The Slow Food Manifesto begins with the following two sentences: “Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.” While they focused their
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Slow management in a fast world
Last month, I had the great pleasure of keynoting the CALM (Conference on Academic Library Management) Conference, which is consistently one of my favorites. The video of my talk, Slow Management in a Fast World, is available below for those who would like to check it out! You can also view my slides here…
Neoliberal Time and the Promise of Slow Librarianship
I’ve meant to post about this for a while, but one of the book chapters I wrote back in 2023-24 during my sabbatical has finally come out (the other is estimated for early 2027, <sigh…>). The book Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices edited by the wonderful Ashley Rosener has finally been published by Library Juice…
Strike time, collective action, and moral conviction in library leadership
I’m on strike right now, along with thousands of other faculty, academic professionals, and staff at Portland Community College (that’s two unions, friends!). It’s a weird feeling. I never thought I’d be in this position. PCC was the first place I worked where I really felt like the values of the College matched…
When I surrendered to the current
One author whose newsletter I read avidly is Dr. Zed Zha. In Ask the Patient, she writes about holding on to humanity and humility as a health care provider and is an inspiration to someone like me who has experienced very few caring and invested doctors. The other day, she wrote a note about…
The double life of being chronically ill at work, slow librarianship, and checking in as an expression of care
Developing a long-term illness, whether chronic or acute, is like being dropped into a country completely unfamiliar to you. You don’t know the language, the customs, the cuisine, the people. You feel alone, isolated, and totally out of your depth. Eventually, you start to learn the language, the customs. You find community, fellow travelers, people…
Rest as a productive act
I’m a member of an online support group for the autoimmune condition I have and one of the recently diagnosed people wrote a post about how hard it is to cope with the pain and fatigue alongside their job, parenting, and housework and sometimes they have to “give in” and rest. They made giving in…
Toxic comparison, time poverty, and a manager’s duty of care
I haven’t written anything in a while because it’s been a really hard few months. My health has taken a turn for the worse with a new condition – also caused by my broken immune system that seems to greatly prefer attacking my body than foreign invaders – and I honestly haven’t had a decent…
The Crushing Mental Load of Disability
Photo credit: Statue Atlas by PeterKraayvanger on Pixabay
This isn’t the essay I was planning to publish next. I’ve been working on an essay about the lack of solidarity around COVID protection, but this is very much related. While I’ve been very sick since 2022, when I had my first COVID infection and then Long…
It’s not about information literacy: Why people’s risk calculus around COVID has changed
Image credit: Willet on the Beach by Korall inWikimedia Commons
I’ve been doing so much thinking, reading, and writing on social media about COVID that I was honestly surprised to find that I hadn’t written much about it on this blog beyond talking a little about my experience with disability due to COVID (tl:dr…