 I'll go ahead and start. I am Dr. Michelle Villagran. I'm an assistant professor with San Jose State University, the School of Information, and you are joining one of our webinars as part of the Your Voices Project or Your Voices program. We at the School of Information and Applied Data Science Department recognize how critical it is to foster and solicit input around advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, so we can help educate the next generation of information professionals. So this project is really an outcome of our desire to be more inclusive and even culturally aware and in supporting our academic units. So our students, our faculty and our staff so we can enhance the student experience and even understand the value of your presence as a student at San Jose State. And I know we have several students here as well as alumni, even faculty, practitioners, and other individuals in the profession. So we're very grateful you're here joining us today. I'm going to now turn it over to my wonderful assistant, Kara Renee Price, who's going to share with you and introduce this program. S. J. Hello, everybody. Thank you, Dr. V for introducing me. Once again, this is the second webinar in our Your Voices series. Lady from Lady Bountiful to Librarian Cute, Tracing Race, Gender, and LIS by Gina Scheschelman-Torongo. Through a discussion of her, the legacy of Lady Bountiful, white women in the library, and how cute race, gender, and neutrality in libraries, Gina will trace some of the political work that has performed at the intersections of whiteness and gender in libraries, demonstrating how that which surfaces in our field is illustrated and often in service of larger racial projects. She will also go into reflections on what whiteness studies can offer to LIS and where they might fall short. And also briefly about Gina. She is a librarian and associate professor at Des Moines University, where she is responsible for teaching and research services and coordinates a graduate peer associate program. Her research interests include gender and race and librarianship, critical library pedagogy, and information labor as it relates to reproductive health. And she currently lives in Iowa with her partner, child, cats, and chickens. So thank you for joining us, Gina, and I will turn it over to you. Thank you so much for the introduction. Thank you both, Michelle and Cara, for facilitating this, for setting this up and for the invitation to speak with everyone today. As mentioned, I'm going to be talking today about Lady Bountiful and Librarian Cute, Tracing, Race, and Gender in LIS. My pronouns are she, her, and hers. And as mentioned, I'm coming to you from Des Moines University, which is in Iowa. So I do want to begin with a land acknowledgement. Des Moines University, and also their area I live, I believe you can actually see my house in this aerial photograph. DMU Des Moines University sits on the traditional ancestral and unceded land of the Bacogé, Sac, and Fox peoples. I think it's important to when we offer a land acknowledgement that we pair it with concrete action. So it's more than just an empty gesture, right? And so in preparation for today's talk, I have donated some resources to Great Plains Action Society. This is an Iowa based indigenous led organization that really is working to rematriate the land. LandBac.org is another sort of Midwest rooted organization that does work across what we call the United States. So I encourage you if you're able to also commit some time and resources to an indigenous led organization. I also want to mention that many of the themes that I'll talk about today and then the work I'm going to be talking about can be tied back to settler colonialism and the horrors that have been brought on indigenous communities and the land. And so I won't be explicitly talking about that. It's all interconnected. And I'll be sort of returning to this theme of the importance of understanding how structures and our histories are all connected. So as far as what I'm going to be talking about today. I want to begin by addressing how sort of my ideas around these themes developed. I know we have a number of graduate students and the SJSU program and maybe elsewhere in the audience. And so I think it's important that I sort of share a bit about my journey in this work because it did start while I was a graduate student. I'll then outline two pieces in particular. One is the legacy of Lady Bountiful, White Women in the Library, which is an article I published in the journal Library Trends in 2016. And then the article How Cute, Race, Gender and Neutrality in Libraries, which was published in the journal Partnerships in 2017. I'll then move to a discussion and hopefully we'll have lots of time for Q&A. I think that it's important that that I model sort of reflecting on my own working, including some of the gaps and limitations I think of scholars. It's super important that we do that. So I hope to do a bit of that here. And before I move on, I wanted to talk a little bit about the image that you see in front of you. I found this at the University of Kentucky Archives. And this is an image of Pack Horse Library Carriers. The title is Pack Horse Library Carriers Mounted on Horses Outside Pack Horse Library in Hinman, Kentucky. You might have seen images of these these libraries on horseback circulating. I think for me, at least in my social media feeds, I saw a lot of these a few years ago and they were really celebrated as sort of like, oh, look, look at this really unique history. Oftentimes, we see that there are women presenting and white presenting folks riding on horseback. This particular image was taken during the Great Depression and it was a WPA project where books were delivered to rural Appalachians. And so I sort of had to roll my eyes when I saw this because roll my eyes or chuckle. I'm not sure exactly how to capture my reaction, but I think we can see threads of the lady bountiful work and her operating in projects like this. And I want to be very clear