Identifying possible courses of action or locations for enacting sustainable change is hard because revolutionizing institutions takes time, effort, and hope, while effectively merging discursive theoretical endeavors with an embodied and intentional praxis.
One of the main components to this project was to identify a how to address the following questions: How can academic libraries, as part of the interconnected system of power within the institution of higher education, access and harness a lens that is transformative rather than performative? How can performativity and intentionality be measured? Should it be measured or quantified? What does a mechanism to quantify but not erase look like? Leung and López-McKnight (2021) discuss 'performative commitment' (p. 4) whereby they explain how practices such as relying on committee work or statements alone without critically engaging with the realities of injustice and how they go beyond librarianship are ineffective. Rather, understanding the deeply profound historical roots of these challenges and injustices are imperative (Espinal et al., 2018).
Intentionality behind actions is both a solution and a process. Espinal, Sutherland, and Roh (2018), Leung and López-McKnight (2021), Colón-Aguirre and Cook (2022) suggest that acting with intentions supporting IDEA initiatives rooted in a socially just praxis is a way that change can be harnessed rather than approximated.
Engaging with the literature has encouraged me to critique performativity, especially in regards to enacting change to center BIPOC and other marginalized individuals. Questioning institutional practices to weaken institutional legacies is one way that I envision crossing over from performance into intentional and transformational change. In reflecting on measuring performativity or intentionality, I believe these do not need to be assessed in such a way to quantify or empiricize to make more digestible, instead, I think these need to be felt, understood, and viewed as a basis from which to gauge the necessity for revolution.
"Without a commitment to design, or in some cases, redesign, or to redistribute physical and virtual spaces that facilitate epistemological discourse and training for librarians, workers in the GLAM sector...will continue to perpetuate the basic inequalities of society and virtually guarantee a white, heteropatriarchal, ableist, capitalist status quo, not just for our users, but for our library staff as well." - Morales & Williams, 2021
Works Cited & consulted
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