When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Top TIE Posts from 2024!
Part One
Posted on December 17, 2024 in Blog Posts
The past year has been a big one for Toward Inclusive Excellence, full of new contributors and new content. Looking back, it’s fitting to reflect on the posts that have garnered the most interest. Gathered here, in the first of a two-part reflection, are our top posts from 2024. These pieces span resource lists, blog posts, and content round-ups, touching on belonging, disability, leadership, and so much more. We hope that reading (or re-reading) these pieces offers new insights, renewed motivations, and inspiring ideas to tackle pressing topics affecting libraries, librarians, and librarianship in the New Year.
Content Round-ups
Commemorating Women’s History Month with TIE and Choice Content 2024 (March 5, 2024)
Commemorating Women’s History Month
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Toward Inclusive Excellence team gathered TIE content and Choice resources from the past year that spotlight women’s history, including female literary figures, Black women’s contributions to the Colored Conventions Movement, and intersectional feminist movements. Choice, the publisher of TIE and a publishing unit at the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, provides book reviews to help librarians identify academic sources and professional development tools like webinars, podcasts, and white papers. Read the full round-up.
Blog Posts
Cultivating a Sense of Belonging: What Does “Belonging” Mean for Libraries in the Era of Loneliness? (March 27, 2024)
An epidemic looms in our society today: nearly one in four adults experience loneliness and isolation, according to a Meta-Gallup survey. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy declared that “loneliness and isolation is a public health crisis” with severe physical and mental health implications. Research has also found that these phenomena impact people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) even more so. Many factors might explain why people are feeling lonely today, such as high levels of social media usage, invisible disabilities, or relocation. In Japan and the United Kingdom, there are ministers for loneliness and isolation who are charged with addressing these issues and implementing measures to prevent social isolation in their respective nations. Given these circumstances, we must also ask ourselves, “Is there anything we in libraries can do to mitigate these issues?” We see this health issue mentioned in Library Journal and we know that libraries, as community connectors, create public programs centered on the sense of belonging. Read the full blog post.
Crip Time in the Academic Library (July 10, 2024)
Crip time, a phrase often attributed to the scholar Alison Kafer, can broadly be understood as a new way of thinking about time. Simply put, it is the idea that disabled folks experience time, milestones, and life events in ways that do not align with normative understandings of time or the socially accepted way that time is understood in everyday life. It is, for the most part, a nonlinear way of understanding and moving through time, and it takes into consideration the flare-ups, setbacks, and fatigue that often accompany disability. Read the full blog post.
Situating Yourself as a Leader No Matter What Your Position (July 29, 2024)
As a working librarian, I have often thought of leadership as a duty reserved for those in formal positions, although this differs from how I had thought of leadership prior to becoming a librarian. It has thus been exciting to see so many presentations, much research, and many books being produced about leadership in librarianship in recent years. This has helped me reconsider leadership as central to our profession at every level. One training in particular that has helped me remember that we all are leaders is the Situational Leadership course created by Paul Hersey in 1969. When I first entered the training, I did not understand why I needed to participate, but I was reminded that we all are leaders at different times, and we can all utilize the tools provided in the training. In this blog post, I want to discuss the importance of classes and training that discuss leadership, even for those who are not in a formal leadership role. Many academic librarians lead projects, teach, or provide professional service, all of which offer opportunities for us to showcase our leadership skills. Read the full blog post.
Resource Lists
Resources to Understand Free Speech vs. Hate Speech (Jan. 18, 2024)
There have been many controversies in the news recently centering on free speech, with much of the discourse concentrated on college campuses in particular. However, as is likely clear to TIE readers, this issue affects not only higher education but every sector of our democratic society. In thinking about our enshrined civil liberties, it is also important to consider distinctions between free speech and hate speech. With that in mind, the following resources are intended to help readers ponder these differences and consider varied approaches to protecting freedom of speech. Read the full list of resources.