today to say that I, I'm not I'm not here to critique helping other people, right, or ensuring that folks who need reading materials have access to them. I'm not here to critique the idea of charity more broadly necessarily. But I think it's important that we think critically about everything we do and librarianship, especially the stuff that is sort of broadly celebrated and again sort of trace that back to these larger projects that might be operating in the background. So I'll start with a little bit about me. So I am from, I grew up in rural Iowa, a town of about 2000 people. I went to Drake University, which is in Des Moines for my undergraduate degree. And the story I always like to tell is that I, that was the first time I had used to crosswalk. So I was one of those rural students who definitely had some adjustment to living in a metro area and being in a school environment with folks who came with a lot more resources than I did. I then enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Colorado Denver. I got a master's of social science and a certificate in women's and gender studies. I wanted to include this not because I'm advocating or arguing that folks in library school need a second master's degree, but this this was a really important time for me because I feel like I sort of learned how to identify and critique power and I carry that education with me in my work today. I then went to the University of Denver and received my MLIS in 2014 and shortly thereafter started at California State University San Bernardino. For those of us who aren't from California, that's a community in Southern California sort of smack dab between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. I worked there as an instruction librarian and later a coordinator of library instruction through 2021. I also have a piece here in my sort of timeline is that I had a kid in 2019, which I also wanted to model like when you're talking about sort of your work or your academic or professional journey that life happens, right? So I feel like I was super, you know, quote-unquote productive up until this point and then my priority shifted and then of course a year later the pandemic hit. And so if you were to look at sort of my research or scholarship journey, there was a lot going on and then suddenly there wasn't and that's totally fine. I want to normalize that. Kevin Sieber has a brilliant post in Lib Parlor about what he calls the mid-career slump. Also in an attempt to sort of normalize this and say, it's okay, life happens. Like you're not always going to be sort of producing at the same levels throughout your life. So then in 2021, my family was a pandemic family. We moved to Iowa to be closer to family and for some other reasons. And now I work at Des Moines University, which is a small private medical school. I'm working with a very different student population. I'm working in medical librarianship, which was completely new. So I'm here to encourage anyone who might be nervous about making that transition to a different type of librarianship that I did it and you can do it too. Okay, so I promise to talk a little bit about how sort of my research projects or projects emerged. So I was a graduate student in the MLIS program at the University of Denver and I had the fortunate opportunity to be able to take a course on an elected critical race theory and education with Dr. William Cross. It was a totally life-changing course. I previously had worked as a teacher in K-12 and I had been seeing and experiencing some things that I didn't have words for and I felt like this course certainly gave me language for what I was seeing. In it, I stumbled upon Erica Miner's work and she writes about this idea of lady bountiful or sort of like this, what we might think of as a white savior complex and its connections to women in K-12. And I feel like the light switch turned on. And so all the while I'm sort of immersed in library spaces, learning about librarianship, taking my curriculum and my LIS program and I was seeing things, especially in sort of the public services courses where it seemed like there was some fetishization of black and brown experiences or bodies or cultures. There was a sort of unspoken assumption that libraries were white spaces or ought to be white spaces and that wasn't really problematized in the way that I thought it should be. And there was a very sort of like colors of the rainbow approach to diversity and inclusion and racism really wasn't like a word that was spoken. And so I was able to make some connections between this idea of lady bountiful, my own experience in K-12 and then what I was seeing in library land. So I was really excited about this and had all these ideas threw them down and was fortunately able to attend the Gender and Sexuality Studies Colloquium which was in 2014 in Toronto. It was my first conference, so as a student I was super nervous. I didn't really know what to expect. Actually it was my second conference. I had done a conference in 2011 and totally bombed and like got lots of negative feedback, so I was terrified. But I took it to this colloquium and it seemed like people were interested in what I had to say. And so I decided to write it up as an article format and it was published in 2016 along with other work that was presented at that colloquium. And then in the following year I published the How Q article. How Q is really sort of like a part two to the lady bountiful piece. I felt like I had to say, I had more to say about lady bountiful or this phenomenon. And I think that's a really useful way to think about your research as someone who might be interested in doing research or work is that it's a continuing conversation, right? Your work can build on itself and of course build upon the work of others. All the while I was sort of working on the edited volume Topographies of Whiteness which came out in 2017 through Library Juice Press. I'm so indebted to all of the contributors of that volume. Obviously they were informing my thinking all the