Teaching the Radical Catalogue: A Syllabus 2021–22

“People don’t think of information retrieval as a political project”
With Emily Drabinski, Amanda Belantara

of negotiating that we need the discourse about the catalogue as meaning-making structure;

of developing recognition or humility in the face of the violence of the processes and systems that we are maintaining;

of learning to identify the hierarchies and power structures implicit in categorisation;

of examining the principles of efficiency and their connection to white supremacy culture.

with Emily Drabinski who talked to us about her critical cataloguing and library instruction practice in the interview “People don’t think of information retrieval as a political project” (2021)

with Emily’s text “Teaching the Radical Catalog” (2008) the title of which we borrowed for this project because it keeps triggering thoughts, conversations and ultimately the idea to this syllabus project at the Sitterwerk. Emily works as Interim Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She is series editor for Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies (Library Juice Press/Litwin Books) and on the board of Radical Teacher. Her scholarly and activist work focuses on critical pedagogy, queer theory, library instruction and cataloguing practice.

with Amanda Belantara who collaborated with Emily on the audio piece “Catalogers at Work: Sounding the Radical Catalog”, which serves as an experimental teaching tool for library instruction and is featured in the video (above). Amanda works as a librarian at New York University with a background in audiovisual anthropology and ethnographic documentary. She has created short documentaries, audio pieces, installations and exhibits exploring themes of power, memory, identity and access in libraries.

with American scholar Hope Olson’s book “The Power to Name” (2002) that revealed the structural violence of classification from a feminist perspective. Reading Olson we got interested in two main discoveries: Those in a position to name hold the power to construct others’ perceptions and realities. And the library catalogue is socially constructed and carries all the biases and prejudices of the people constructing it. Ultimately perceived to be a tool it is a meaning-making architecture in itself.

with Constant, a Brussels-based space for arts, media and technology with a 20-year history in critical feminist and collective practice and with “Unbound Libraries”, a one-week work session organised by Constant (June 2020) in which different groups, artists, publishers, designers, scholars and activists worked together on a range of questions: What strategies can we invent to act upon omissions, essentialisms, generalisations and stereotypes in categorisation systems? Can we think of a federation of libraries on the basis of other criteria than uniformity and sameness? How can we open up collections to the multiple forms of knowledge transfers related to orality, situated objects, physical embodiment, self-published objects, videos...? What can we learn from the promise of digital formats to go beyond pages, page numbers and index systems that are bound to the single book only? See index of materials, interviews, conversations, notepads and recordings.

with Eva Weinmayr’s text “The Power to Name and Frame” (2021) that forms part of the documentation of the Unbound Libraries Work Session (above) in which Eva takes us on a little passage reflecting on Sameness and Difference, Structural Hierarchies, Claim to Truth, Uninscriptions, The Caged Antelope, Confusion, Prejudices and Antipathies: descriptors are never neutral, and Teaching the Radical Catalogue.

with Susan Leigh Star’s essay “Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999) where she outlines how maintenance and management are constantly working to make the infrastructure invisible. Infrastructure works at its best when it has become invisible. In order to talk about infrastructure, it is necessary to look at the forces working in the background and to render them visible.