Introduction

As an undergraduate I had an internship at an agency writing recruitment advertisements. The ads ranged from the small ‘want’ ads for salespeople or programmers to the full-page spreads in newspapers and magazines for directors and executives. I was no Don Draper from Madmen. I didn't particularly enjoy the job, but it taught me to know my audience. And I learned that I enjoyed pitching ads for some audiences more than others.

Now, I am the Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services at the University of East London (UEL). The university is located in the Borough of Newham, one of the poorest in London, with an ethnically diverse population that was one of the most adversely impacted by COVID-19. The University has a 70% Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) student population and a staff population of almost 70% White. So, many students do not see themselves in the staff population. Most of the students are the first in their families to attend university. According to UEL internal data, the degree-awarding gap (percentage difference between groups receiving a 1st/2:1 or A/B grade) between BAME and White students was about 13% in 2019/20, down from 21% the previous year. However, the gap between Black and White students was just over 17%, down from roughly 25% the previous year.

The University has undertaken a range of measures to close the degree-awarding gap. It has created an Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), the first of its kind in the UK, to lead on the delivery of an ambitious action plan to achieve the Race Equality Charter (REC). The REC is a framework created by Advance HE to aid institutions in identifying and challenging the barriers that block the progression of BAME students and staff (Advance HE, 2020). The UEL action plan includes staff training on inclusive teaching practices and anti-racism as well as reviews of such institutional policies and procedures as recruitment, performance management and disciplinaries. The OIE also monitors the equality, diversity and inclusion data for trends, sector benchmarking and achievement of targets.

Key to the success of narrowing the degree-awarding gap is staff knowing their audience. We must see the whole student – their lived experiences, academic needs, caring responsibilities, work demands – so that we can provide the right level of support to lead to successful outcomes for the students.

Introduction

The Decolonise campaign at Cambridge University included an open letter from the FLY network, for women and non-binary people of colour, to the English Faculty, requesting that the Library ‘move postcolonial books out of the basement and integrate them in the library cataloguing order’ (FLY, 2017). Students were quick to recognise the importance of library systems in the preservation and organisation of knowledge, and they demanded a professional collaboration to address a transformation of the curriculum from within the library system. The student-led Cambridge Decolonise Network first began in 2015, and organised with the call for the University to ‘Decolonise Disarm Divest’ in 2018. Students organised protests and revised reading lists via Facebook groups and Google documents. The Network led to the creation of subject-focused working groups, such as Decolonise Sociology, Decolonise Law and Decolonise Anthropology. They collaborated with groups such as Black Cantabs Research Society, a ‘counter-history project’ designed to ‘place Black students in the institution's past, present, and future’, which in turn collaborated with the University Library on a ‘Black Cantabs: History Makers’ exhibition in 2018 (Cambridge University Library, 2018; Black Cantabs, n.d.). In its specific mention of library space and cataloguing, the FLY letter encouraged library staff to reflect on the flaws in the Library's cataloguing processes and to come up with a practical plan of how to learn differently.

Cambridge University Libraries

Cambridge is a collegiate university comprising 31 autonomous colleges, each with its own library, alongside more than 30 faculty and departmental libraries and numerous museums and special collections, all working with the legal deposit University Library. The federated nature of libraries in Cambridge creates obstacles as well as possibilities. Unlike universities with a single, centralised library, we are unable to instigate total and uniform updates. However, this multilayered library ‘ecosystem’ also meant that we could implement swifter changes at a local level. Several libraries were able to respond quickly: the English Library reclassified over 2,000 books under a new subject of Contemporary Global Literature in English; and the Modern Languages Library launched a programme of consultation on changes to the curriculum, reading lists and book recommendations with students and academics.

Advisory: this chapter contains an offensive term to identify a historical book title.

Introduction

Our concern in this chapter is to develop our thinking through our personal history of racialisation, learning and working in White educational spaces in order to explore the call to decolonise academic libraries. Toni Morrison posits that higher education is an ‘unabashedly theological and consciously value-ridden and value-seeking moral project’ (cited in Law, Phillips and Turney, 2004, 7). Much of Western archival methodology is embedded in colonialism and imperialism with a cultural bias towards Eurocentricity, Christian values and the Enlightenment, and therefore libraries are not inherently neutral spaces. We argue that libraries, as collectors and producers of White heteropatriarchal knowledge, are culpable in legitimising and reproducing colonialist and racist ideologies. As Nina de Jesus (2014) suggests,

As Black educators in a post-1992 London institution (University of East London, UEL) we are committed to the decoloniality of education and the dismantling of institutional Whiteness. In the same way that there have been calls to decolonise the university curriculum, the university library must be considered along the same lines. It is not appropriate to attempt to decolonise one part of an institution but leave all others steeped in Whiteness.