way through. So if you haven't had a chance to check that out, definitely do. I'm sure you can find it in a local library near you. And then this last bullet point kind of speaks to that same thing, right? This nothing happens in isolation. I was in relationship to other librarians, scholars, thinkers, activists in the world, whether that was because I was reading their work or I was actually meeting and talking and collaborating on projects with folks. Work doesn't just happen, right? Like you're not just a floating head. It absolutely happens in relationship. And so I have a shout out for some of those folks at the end of today's presentation. I'm going to grab a quick drink of water. So I'll start by talking about some of the themes and points I have attempted to make in the article on Lady Bountiful. I don't have the time or space here to really outline my argument in detail. So if you haven't read it, I encourage you to. I'm not sure, Michelle or Kara, if you've shared those links yet, they're all openly available. And so the two articles I'll talk about as well as the introduction to Topographies of Whiteness, you can access those freely. So my point in this article is really that white supremacy and patriarchy have worked together, not only through white women, but on white women. In early libraries, and Todd Homa writes about this in his article tripping over the color line. Early libraries really had a role in quote unquote, civilizing or Americanizing or otherwise saving patrons. They definitely had were a major player in sort of early assimilationist projects. And many of these duties were to consider to be perfect for this idea of an ideal woman, right? And so we can read that ideal woman in many ways. Of course, one of the primary ways is that this category was available only to white women. But these were also women who had sort of a special mission who were assumed to have innate mothering abilities, right? Who could exert a positive influence on the masses. And I think what's important here is if we think about early colonial logic, especially in projects like settler colonialism, they really turn on this idea of white benevolence. So white women were sort of the perfect figure here. I think this, if anyone has read Fobazi Ehtar's work on vocational law, I think there's absolutely a tie in here. She writes about the sort of religious or mission minded ideas that sort of propel librarianship. And I think you can locate those too when we think about Lady Bountiful. I think this matters. I mean, the so what right is that LIS has so long been comprised of a majority of librarians who identify as white and who identify as women, myself included. And the point here is really that this is no accident, right? The term Lady Bountiful, Lady Bountiful isn't an actual like historical person. It's an archetype or sort of an idea. And I feel I wanted to use and label this sort of idea or this project with the term Lady Bountiful, because I think that she really captures this history and what is still at play in librarianship. So some examples of Lady Bountiful, some more recent examples. The first one actually is not from librarianship, but it's just so perfect that I had to include it. The film Dangerous Minds. I can't remember the exact year that it came out, but I've got the VHS cover right here, the film poster. We've got Michelle Pfeiffer, who is sort of a traditionally attractive or conventionally attractive white woman, right? She's got blonde hair, blue eyes, and she's looking all tough in front of in front of a line of students of color that in the film she essentially, you know, quote unquote saves. And we see the same same sort of thing at work in the film Party Girl, which if anyone hasn't seen it, definitely check it out. Party Girl is a film where a character played by Parker Posey is a Party Girl turned into a librarian. And as part of her transformation into a librarian, she engages in a number of missions where she essentially, you know, saves others. And it's no accident that these others in the film are more often than not men of color. And so I dig into that and provide some analysis of that film in the paper. Another piece I touch on in the paper is this idea of superhero librarians, right, like the original search engine you sometimes see like figurines or posters of librarians and capes like we're here to save you or the one I've seen is we know the answers to questions that you don't even know you have right. And so it says the same logic of we know better than you and we're here to save you and do some good gosh darn it. Another element that I address in the paper is this idea of technology and sort of this fetishization of technology as a civilizing force or force that can save. And I saw a lot of this, especially in the early days of the pandemic around public libraries providing access to internet for low income folks or folks who otherwise didn't have have access to technology. I see this sort of discourse around like innovation more broadly too. And so I think that if I were to write this paper all over again, I would spend more time with this. If anyone is interested in exploring this further, I definitely recommend checking out Raffia Merza and Maura Seale's work on what they call the Technocratic Library of the Future. This isn't my reference, references slide I'll share, but they compliment this, but they also sort of complicate it because they point to the role of white masculinity in this sort of innovation and technology fetish. Okay, so what I will do now is move to a discussion of themes explored in my work on cuteness. Again, I think it's useful to think about the cuteness work as sort of an extension of my thinking around Lady Bountiful. It's really my continued thinking about how benevolence, patriarchy and white supremacy all recruit one another. So in how cute race, gender and neutrality in libraries, my thesis here is really the aesthetics and sort of more broadly material culture. They have a role in political projects and we ought to take