Resources for Understanding and Engaging with Afrofuturism (Feb. 20, 2024)
Following up on last week’s lively podcast episode on Afrofuturism with Ekow Eshun, this week the TIE team is proud to continue that conversation with a resource list on Afrofuturism, in honor of Black History Month. The works included not only analyze Afrofuturism across literature, film, and art, they also encompass works of fiction themselves. Beyond deepening readers’ understandings of Black history, our hope is that these resources will also uncover new possibilities for imagining Black futures. Read the full list of resources.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to TIE over the past year!
Krista Aronson
Dr. Krista Aronson (she/her) is an Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Psychology at Bates College. Her scholarship focuses on illuminating how people come to understand complex social constructs like race and ethnicity, including how children process and understand race as well as appropriate, effective and productive ways to discuss this topic with them; specifically, the effective use of picture books to enhance intercultural relationships and self-understanding during childhood. Her own identity as a biracial woman deeply informs her work. The Diverse BookFinder and associated work are the focus of her active research, which represents a substantial portion of the professional effort of faculty at Bates.
Sam Berry Sullivan
Sam Berry-Sullivan is a white, nonbinary, neurodivergent academic librarian who leverages their privilege and unique experience of the world to advocate for diversity and equity in librarianship, higher education, and health sciences, for which Sam is subject liaison.
Marlee Bunch
Dr. Marlee Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, and lifelong learner. Her research examines the oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi who taught between 1954-1971.
She received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois in 2022 in Education/Policy/Organizational Leadership. Additionally, she has a Masters in Education (MEd), a Masters in Gifted Education (MS), a Bachelors in English, a certification in Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, and a certification in ESL (English as a Second Language).
Bunch has been an educator for 17+ years and is the founder of the un/Hush teaching framework. You can reach out or learn more about her work at https://www.marleebunch.com/.
Ashleigh Coren
Ashleigh Coren is a content strategist, educator, and curator based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Ekow Eshun
Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the curator of exhibitions including, most recently, In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London, for which he was awarded the Curatorial Prize 2023 by the Association for Art History, and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.
Described by The Guardian as a ‘cultural polymath’, he is the writer and presenter of documentaries including the BBC film Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture, and the BBC Radio 4 series White Mischief. He has contributed to books on artists including Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, Chris Ofili, John Akomfrah and Wangechi Mutu and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Observer. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Elena Guzman
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her previous positions have included a postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College and a Research Associate fellowship at Harvard University with the Women’s Studies and Religion Program in the Divinity School. She is currently writing her book manuscript tentatively titled, Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean, which focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions to forge geographies that counter landscapes of oppression. As an educator, she teaches Black feminism, performance, feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, autoethnography, border/land studies, and visual anthropology.
In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others.
Alexia Hudson-Ward
Alexia Hudson-Ward is Associate Director of Research, Learning, and Strategic Partnerships, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries. Her past roles include: the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries for Oberlin College, a Penn State tenured librarian, an award-winning entertainment editor, public radio promotions coordinator, and Coca-Cola Company marketing manager.
Martha S. Jones
I am the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. I am a legal and cultural historian whose research explores how Black people have shaped the story of American democracy and today extends to work on memorial landscapes and family memoir. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project which, since 2020, has examined the role of slavery and racism at the Johns Hopkins university and hospital.
My books include Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007). I am also a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and have written many articles, reviews, and essays.
Crystal Yin Lie
Crystal Yin Lie is an Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses in disability studies, health humanities, literature & medicine, and comics & graphic narratives. Her research interests include contemporary literature and life writing about dementia and the representation of disability in comics. She received her PhD in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, & Society. Her work can be found in Graphic Medicine (University of Hawai’i Press), Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She was a co-editor of Sex, Identity, Aesthetics The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and is currently co-editing a volume on Disability and Comics (Palgrave).
Brea McQueen
Brea McQueen is an activist and academic librarian whose work primarily focuses on the intersections of disability and librarianship, and challenging normative ideas of what librarianship should look like.
Ray Pun
Ray Pun (he/him) is the academic and research librarian at the Alder Graduate School of Education, a teacher’s residency program in California.
Jamia Williams
Jamia Williams (she/her) is the Consumer Health Program Specialist with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Training Office. She is also the co-creator and co-host of the podcast LibVoices and the founder of The Diversity Fellow’s blog.
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.