Rethinking Practices: What a Blog Tagging Project Taught Me About Social Justice - Part 2

This is a continuation of an article written by YSS member Emily Zorea. You can find Part 1 here.

During the time working on the blog tagging project, and reflecting on the process, I had to recognize my positionality as a school librarian professional assessing a (mostly) public library professional blog. Although the interests of both youth service librarians and school librarians largely intersect, our work is different. In a school space, my priorities reflect the vision of my school district. In the public library, the vision for youth services often reflect the vision of individual library boards, as well as initiatives and priorities from professional organizations, such as ALA or WLA.

I also needed to assess my privilege as a white librarian working in a predominantly white-dominated field. I consistently asked myself, “Who is this blog tag benefitting?” My goal was to choose tag terms that would do the least amount of harm, especially to the marginalized populations that librarians serve. It can seem trivial, but the words we apply to ideas do matter, even if those words are blog post tags. 

Social Justice and Tag Categorization

Although I worked through many tags and found new terms, the tags that fell under “Diversity” and “Inclusion” themes were especially through-provoking places for me to assess my understanding of positionality, privilege, and power. Although I had not considered this before, the YSS blog is a powerhouse of social justice content, examining what social justice can and should look like in library spaces. Hundreds of posts cover topics related to social justice, many from an inclusion or diversity perspective.

In my tag categorization, I used the definitions of inclusion and diversity as presented by Jones, Moore, and Walton:

“Inclusion means that there is respect for everyone’s voices, stories, and knowledges. Diversity, which addresses representation in its most basic form, is a necessary precondition to inclusion: We need to get everyone to the table to do the messy work of promoting and enacting social justice to create a more inclusive environment” (p. 219).

Using their definition, and after reviewing the blog posts different tags are currently connected to, I realized that tags, including “affirmations”, “African-American lit”, “allergies”, and “American Indian Studies in Wisconsin” could fall under a larger “Inclusion” tag due to their theme of respecting voices, stories, and knowledges.

Similarly, “#ownvoices”, “anti-racism”, and “#WeNeedDiverseBooks” addressed themes of bringing everyone to the table. I categorized these tags, and more, under a “Diversity” tag.

Moving Forward

It may be helpful for current and future blog administrators and contributors to have not only a list of the paired down tag terms (the eventual goal of this project), but also to have a definition of those terms. For example, adding a short definition for both inclusion and diversity in my tag term categorization document shows the reflection needed for me to commit to those terms. Something similar for other terms may be very helpful, especially for tags that specifically address social justice topics.

Small sample of tag recategorization. Current blog tags falling under a "Diversity" theme sorted and categorized on the left-hand side of the table, and the new tag term, "Diversity, reflected with a definition on the right-hand side of the table.

Inclusion themed tags

Additionally, I found dozens of excellent posts while reviewing tags that address social justice topics in library spaces. I hope that at one point, those posts could be curated into a “Best Of” blog post so those ideas can be shared and reviewed again. For professional learning, the YSS blog has the most library specific information I have seen yet addressing how to do social justice in library spaces. I hope this work can continually be showcased.

Reflection

In a time when we are rethinking so many things, re-orientating our work in a social justice framework offers us an opportunity to rethink our practices from the ground up. This project caused me to deeply think about how positionality, privilege, and power intersect in my teaching and school library work, especially on projects that appear to be neutral. It also caused me to reflect on the differences between inclusion and diversity. Although these terms are commonly used interchangeably, they represent specific and different ideas

I know social justice takes a lot of work. Social justice, as much as it is a commitment that the library field holds, is not quick work. It requires action, and building coalitions with others who share mutual interests in an issue for the work to advance. In libraries, I see this happening already in our partnership building work between the library and organizations in the community. As much as this has been a time for us to assess our practices, such as curbside pickup and Facebook live Storytimes, I hope we can also use this time to asses our social justice commitments and continue the work needed for our libraries to be spaces that welcome our whole community.

References:

Jones, N., Moore, K., & Walton, R. (2016). Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(4), 211-229