them seriously. So I look at a particular brand of the feminine and that is cute. Cute often is associated with youth or even infantilism. Certainly the feminine cute things are meant to be non-threatening or harmless or perhaps more importantly powerless. I have a picture here of an early edition of the cover of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in that she really takes up this question of sort of the association of cuteness and beauty with white youth. And so there's like Shirley Temple makes an appearance in that novel, right? The curly blonde hair and big blue eyes and other authors have really taken up Morrison's work too. Most importantly, I think the, of course, whiteness is central to cuteness. C&I also does quite a bit of work on cuteness and in addition to pointing to the centrality of race, she does the important work of pointing out that cuteness like so many aesthetics was historically crafted or created. And so she traces it back to the 19th century and domesticity and sort of consuming within the domestic sphere, right? Like marketing things for largely women. And so I think it's, her work is really useful because she points to social forces at play that are often just sort of unspoken, right? So in this case, capitalism. The cute thing is meant for the viewer or the person who apprehends it. It makes you want to consume it or have it or protect it or care for it. Cuteness is meant to have timeless or universal appeal, right? So it's meant to be for everyone. In the paper, the way I sort of talk about this is that the cute is meant to be for all and against none. And we can see the same sort of framing or positioning of libraries, right? Libraries are a public good. They're meant to be for everyone until of course, questions about whether hate groups, for example, can use library spaces, right? And then that complicates things. But there's absolutely this tie into this idea of neutrality. Libraries are to be neutral, right? Like we don't take sides. And of course, it's never as simple as that. I think that the nigh quote at the bottom sums this up. I apologize. This slide is a little busy, but I couldn't leave it out. She writes that cuteness reflects and seems to legitimate by aestheticizing a saying no to political power. And so my question that I really look at here is, what is this aesthetic doing in library land? So what do I mean? I think providing examples can be helpful. I pick up a lot more and sort of analyze a lot more examples in the paper. But for the sake of today, I'll just talk about two here. So on the left, I have an excerpt and an image from a blog. I'll just describe it quickly here. It's a young looking woman who sort of presents as white. She has blonde long sort of traditionally feminine hair. There's a bow in her hair. She has a cardigan with flowers on it, a polka dot dress. Her knees are sort of together and she's almost in a curtsy sort of position. And she's holding a purse. She does have a tattoo. And the accompanying text reads, something about a nice tan and navy with a nice burst of maroon and some cute specs makes me think of a librarian. But the adorable kind, not the stereotypical kind. Though I may be making a stereotypical depiction as well, whatever. The important thing is that you know it's a good thing. And I love this this excerpt because she says the quiet part out loud, right? This is meant to be universally appealing. Everyone loves it or that's the assumption. As I was preparing for this presentation to yesterday, something that I hadn't noticed before is that she repeats the word nice twice at the top here. And so it's not lost on me that like there's this sort of nice white ladies trope that others have identified in librarianship too. So again, it's all sort of interconnected. We sometimes see this style described as library cute geek chic or even a dorkable. Oftentimes when I talk about this, people think about Zoe Deschanel, for example, or the characters rather that she plays. I don't I'm not attacking this particular blogger. I think she looks nice. I have some items that might be described as cute. It's not my personal preference. But again, my my work is less about attacking individual choices or individual actions and pointing out sort of the connections between the individual and larger projects at play. Another example of cuteness that we see in libraries is the little free libraries project. And so I have here an image of one that was pulled from social media. It's tiny. It's it's cute would be a very good descriptor for this one's colorful. Some some in my neighborhood are like look like miniature doll houses or like miniature birdhouses, things like that. But if anyone has read Jordan Hale and Jane Schmidt's work, they really critique the ways in which little free libraries often end up sort of distributed along racial lines and how it's a sort of privatization of what should be freely available good to the public, right? So I've seen cases of where library funding has been cut and folks are encouraged to put little free libraries in their lawn instead. And that can become quickly problematic. On the website, folks on the little free libraries website, those who who put little free libraries in their yards are discouraged from stalking them with what they call overly political texts. Little free libraries used to and I'm not sure if they still do but they had a community and cops program which claimed it was helping build safe places to read. I know a number of folks who would who would consider a police station to be the least safe place to be let alone to leave their children to read a book. But it was really fascinating to me that police stations and other community spaces were sort of calling upon or using little free libraries as a way to signal harmlessness or universal appeal or safety. And again, I just want to reiterate, I'm not saying like free book exchange or neighborhood book exchange is bad. I've I don't have a little free library, but I've certainly with my kid taken a book and put a