Introduction

This chapter considers the contribution of library and information science (LIS) education to the ‘decolonising’ of our university curricula, and how students on LIS degree programmes can be supported to explore the concept of decolonising as students both in a higher education environment and in the workplace as LIS professionals.

There has been a growing agenda – shaped by both protest movements and intellectual debate – to ‘decolonise the university’, to draw attention to the colonial history of the campus and how higher education remains in the shadow of that colonialism. This process has included much reflection on what it might mean to ‘decolonise’ both the university (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu, 2018) and its library collections (Dali and Caidi, 2021). However, our understanding of where LIS education fits into this discussion is arguably less advanced. This seems a little surprising, as LIS education is the academic discipline which bridges the gap between higher education and the LIS professions. This chapter is informed both by the author's experience as an LIS academic and by her involvement in a 2020 study, ‘Decolonising the Curriculum in the Faculty of Social Sciences’ by Williams et al., as part of her role as Co-Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

LIS as delivered in higher education tends to be situated within a broader social sciences school or faculty, and the reach of colonialism across the social sciences is widely acknowledged in the literature. As Williams et al. (2020) state, ‘The division of labour among the disciplines of the social sciences, for example, follows the distinction between the “modern” world of colonisers (Sociology, Political Science, Economics) and the “traditional” formerly colonised world (Development Studies, Anthropology).’ Although they observe that ‘much has been done to blur these geographical boundaries, which made sense in the age of empires’, Williams et al. argue that we are nonetheless still working with ‘these dichotomies (First World/Third World, Global North/Global South, Developed/Developing, etc.) in how we understand the disciplinary division of labour within the Social Sciences today’ (Williams et al., 2020, 7).

A contested term

When we were editing this book, and thinking about the title, we discussed at various points whether to use decolonise or ‘decolonise’, and it's noticeable that the contributing authors to this volume sometimes also use ‘decolonise’. So, what is the tension around this term?

Decolonisation as an intention has clarity. The students at the University of Cape Town in 2015 were intent on decolonising: ‘For the first time since the anti-apartheid movement, South African students were grabbing international headlines, as they struggled for universal access to an education that did not reproduce the imperial logic their parents’ generation fought to dismantle’ (Elliott-Cooper, 2018, 290).

The intentions of students and other activists in the UK are also clear, though in the different context of its being a historic European centre of colonialism, as expressed in Keele University's Manifesto for Decolonising the Curriculum:

So are the tensions around the call to ‘decolonise the library/curriculum/university’ more about enactment than purpose? In relation to the library, perhaps it is the implication that decolonisation is a definable, finite and measurable process that is problematic; like so many processes that constitute the organisation of libraries, the implication that we can start and one day finish this project. The library is a place that privileges practicality (Hudson, 2017; Nicholson and Seale, 2018), and though there is work to be done, this is not the familiar project process with measurable time scales and impacts that we are so used to implementing, and is about learning and unlearning as well as about activity.

Introduction

Since 2015, institutions across the land we now call Canada have been increasingly engaged in reconciliation efforts as laid out in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action. While only three of the 94 Calls to Action are directed at libraries, the overarching theme of educational change resonates within all library sectors. Academic libraries are uniquely positioned both to engage in their own decolonising and Indigenising initiatives and to support those of their parent institutions. Caution should be taken, though, since often people and institutions seem to want to move quickly to reconciliation, as if it were a destination and not a journey. As Rhiannon Bennett [Musqueam] said during a panel discussion at Kwantlen Polytechnic University on 25 November 2020, you need to learn the truth before you can work on reconciliation.

This chapter presents some of that truth by providing a brief background on the colonisation of the country known today as Canada and how that colonisation was carried out through education. Part of this is learning what we mean by Indigenous, and who the three Indigenous Peoples in Canada are. We also share our learning on what reconciliation means, and how legal documents set up a framework to support our work. Complementing this, we unpack decolonising and Indigenising in relation to each other. This leads to a section on education, imparting why Indigenisation initiatives are important both within post-secondary institutions and in the libraries that serve them. We conclude our chapter by sharing our stories as Indigenous academic librarians contributing towards Indigenising our institutions.

