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Full-Text Articles in Library and Information Science
Meaningful Work When Work Won't Love You Back: Sociological Imagination And Reflective Teaching Practice (Reports From The Field), Andrea Baer
Libraries Scholarship
This essay explores the tension between pursuing meaningful work in instruction librarianship and the realities of working in a society in which many jobs provide little fulfillment or pleasure, or, as the journalist Sarah Jaffe puts it, “Work won’t love you back.” Drawing on a recent conference keynote by Anne Helen Petersen, C. Wright Mills’s conception of sociological imagination, and an ecological model of teacher agency, I propose that one way librarians can sustain their teaching practices and preserve their well-being is by actively investigating how social structures and relationships influence their teaching roles.
Problematic Expectations: Using Close Reading To Surface Emotional Labor In School Librarian Job Postings, Alexandra Grimm
Problematic Expectations: Using Close Reading To Surface Emotional Labor In School Librarian Job Postings, Alexandra Grimm
School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship
Although emotional labor—defined as the process(es) by which a worker manages their feelings in order to produce the desired emotional response in a customer—has been studied in various fields and specific domains of librarianship, this topic has yet to be examined in school librarianship. In this exploratory article, I perform a close reading of school librarian job postings to surface expectations of emotional labor and explicate connections to the feminized history of librarianship. The article closes with a call to action, outlining steps for administrators and researchers to prevent the potential harms of emotional labor in school librarianship.
Claiming Expertise From Betwixt And Between: Digital Humanities Librarians, Emotional Labor, And Genre Theory, Alexis Logsdon, Amy Mars, Heather Tompkins
Claiming Expertise From Betwixt And Between: Digital Humanities Librarians, Emotional Labor, And Genre Theory, Alexis Logsdon, Amy Mars, Heather Tompkins
Staff Publications
Librarians' liminal (intermediate) position within academia situates us to make unique contributions to digital humanities (DH). In this article, we use genre theory, feminist theory, and theories of emotional labor to explore the importance of discourse mediation and affective labor to DH and the interplay between these areas and academic structural inequality. By claiming our expertise and making explicit work that is often not visible, we can advocate for new and varied roles for librarians in digital humanities. Our analysis is informed by both theory and practice, and it takes a dialogic approach that depends upon the interactions between the …