book back. But again, I think it's worth looking at sort of aesthetics that show up in libraries, and the message that this is sending in the work that that it's doing. Let's take another drink. I'm thirsty today. Okay, so I was trying to think through sort of three lines or takeaways for these two pieces. And for me, the biggest one really is that race and gender are co constitutive, right? They make one another. And so that renders intersectional analysis to be absolutely necessary. So for example, white women were quote unquote allowed to enter early librarianship because they were seen as non threatening or non revolutionary, right? They weren't going to stir things up. There was an assumption of lack of political agency. And Lady Bountiful Bountiful demonstrates this, but we also see this sort of like non threatening this showing up with this cute aesthetic too. I think the second piece here is that what surfaces in library land is not sort of isolated, right? It's connected to larger racial projects as well as projects and structural work of, again, white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, the list could go on and on and on. Also projects surrounding neutrality in libraries, sort of the suggestion that it's possible or desirable. And then finally, this is all super complex. That's always a big takeaway of my work. I didn't have time to talk about it today, but in my cuteness paper, I have a whole section in the second half of the article about how cuteness can be politically productive, how it has been taken up and sort of subversive spaces. And so it's not all, you know, clear cut black and white. I think also when we're talking about categories of identity or presentation, like categories of womaness or femininity or masculine or maleness or whatever, those are always changing, right? And they're so deeply tied to performance that it's useful to track sort of who can inhabit these different categories and the work that certain subjects are allowed or not allowed to do when associated with different identities. My goal in my work is never to emerge with sort of clear or clean cut answers. I think answers can and should be developed collectively sort of at the local level. But I think there is definite value in presenting questions and thinking deeply again about the work that we do in our field. Just because I had mentioned I want to model sort of thinking about gaps in our own work, speaking of complexity in the Lady Bountiful piece, when I'm when I'm discussing the film Party Girl, there's a scene in which the Parker Posey character is sexually assaulted. And I sort of relegate that to a footnote in the article. And I really wish I had spent more time on that really diving into sort of what that means for the character in our analysis of intersectionality. So anyone wants to take that up go for it. I think there's a lot there that I could have explored in more depth. So I will wrap up by speaking to some of the pensions or dynamics at work in theorizing around whiteness. This is really drawn from sort of what I address in the introduction to topographies of whiteness. Again, there's a lot more there than I have time to sort of take up today. But just a few points for anyone who might be interested in racist or anti-racist scholarship or work in libraries and how that what that sort of looks like in the workplace. I think what whiteness studies does. And what is useful is that explicitly frames whiteness as a social construct in the same way that all race is a social construct. I think this is useful when thinking through things like Lady Bountiful, when you're seeking to understand how gender or aesthetics, for example, come into and are integral to this construction of race and gender. I think that, and this is changing, but when I was doing a lot of this work, I was seeing sort of questions of diversity or race and racism in LAS literature really talked about in terms of BIPOC communities only. And so the whiteness question and white as a racial construct was sort of ignored, which unwittingly can render it normal or neutral. And I think that's changed. There's a lot of excellent scholars really, really addressing whiteness and troubling it. But I think that's just something to keep sort of top of mind is that if we're going to study sort of oppressive histories, we have to look at how they're made and always being re-aid. The other piece with theorizing whiteness sort of ties into this idea of white privilege pedagogy. And this is a way of talking about how whiteness and problems and issues of whiteness are often sort of taught, especially to white people and taken up as like what anti-racism looks like. So oftentimes, you know, you attend a DEI training at work and you might be presented with a checklist, like, you know, check off my privilege. And oftentimes it's sort of left there and that sort of can create the sense that racism or anti-racism is really an individual manner matter, excuse me, it's an individual matter or a personal or interpersonal matter. When in fact, I think it's really useful to look up, look at sort of the structures that have built and continue to shape the world that we live in. And this ties into the third piece that often, especially with white privilege pedagogy, it can become sort of a self-corrective project that is very inward focused and focused sort of on identity rather than collective action. If you're interested in sort of this tension between racist and anti-racist politics and the personal versus the structural, definitely check out David James Hudson's work. We did the presentation together, but he's much more brilliant than I am. And that's a lot of good things to say about this. And so his work is also on my reference list. So I will wrap up by presenting you with a list of folks who I'm embedded to. This list of thinkers really only speaks to sort of my presentation today and the two articles and introduction that I elaborated on. I also, as Kara mentioned in the beginning, I also write sort of on reproductive labor