Creating a convival library: an autoethnographic study of praxis

Dan recently completed his PhD (external examiner Alison Powell).

I co-supervised Dan with my colleague Andrew Cox.

Abstract

This thesis sets out to understand what the role of the public library should be in relation to one of the greatest crises of our time; climate change. Utilising the undertheorised concept of conviviality and the positioning of the library as a prototype of a convivial tool from the works of Ivan Illich, alongside a critical examination of my own praxis, it seeks to draw out a theoretical framework for those also interested in tackling this problem.

Climate change is most often viewed as a crisis into which the library and the librarian may intervene positively, be that through involvement in educational programs or through its own activity as an institution, e.g. aiming for sustainable practices in buildings and workflows. Little has been done to examine the function of the library and librarian, and the assumptions contained in those concepts, within the context of wider social relations (e.g. capital) whose reproduction sits at the heart of the destruction of the environment.

The thesis takes the form of a longitudinal study over two years, documenting my own attempts to realise this idea of a convivial library, engaging with open data and wider political activism in my own home city, Sheffield. As a critical autoethnography of praxis, this consists of an account created from interviews, ethnographic notes and other documents, read alongside and through theoretical works. The use of dialectical pairs in the coding process provides a unique and novel approach to opening up this data to produce new theory, which might, once again, be tested through future organising. This theoretical aspect is grounded by the autobiographic element, locating this particular attempt within the context of my own political activism across the last twenty five years.

Beginning with an examination of the library and librarian’s position vis-à-vis the climate crisis through the concepts of the commons and community resilience, alongside conviviality, this thesis expands and deepens a structural analysis of this relationship, primarily through the work of Jason W. Moore. Alongside the development of a new method of coding, the unique contribution of this thesis can be found in its theoretical insights. Utilising Moore’s concept of Cheap Natures I develop a theory of Cheap Information as a critique of the function of library services within capitalism. Drawing on a variety of further theoretical sources from outside of the discipline of Library and Information Science I critique my own praxis, unpicking the ways in which this Cheap Information flows through structures and into our everyday life. From this critique emerges a more rigorously theorised possibility of the library as convivial tool, as an ecotonal space committed to limiting the practices of Cheap Information and cultivating counter-hegemonic sets of knowledge practices, ones which we might wield towards a future worth living.