be helpful for us academic librarians to consider and grapple with.
What Is Imagination?
In her book, Benjamin writes,
Imagination, by definition, takes many different forms. Still, Merriam-Webster Dictionary comes in handy: ‘The act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.’ In this book, however, I refuse to police the parameters of imagination. I want more than anything for your imagination to run wild.
So, how can those of us in academia harness our imagination? I encourage all of us to make time for imagination by pushing back against the need to always be productive and imagining what we don’t see.
Radical imagination is about seeing ourselves somewhere we have not yet been allowed to exist. Spaces where we don’t see others who look like us, think like us, or come from where we come from. For many of us working in academic libraries, that imagining was personal before it ever became professional. We imagined ourselves as scholars, leaders, and decision-makers in institutions that were never built with us in mind.
Our students feel this too, especially those who are first-generation, disabled, Black, Indigenous, students of color, queer, or otherwise marginalized. They are constantly scanning their environments for cues that tell them whether they belong. Radical imagination becomes a way to exist when the present reality is oppressive.
When Imagination Gets Fetishized
Of course, imagination, like any powerful thing, can be misused. Benjamin warns us that “when we work to cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world, we must be careful not to fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients, like strategizing and organizing, to make our vision a reality.” In higher education and libraries, imagination is often celebrated in abstract ways. We’re encouraged to “dream big,” “innovate,” and “reimagine the future” without any commitment to dismantling the structures that limit who gets to benefit from those dreams.
This is where imagination gets fetishized. It becomes a virtue signaling exercise rather than a practice rooted in accountability. We ask students to imagine better futures while continuing to subject them to surveillance technologies, inaccessible spaces, and policies that punish vulnerability. We talk about creativity while denying people the material conditions required, like time, safety, rest, and dignity, to actually imagine. Fetishized imagination is disconnected from repair. It loves the aesthetic of possibility but resists the work of transformation.
Collective Imagination & Library Design
Another thought that comes to mind when thinking about this is how we use collective imagination in designing our library spaces. Benjamin writes, “In most cases, I am implying the idea of a collective imagination, as when we imagine different worlds together, writing shared stories and plotting futures in which we can all flourish. But this ‘collecting’ of our imaginations is not always a good thing, as when the powers that be endeavor to download their dreams from on high.” Library design is one of the clearest places where imagination, or its absence, shows up. Size, layout, furniture, lighting, entrances, security measures, and signage all communicate who a space is for.
Hostile architecture doesn’t only exist on city benches. It shows up in libraries through chairs designed to prevent resting; narrow aisles that exclude mobility devices; loud, open spaces that ignore neurodivergent needs; and “quiet” policies enforced selectively. Even decisions framed as neutral, like removing seating to deter sleeping, are deeply political. Accessible design requires imagination that centers marginalized folks not as afterthoughts but as primary stakeholders, for instance, by redesigning spaces with disabled users leading the process or slowing down decision-making to include those most impacted. That kind of imagination is about intentional care, a political view that should be normalized.
A couple of years ago, during a conference session titled “Preferred Sourcing, Prison Labor, and the Library,” I learned that some of the furniture in our library spaces is produced through prison labor, and that knowledge has stayed with me. It unsettled the idea of libraries as purely benevolent or neutral spaces and forced me to confront how our carceral systems are woven into the everyday infrastructure of higher education. Programs like Federal Prison Industries are often framed as providing job training, but that framing obscures the coercive conditions, low wages, and lack of choice that define prison labor itself. Realizing that desks, shelves, or chairs meant to support learning may be built through systems of modern-day enslavement complicates our narratives of access and equity. It also raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about whose bodies bear the cost of “affordable” library spaces and what it means to cultivate environments of learning while remaining entangled with the carceral system.
What This Means for Academic Librarians
Benjamin writes,
Indeed, there’s a danger that in carving out space to take imagination seriously in these pages, I leave you with the impression that we can simply imagine ourselves out of the death-making machinery humming in the background of our schools, jobs, and neighborhoods. Deadly eugenic imaginaries animate political regimes and bureaucratic structures, without which it would be impossible to materialize the noxious harms that flood our news feeds and our lives.
Academic librarians are uniquely positioned at the intersection of space, technology, pedagogy, and care. Our choices, what we purchase, how we design, what we tolerate, and what we challenge shape not only access to information but access to possibility.
Radical imagination, grounded in justice, asks us to model the futures we want students to believe are possible. It asks us to refuse visions of the future that rely on exclusion, extraction, or control. Justice imagination asks different questions. Rather than “How do we control outcomes?” it asks, “What harm has occurred, and what would repair look like?” Instead of “Who doesn’t fit?” it asks, “What conditions make it hard for people to thrive?” In libraries, this can mean rethinking policies, ensuring that safety, trust, and dignity are prerequisites, not just feel-good words but priorities. Justice imagination is not fast; it is relational, and it requires sitting with discomfort when institutional urgency pushes us toward quick fixes.
Benjamin reminds us that imagination without repair is incomplete. “Imagination doesn’t erase nightmares,” says scholar Imani Perry, whom Benjamin cites, “but it can repurpose them with an elaborate sense-making or troublemaking.” And, if imagination can lead to troublemaking, is it any wonder, then, that those in power work tirelessly to squash us from having radical imaginations that dare to envision a world in which everyone can thrive? If you want to get into “good trouble,” then I urge you to engage with the discussion prompts at the end of the book to help lead discussions about imagination. Radical imagination is not about escaping reality. It’s about insisting that our current reality can be better and continuing to do the work to make that true. Historian Robin D. G. Kelly Hayes, whom Benjamin also cites, says of imagination, “‘There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.’” As Benjamin adds, “Our aim here is to carve out those spaces by all means possible.” I believe academic libraries can be those spaces.
About the author:
Jamia Williams (she/her) is a health sciences librarian. She is also the co-creator and co-host of the podcast LibVoices and the founder of The Diversity Fellow’s blog.
Sign up for Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) new post notifications and updates.
Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Fatima at Choice (fmohie-eldin@ala.org) with your topic idea.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.