Before we begin

Following the government definition and current practice (Joseph [Gwawaenuk], 2018; Justice [Cherokee Nation], 2018; Vowel [Métis], 2016; Younging [Opaskwayak Cree], 2018), the term Indigenous will be used when discussing First Nations, Métis and Inuit. Older and outdated terms may be used in context when discussing practices or as used by an author. Additionally, where possible, the name of an author's community or Nation has been included the first time we cite them. We are responsible for any omissions or mistakes and apologise in advance for them. We have used Gregory Younging's 2018 work Elements of Indigenous Style (EIS) to compose this chapter; where there are discrepancies in publication styles, we have followed EIS.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”

Introduction

This chapter will discuss the commitment to anti-racist practice by library workers who seek to engage with social movements – predominantly led and created by university students and progressive academics – calling for social justice in educational spaces, in particular, in the westernised university, which has many sites around the world due to the ongoing influence of empire and colonialism. It will look at how our praxis as library workers is steeped in racism and coloniality, hence the use of the term ‘decolonisation’ and/or ‘decoloniality’. It will also focus on the work of the Liberate Our Library initiative at my current institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, which posits itself in the arena of critical librarianship, which draws from critical theory, critical information literacy and critical race theory (CRT), which asks library workers to ‘consider the historical, cultural, social, economic, political and other forces that affect information’ (Gregory and Higgins, 2013, 7). hooks writes of the classroom as a space to experience freedom, and eventually empowerment, through rethinking teaching practices that lead to systemic changes around race and representation. So too can library workers ‘transgress’ by rethinking professional practices that disempower and silence certain voices and experiences, and instead work with educators and users to empower the voices kept silent for far too long.

Using such terminologies can often depend on the racial and cultural identity of the author, their geographical location, their class, their socio-economic status and their experience of the education system in which they were taught. I am a Black, British, working-class woman of mixed heritage (German/Hungarian–Jamaican) born and raised in London and educated in the comprehensive, state school system – a system that to this day does not teach Black British history to school children. A UK-based social enterprise called The Black Curriculum (2019), with its roots in student-led activism, has taken up the mantle to go into schools and teach Black British history, due to the ‘lack of Black British history in the UK Curriculum’.

Introduction

In September 2020 the British Library added captions beneath the previously undescribed busts of four major figures proudly displayed at the main entrance of the Library's St Pancras building in London. We begin this chapter by reproducing two of those captions in their entirety, as they capture the essence of efforts by many within the Library to show how the institution's colonial entanglements resonate in the experience of staff and visitors every day.

Introduction

Research methodology is traditionally understood as the research strategy and rationale that informs approaches to conducting research, including its aim, purpose and methods. It is part of a research paradigm that is based on both ontological (view of the world) and epistemological (relationship with knowledge) orientations. One main ontological orientation is that reality is objective, meaning that objects in the world exist independently of our perception or comprehension, that they can be measured and tested and that it is possible to establish and explain universal principles and facts. A subjective ontological orientation, on the other hand, believes that reality is made up of individual perceptions and interactions, that facts are culturally and historically located, subject to variable behaviours, attitudes, experiences and interpretations, and thus multiple (Bryman, 2016). The tension between these two poles is largely irresolvable, and researchers often choose a position between the two. This position informs what is considered possible to know, and how knowledge is constituted, or an epistemological orientation.

Positivism asserts that genuine knowledge must be confirmed by the senses, gathering facts in a value-free way that provides the basis for generalisable laws and principles. Constructionism, on the other hand, claims that knowledge is a social, cultural and historical artefact, constructed by humans and their interactions with each other. It is not natural or inevitable, just socially agreed (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). Based on these ontological and epistemological orientations, basic choices are made to pursue quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods research, which determine the specific methods that are used to gather data and information.

Enlightenment principles such as individuality, rationality, empiricism and universalism were introduced and validated as essential foundations of not just research but also human civilisation, situating them both firmly in the values and contexts of the Western world. Processes of modernity and colonialism thus asserted control over not only politics and the economy but also the categories by which systems of knowledge, social norms, cultural values and social identities could be understood. Colonial epistemologies established hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, naturalising and normalising unequal social and political relationships.

The Western canon, including ways of thinking and educational foundations, divides social reality, including forms of knowledge and their conceptual foundations, into that which is visible and that which is invisible.