The Reimagine Research Toolkit invites researchers, students, artists, librarians, and community members to reclaim research as a collective, creative, and decolonial practice. It’s for dismantling the barriers between knowledge and life.
To be a librarian of the otherwise is to commit to imagining and enacting library work beyond the confines of neutrality, hierarchy, and inherited systems of control. This module invites participants to question what libraries could become if they were not constrained by the colonial, capitalist, and technocratic logics that have long shaped their foundations.
Rather than simply improving existing systems, librarians of the otherwise work to reimagine the role of the library as a site of possibility, resistance, and care. This vision emerges from a lineage of critical information scholars, radical archivists, community knowledge workers, and decolonial thinkers who center the social and political stakes of knowledge work.
What is “the Otherwise”?
The phrase “the otherwise,” taken from scholars like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Ashon Crawley, refers to speculative, liberatory futures that resist and exceed current realities. It’s about asking: What if things could be different? What if libraries weren’t sites of quiet compliance and austerity, but places of radical imagination and healing?
In library and information work, the otherwise invites us to:
- Refuse neutrality as an ethical stance.
- Center oppressed and marginalized epistemologies.
- Disrupt dominant knowledge organization systems that erase or distort.
- Build infrastructures of belonging and access that aren’t merely symbolic.
Libraries and Systems of Power
Libraries, like other institutions, are embedded in broader systems of power: settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. To be a librarian of the otherwise requires grappling with these entanglements—not to become cynical or hopeless, but to develop strategies of collective intervention.
Key questions include:
- What ideas about order, value, and access are baked into classification systems like Dewey or LCC?
- Whose knowledge is privileged in scholarly publishing?
- How do surveillance and policing affect library users and workers, especially those from marginalized communities?
A librarian of the otherwise sees cataloging, programming, budgeting, hiring, and teaching not as neutral tasks but as political acts with real consequences.
Practices of the Otherwise
So, what does it look like to practice librarianship otherwise? Here are some pathways:
1. Radical Cataloging and Metadata Justice
- Interrogating subject headings, classification schemes, and authority records for bias, erasure, and violence.
- Advocating for and implementing community-driven vocabularies (e.g., Indigenous metadata protocols, activist zines in discovery systems).
- Creating space for knowledge that resists being easily categorized.
2. Community Accountability and Collaboration
- Building partnerships with local knowledge keepers, mutual aid groups, grassroots archives, and cultural memory workers.
- Supporting forms of authorship and knowledge production that aren’t validated by the academy (e.g., oral storytelling, zines, community newsletters).
- Sharing power over space, programming, and resources.
3. Infrastructure for Justice
- Rethinking library policy around access to materials for incarcerated people, unhoused patrons, undocumented users, and people with disabilities.
- Building systems that center trust and care rather than punishment or scarcity.
- Using library budgets, hiring practices, and leadership positions to redistribute power.
4. Pedagogy of Refusal and Liberation
- Teaching information literacy not as a skillset for consuming “authoritative” sources but as a tool for questioning power, uncovering bias, and amplifying marginalized voices.
- Encouraging learners to refuse deficit narratives about their communities.
- Reframing research as a relationship rather than extraction (connecting back to Module Two).
The Emotional Labor of Imagining Otherwise
To work toward the otherwise is both energizing and exhausting. It requires hope, imagination, and persistence—but also grief, anger, and letting go. It means recognizing the limits of reform and accepting that some systems need to be dismantled entirely.
Librarians of the otherwise must contend with:
- Burnout and institutional pushback.
- Isolation in workplaces that resist change.
- The emotional toll of advocating for justice in slow-moving bureaucracies.
Yet we are not alone; this work is collective and intergenerational. It is sustained by solidarity, mutual aid, storytelling, and rest.
Discussion & Reflection Prompts
- What would it mean to reimagine your daily library tasks through the lens of liberation?
- Where do you feel most constrained in your work? What might you do to push back, even in small ways?
- Who are your ancestors or elders in this work? What traditions or teachings sustain you?
- How do you cultivate imagination as a practice, not just a concept?
Closing: Toward Otherwise Futures
To be a librarian of the otherwise is not to have all the answers, but to remain committed to asking better questions. It’s to refuse to normalize systems that harm, silence, or erase. It’s to believe that libraries can be tools of liberation—and to act as if that’s already true.
This module is an invitation to start or deepen that journey. Not alone, but with others who are dreaming and building beside you.
The Open Knowledge Lab 