Ways of knowing

I had an interesting chat with my friend Baruk this week. We haven't spoken to each other for literally years, so it was quite a catchup, but immediately we fell into one of those stimulating discussions that seem to come naturally to him, and really the reason I made the effort to reconnect.

We spoke of the insufferable colonial mentality of librarianship. In different ways it has pushed both of us out of public libraries, though in my case I'm now in academic libraries which are, if anything, arguably worse on that score. Baruk is fascinated by ideas and practices of post-literacy, which it has taken a while for me to understand. One of the possibilities we discussed was a librarianship dedicated not simply to helping people to organise and find knowledge within a single knowledge system (i.e. Eurocentric, reductionist and rationalistic), but rather a librarianship that helps people to access and learn from knowledge sources within a broad collection of knowledge systems. This moves well beyond simply "making our classification system less racist" or "diversifying our collection" (of books). It would not simply be a diversification of knowledge sources or formats, like adding DVDs or lithoraphs to a collection of paper monographs and serials. The closest thing to it currently practiced in libraries would perhaps be the "human libraries" that are popular from time to time, but that is a pale shadow of what we were pointing at. A "human library" is in many ways a solution projecting the problem backwards. "Book in to talk to a Muslim woman" is a statement of generic possible information needs. It says "Maybe you're a bit racist". Or more generously, "maybe you've never considered finding out more about Islam and what it's like to be a Muslim woman in a country where that is rare, would you like to?" There's nothing wrong with this, but it's posing a possible, fairly limited set of sources for anticipated but as-yet unasked questions.

What we were thinking about was, in many ways, a more traditional conception of libraries: a "reference interview", but with less conventional behaviour from the librarian. Perhaps the knowledge you seek is in some books within this particular classification in a collection. Perhaps it could be found within a yarn with a particular local Indigenous elder. Maybe the best way to find it is to go for a walk in this forest. Maybe you need to pop down to the community shed for some embodied learning. Or by cooking this dish with this particular woman or someone from this community. Maybe you need to spend a month in this community, living with them, to begin to understand.

Of course, this approach is not "practical", nor "scalable". It could be done in a way that is just as colonial, bureacratic, and leeched of meaning as our current practices. Maybe it's just a dumb idea. But it was an interesting thought experiment.

Many academic libraries and their parent universities, including the one I work at, are formally committed to "decolonising"—sometimes "decolonising the curriculum", more adventurously, "decolonising the university". I have little expectation either of these things will happen within my lifetime if at all, but I'm eager to push things as far as we can. Reductionist science has been a driver and a result of colonisation. Universities and even more so everything under the "GLAM" umbrella are intricately connected to the violence, dispossession and destruction of colonisation and colonial thinking. They can't be "decolonised" without pulling them entirely apart, facing some disturbing truths, redistributing power, and—maybe—then putting them back together. But if we imagine what a truly decolonised library would look like, it would have to be dedicated to truly respecting and directing people towards multiple knowledge traditions and systems for sense-making. That type of librarianship is radically different to anything being practiced or taught at the moment. If genuine, it would "diversify" librarianship automatically because librarians would need to have a sophisticated exposure to and understanding of multiple knowledge systems, sense-making traditions and conceptual frameworks for organising and passing on knowledge.

I started the conversation by noting I was rather disillusioned with librarianship. But perhaps there's some hope after all.