Reorienting Library Technology With Slowness and Care

Meredith Farkas described Slow librarianship in this blog post as "an antiracist, responsive, and values-driven practice that stands in opposition to neoliberal values."

In their chapter "Toward a feminist theory of caring," Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto described care as "everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible."

Steven Jackson helped to catalyze the discipline of repair studies with his chapter "Rethinking Repair", in which he applied care ethics to the maintenance of technology.

This anthology explores the complexities of speed in modern society and organizations. Hartmut Rosa and Sarah Sharma contribute chapters on the phenomenon of people falling into and out of synch with each other. Steven Jackson contributes a chapter on how repair studies disrupts the association between technology and speed.

Sharma argued that one's ability to control their own pace has become tied to socioeconomic class. For some people to save time, others have to wait, slow down, work harder, or otherwise synchronize themselves to another's pace.

Karen Nicholson interviewed Canadian public services librarians to understand how they "recalibrated" themselves to stay in synch with the students and faculty they served. Nicholson draws upon Sharma's concept of power-chronography and applies it to librarianship.

Mollie Dollinger connects two important conversations here. She relates academic working conditions to the critical management studies (CMS) literature on time and project management. "Projectification" explores the social implications of work being structured for maximal efficiency across all economic sectors.

Acemoglu and Johnson reviewed Western technological innovations over a thousand-year period, from the invention of medieval watermills to the advent of generative AI. They found that innovation improves workers' productivity, but workers do not benefit from the greater efficiency unless broad social movements shape the direction of technology toward the public good.

The published text of Ursula Franklin's 1990 Massey Lectures delivered to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Franklin argued that technology facilitated the rise of large-scale, industrial production. This required bureaucracy, division of labor, and managerial control enforced through technological design.

"If one cares about broken worlds, one is drawn - inevitably, I believe - to the question of hope." In his chapter "Ordinary Hope," Steven Jackson argues that hope is not escapism. Hope is effective when it motivates us to do what we know to be good.