and information work as well as information literacy. And so that list would be much, much longer. I'm also sure I missed someone or more than one. And so if you're here, I ask you or if you view this, I ask you for your forgiveness in advance. I also want to give a shout out to Baharaki Sefi. She modeled using a similar slide in her recent really great claps keynote address. I think it's important to recognize again, who has informed your work, who in a sense is all over it. Of course any errors, omissions, mistakes are mine alone. And as promised, I have a reference list here that I'm happy to share out that really only touches on the pieces that I explicitly mentioned in today's presentation. So that is all I have for you. Again, thank you so much for being here. And I guess I can turn it over to Kara or Michelle to sort of facilitate the Q&A. Yes, thank you so much, Gina. That was an incredible presentation. You've shared up with us a lot of good resources and things that we should reflect on, especially as we navigate librarianship. So we do have a lot of people that are expressing their gratitude for you sharing with us. But again, if you do have any questions, feel free to pop them into the chat. We've got about 15 or 20 minutes or so for our Q&A. And there were quite a few resources shared in the chat. So I just want to reiterate that we will be collecting all of those and we will share them out with the recording. So everyone will have a full list, including the three key citations that Gina from her work has shared as well as her reference list. While we're waiting for questions, I have, I guess, a prompt here, particularly for students in our audience. Gina, what would you recommend if students wanted to become more involved with this work? And while they're in school, what recommended actions would you suggest they take, whether it's internally while they're in their institution or even externally in their workplaces? Is there a good starting point or where would you guide them to if they want to either learn more or take some concrete action? Yeah, so I think starting with some of the some of the work that I touched on today, not not mine, but in my reference list would be useful. I think also, as I mentioned, my world sort of changed when I took that elective course, the critical race theory and education course, I think that oftentimes in sort of library land, we can get a little myopic and focused on issues that arise in librarianship and immediate sort of pressing workplace issues. But again, everything is interconnected. And so I think what's beautiful also about LAS, the field of scholarship especially, is that it's really interdisciplinary. So like anything you learn can apply. And so maybe looking outward a bit to see what's going on in other fields and speaking of concrete actions, okay, if there's not stuff that's working in our area, what can we learn from education or other sort of pink collar professions that have historically been grappling with similar issues like nursing and social work. So I think, yes, having an open mind and looking outward can be a really good first step. Thank you. And Carol, turn it over to you. I see several questions if you want to. Yes, so Andrea asks, thank you for this, Gina. My question is about race and gender are co-constructive from one of your slides. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Yeah, that's a really great question. So what I mean by that is that their co-constitute is that there is a particular, let me see, being a successful, and I'm using that in quotes, right? Like if you're performing white masculinity, well, if you're performing it the way you sort of should, that looks different than how you perform white femininity. There are certain ways of being that are sort of expected based on your gender and your race. And those things have to be considered together, I think, for a true analysis. I hope that answers your question. I feel like I'm not being super eloquent here, and it always makes sense in my head, but what to say in that love? Not so much. I think too, if we think about, for example, Lady Bountiful, this idea of she was able to sort of inhabit ideal womanhood, which is tied to Victorian notions of womanhood, that womanhood was not available to women of color, gender, queer women, etc. It was particularly tied to race and a particular performance of gender. We also have another question from Tawana that asks, what has been the most surprising thing you've learned or demoralizing? I guess it's not so demoralizing, but when I was sort of beginning my work with Lady Bountiful and sort of had this revelation in this course with Dr. Cross, I was saddened a little bit that like, Libra LAS Scholarship and sort of the way racism and anti-racism was thought about in the field, that it wasn't quite where other fields were, like folks in education and social work and nursing, like I mentioned, have sort of taken up these issues and been writing about them for a while. And it just seemed like, while there are certainly some folks who had been talking about these issues, it wasn't sort of as prominent as I had hoped to see, which really propelled me to write the piece, because I saw a gap in the literature that I wanted to fill. We also have a question from Lisa. Librarian cute aesthetics remind me a lot of feminism and makeup, trying to balance between supporting the individual's right to choose to enact it, but advocating against a system that would require it. Do you have any thoughts about the individual's role in using the aesthetic? My sort of mantra is you do you. Like I said, I have some clothing, articles of clothing that could be considered cute. When I did my first master's degree, my thesis was all about like the association of animals and women and bridal magazines specifically. And so for a while, I refused to wear anything with animals on it, because I was like, well, I'm politically associating myself with an animal. But I also think that people have power and people can subvert things and