Authenticity vs. Professionalism: Being True to Ourselves at Work
Name
Chap12_Brown_Leung.pdf
Size
637.78 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ef6f87fd6abde213cfb85596a0ace20c
Author(s)
Brown, Jennifer
Leung, Sofia
Date Issued
September 2018
Journal
Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS
Publisher
Library Juice Press
Citation
Brown, Jennifer and Sofia Leung. "Authenticity vs. Professionalism: Being True to Ourselves at Work – Jennifer Brown and Sofia Leung." Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, edited by Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho, Library Juice Press, 2018: 329-347. © 2018 Library Juice Press
Version
Final published version
Abstract
For early-career librarians of color, academic librarianship contains a number of unspoken and unacknowledged expectations. While it is widely recognized that the majority of librarianship is white and female,1 there is still a lack of action that directly addresses the consequences of this dearth of diversity. In fact, we have seen through personal experience that some attempts to remedy this problem have resulted in further marginalization of librarians of color in the workplace. The American Library Association (ALA), among other professional organizations, continually calls for academic and public libraries to increase the representation of marginalized professionals on library staff and to create diversity and inclusion initiatives. These efforts have put increasing expectations on libraries to also diversify programs and collections, and to become more inclusive spaces. However, carrying the burden of planning, promoting, defending, and/or assessing the work of social justice often falls to the very marginalized professionals that institutions struggle to recruit and retain. This tokenization results in the shouldering of invisible and emotional labors that burden us further; we operate at a deficit working under these conditions, as this toll then affects the -isms we experience while embodying our intersecting identities in the
workplace.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Libraries
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://litwinbooks.com/books/pushing-the-margins/
