When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
The Disillusionment of EDI
Posted on September 23, 2025 in Blog Posts
It can be difficult to criticize equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), particularly in the current political environment where progressive gains are rapidly being dismantled by the same individuals who express the importance of “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.” It is even more difficult for us, writing within the Canadian context where EDI initiatives remain standard in academic libraries, to criticize EDI for a largely American audience. The unassailability of EDI is particularly compounded by how EDI has come to be used as shorthand for a variety of values that are closely related to social justice but are distinctly not social justice. However, the conflation of EDI with social justice is detrimental to establishing workspaces that are meaningful and equitable in the long term. In this blog post, we want to explore how EDI differs from social justice, and how to move away from EDI without pulling the metaphorical ladder up behind us.
The fundamental difference between EDI and social justice is that EDI is an organizational framework. EDI utilizes the language of social justice to emphasize how institutions appear to understand the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities. In actuality, EDI and social justice have fundamentally opposing goals. Where the principles of social justice emphasize bottom-up support for marginalized communities, the ultimate aim of EDI is a top-down imposition of initiatives for the primary purpose of defending the interests of institutions. As such, EDI’s engagement with marginalized communities is almost “exclusively concerned with improving the superficial appearance of diversity,” as Nancy Leong writes in “Racial Capitalism,” thereby reducing diversity into “the common-sense language of racial liberalism, the ready-to-wear, one-size-fits-all analytic available for the presumably simple, utilitarian task of transmitting anti-racism in the library world,” as David James Hudson writes in “The Whiteness of Practicality.” While EDI and social justice do not fit into an entirely black-or-white dichotomy, the EDI framework is designed to serve institutions with the primary purpose of protecting the interests of the institution, whereas social justice operates at the community level to promote the interests of affected people.
We are cognizant of how EDI has still created tangible benefits for individuals by prompting critical reflection over processes such as hiring and purchasing. However, EDI has also created problems, such as creating spaces where people who already agree with EDI preach to the choir, outsourcing “equity work” to EDI committees, and treating EDI as an additional layer on top of librarians’ already overflowing workloads. Further problems arise when people who support EDI feel their work is done once an EDI committee is established, or when others feel they should not be involved with this work because they are not experts or because of their identities. In light of these shortcomings, all of which are compounded by the current socio-political climate, we would like to remind others that EDI is not the be-all and end-all of social justice.
When we advocate against EDI, we do not intend to pull the ladder of opportunity beyond the reach of new librarians. Rather, we intend to implement slow librarianship as an approach that prioritizes community, capacity, and care. This ethos brings librarian work closer to the tenets of social justice. In contrast, EDI is an approach that has been in place for the better part of a decade now and has been much criticized by the marginalized communities it claims to support. Due to EDI’s mixed results, it is worth slowing down and creating spaces to revisit the EDI-social justice dichotomy in order to build new, sturdier ladders up the ivory tower.
So, what would this new ladder look like?
Typically, this is the point in an article or blog post where readers are given a list of potential action items to bring into their workspaces as a “solution” to the problem raised. However, in the spirit of slow librarianship, we are pushing back against the notion that following a cookie-cutter checklist will turn academic libraries into equitable spaces. We are cautious of how generic checklists are rarely able to adequately capture the needs and local circumstances of individual institutions. EDI “solutions” often embody generic, superficial metrics that are grounded in institutional goals, not community needs. As such, we encourage readers to determine barriers and inequities specific to their institutional and local contexts.
The crux of practicing slow librarianship is doing away with top-down, exclusive corporate decision-making to make room for intentional, long-term, grassroots-directed efforts. This, in turn, would shift the focus of inclusion to consider the humanity of community members who are part of notably underrepresented or disenfranchised groups, prioritizing employee experiences and life circumstances when reviewing institutional practices or devising policies. Dismantling current practices also means a shift in mindset away from institutional control over discourse and branding and quarterly meetings with regularly timed deliverables to present in various administrative reports for stakeholders. Slower, inclusive practices would focus on community involvement, open communication, and long-term goals.
We further explore how libraries can move beyond EDI toward social justice in our upcoming chapter, “Beyond Mere Quantity: How Neoliberal Approaches to EDI Further Embed Inequities,” in Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices, to be published by Library Juice Press later this year. We, along with other contributors, provide several suggestions that have the potential to support long-term, community-led change toward creating more equitable and inclusive libraries. These suggestions do not have to be complicated or quantifiable; they can be inexpensive practices that require little to no effort for implementation. For example, flexible scheduling and optional appearance on camera during interviews and meetings are just a couple practices that embed equity into routine procedures. However, we must underscore that without institutional buy-in to make thoughtful long-term changes in procedures and policy, as well as money and inclusive, self-reflective social infrastructure, these actions would also end up being performative rather than revolutionary.
In promoting slow librarianship, our goal is not only to dismantle EDI’s hold on how we understand diversity, but also to create space to conceive of and build progressive, anti-racist policies in our workspaces beyond the body count, where all members of the community feel comfortable contributing to the conversation. EDI is for institutions, but social justice is for the people.
About the authors:
Tina Liu is a Cataloguing Librarian at McGill University. She has been the recipient of grants and scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and was an ALA Spectrum Scholar. She is also the recipient of the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians’ 2025 Early Career Researcher Award. Her research interests include critical librarianship and critical cataloguing, library and labour history, and representations of diasporic and marginalized communities in library collections.
Jennie Fallis is a liaison librarian at McGill University, Macdonald Campus in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jennie holds a Master of Library Science from Western University. Jennie has worked as a librarian in both public and academic libraries, as well as an ESL instructor in Thailand and Spain. Jennie’s research areas include gamification and game-based learning, EDI, information ethics, as well as ESL service and teaching in libraries. When Jennie is not working, she is most likely spending time with her five-year-old Aussie German Shepherd mix, Manuel.
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