use them and be creative with them. So if you want to wear cute clothes, or if you want to wear makeup, go for it. I usually wear a mascara just because I like how I look better with mascara. That's probably problematic in lots of ways, but at the same time, it's my body. I'm going to do what I want to do with it. I think, again, I'm less concerned with sort of what people do on the individual level and more about things like the little free libraries sort of in police spaces. Those are the things that I think are more important and that I prefer to focus on. What has been the reception of your research for white people? How has your research impacted BIPOC people? Oh, that's a very good question. So I have seen and heard from a number of white women, specifically, especially the Lady Bountiful piece that it has helped them sort of rethink like what their body signals or means in the library. It was never sort of meant to be, again, like a self-corrective project, but I'm glad there's an impact. I know that BIPOC read the article and I hope folks find it useful. I hope that it sort of also has provided some additional language or affirming probably what BIPOC know and have been experiencing. I'm not necessarily saying anything new. I just probably said it in a different way. I think also the fact that when I first published the article, it got a lot of attention on Twitter. I don't really use Twitter much anymore, but it was not lost on me that I am a white woman and so this message was probably more well received from a white person than it would have been a BIPOC. And so there's also those dynamics in theorizing whiteness. I didn't have time to address that in the slides that the messenger matters on whether it will be taken seriously or whether it will be viewed as a direct attack or not and things like that. So I didn't fully answer the question, but that's what it made me think of. So Brandon left a comment that says, I'm BIPOC and I have to say that some of her writing helped inform my approach with DEI initiatives, especially with buy-in from co-workers who are white women. Well, I'm glad it helps and yeah, I think that sort of connects to maybe the point I was just making about sadly the messenger can help or I should say not help but can play a role in how the message is perceived. I have a question. It's kind of a follow-up to the one about how it's been received. I'm curious to your next steps or your next research projects or next piece of work. Have you thought of expanding this work further maybe in a aligned direction or maybe what are you working on now that might be of similar interest to those in the audience? That's a great question. So I think I was really tired after topographies of whiteness was published and as I mentioned, I had a child in the pandemic and so I also at that time just saw an explosion of BIPOC authors writing about whiteness in ways that really captured what was happening far better than I ever could and so I've been trying to just sort of listen and really engage with their work lately. The volume knowledge justice that Sophia Leong and Jorge Lopez McNight edited that came out recently, that has like blown my mind. It's amazing. So I've been really trying to engage with their work. I've also sort of been interested in looking at and I mentioned this reproductive health and the role of information work. So still thinking sort of about labor but related to reproduction and a lot of that that interest just stemmed from personal experience and so I actually wrote a few auto ethnographic pieces related to that and but I think the tie-in is that in all of my work I'm really interested in again is sort of looking up and in my work on reproductive labor and information. I'm looking at how neoliberalism informs how people make sense of their experience and how their experiences are sort of cast in the public imagination. So that's sort of where I am now. I won't say much about it but I'm working on a very exciting project with some collaborators sort of rooted in this idea of reproductive health and libraries. We've got a three-point question here. Do you think that critical race theories should be taught in library school? If so, why and how do you think whiteness could be brought out and discussed in library schools? All right and taking notes. I address each piece here. Yeah, I absolutely think critical race theory should be taught in library schools. If I had stumbled upon that in my LIS curriculum versus some of the watered-down approaches, I think I would have been less discouraged to sort of speak to Tuana's question from earlier. Why? I think because it can help us understand our histories. I don't really have much more to say beyond that. I think that if you don't teach critical race theory or critical ways of thinking about race and racism in American history, then what you're going to get is an alternative which is some whitewashed, jingoistic BS to be frank. We all sort of understand what that can look like. Yeah and whiteness is a part of that. As I mentioned the presentation, I think understanding whiteness as a social construct can be super useful to understanding the American project. I know a number of scholars have written about how early on the Irish and Italians weren't considered white and then they were sort of recruited into whiteness as a way to sort of quell divisions like in the labor context. Whiteness is a race and whiteness is part of our racial landscape. I think you can't really have a full understanding of how things operate without taking it into consideration, especially if you're looking at power. Whiteness has a lot of power and you need to understand that. Where could we follow your work so we can see when you publish something new? That's a good question. I feel like I'm so bad at social media. I don't know if she's on the call but Chandra Walker. This is so embarrassing but I tried to tweet a thread once and then she so politely private messaged me and was like Gina, this is how you do it. So I wouldn't count on social media for me. I have a website. It's GinaSchles.com which links to my CV which I try to keep semi-updated. As much as possible I try to make sure my stuff is open access so I have a Google Scholar profile and ORCID ID or ORCID. My current institution is toying around with getting an institutional repository so I will continue to try to make things as openly available as possible. But yeah I'm pretty bad with social media. There was a comment earlier. I just want to read from an individual that said several years ago I wrote an article about the experiences of male librarians and the reception of that paper was 100% gendered in a way that I hope has an age well. Oh interesting. I would love to hear more about what that person means. I don't want to put them on the spot if they don't want to share. I think it's I'm trying to remember the exact citation but Carmichael I believe has done some work on sort of the experiences of male librarians too and I pulled in some of that in the Lady Bountiful piece because I think it's same thing with whiteness like I think it's super important to look at like maleness and masculinity and how one performs that and what that means in library spaces which are you know sort of female or woman majority spaces right like that's fascinating. And I just found a few Carmichael citations I'll put them in the chat. Oh perfect thank you it's been it was I published it in 2016. Yeah and Carmichael's work the two I found are from the 90s. Yeah yeah but it feels like so long ago like I started working on Lady Bountiful in 2014 which just feels like another lifetime pre-pandemic I guess. And follow-up said the sender said this was largely touching on messaging only being received by certain messengers. Oh okay okay yeah if if you're out there and you want to follow up via email I would love to hear more about that. And I'm going to put your email in the chat Gina. Thank you so much. Just trying to copy it. I know it's so long I always tell students I'm like you can reach me here as long as as long as you spell it exactly with every letter and hyphen in the right place. Got another comment saying this was really informative thank you so much Gina and hosts. This is a very incredible I thank you again Mado Gina for being able to to set aside time to share a little bit more about your work and what you've learned and what we can do and what we should be recognizing moving forward. Absolutely I so appreciate the invitation. We still have a few minutes but while any other comments and other additional resources are coming in thank you Tawana for sharing all of these we'll make sure we capture them and share with all the attendees. I do want to remind everyone we have recorded this so the recording will be made available usually it takes a couple weeks but it'll be available on the Your Voices blog page our site as well as on the San Jose On Demand webinar page and on the San Jose iSchool YouTube page so it'll be in three places you can find the recording and then the resources and a PDF of the presentation will be on the iSchool website as well as our Your Voices page and please check out your voices Kara do you want to announce like a few of the upcoming things or what we've done recently that also tie in with with the webinars? Yes so in addition to webinars we are also doing community learning space sessions or CLS and our first one is actually coming up on Friday specifically for students at San Jose State so people with disabilities and those who are neurodivergent will be able to come together and have a discussion to talk about how their intersectional identities have affected the way that they navigate through the school and any challenges or barriers that they may have faced and what solutions that they propose the iSchool should take on to be able to help students like them. We are also preparing for a webinar that will be coming up a little bit later in 2023 you can get more information on that on our WordPress our website but that will be in January we will actually be listening to the central queer archive project that is based in California we'll be having a panel session on that you can learn a little bit more about their work and being able to capture the voices of those who have been typically and historically removed from the archives so again you can keep an eye out on that and then we've just released a newsletter that is for students by students where we get to share a little bit more about things involving the iSchool or any webinars or events that are occurring inside and outside the school as well so we've got quite a bit going and once again we've just are just working like crazy to make sure that we get and capture those voices not only from our students but from those in the field like Gina who can can speak to her work and experience. And if you anyone in the audience wishes to be a contributor we're welcome to highlight events going on you know at your organizations as well so we can include those in our newsletter. You can just email us through the our your voices we have our email on that page. Gina this was so great I didn't see any other questions I just saw a few more thank yous and comments and there is the email if you do want to contribute to your voices thank you Kara but Gina this was fabulous really appreciate your time and I've taken like a little page and a half here of notes so I'll be reviewing that and probably reach out to you again but we do appreciate you and I certainly do appreciate all those that were in attendance and those that do listen to this recording later on so thank you again. Thank you all so much and I want to give a shout out to Twana I actually haven't met you Twana but I've been in numerous webinars with you and you're always sharing resources and I've heard from other folks in the field that you you are always so generous with sharing information yeah I see a lot of your comments so thank you for all of your work your labor behind the scenes that it is a lot so we appreciate it. Thank you all have a great day.