Discrepancy in libraries concerning race, gender, and the public sphere: A guided tour

For my Master’s thesis I am pursuing a project about women of colour who are library workers, and their experiences in Norway (at work). This has to my knowledge not been a subject of research so far in Norway, and with this in mind I wanted to find out more before pursuing my thesis paper and thesis project. In Sweden the research area has just been highlighted by Milia Rahman Olsson, and I hope to keep the ball rolling further. The text here is a revised paper originally for my exam in the module MBIB4240 (Institutions Promoting Information and Culture) in 2021, where I do some background work on what I initially feel are discrepancies between librarianship, whiteness and libraries as institutions (democratic spaces in the public sphere). I explore connections of the profession’s history, the Nordic welfare state, public institutions and legitimization work and policies, in conjunction with racism, sexism and intersectionality. I show how American experiences of WOC are valuable to the Nordic library context for further research. I pick apart librarianship as a profession and show how it is not only based on whiteness as a norm, but has been bluntly racist in its past, and any effort in diversity and inclusion is often, if not always, adding insult to injury. Our supposed core values as librarians are worthless mirages unless we seek to change the entire profession from its core, not just through adding laws and guidelines, essentially othering WOC particularly, often landing them the ‘diversity hire’, which leaves these women to take the brunt of so-called diversity work. Through reflection and discussion, I explicate the terms ‘white guilt’ and ‘white benevolence’ and what these terms have done to libraries as part of the public sphere. In this paper I show how this way of interdisciplinary work in LIS and Gender Studies is fruitful to research further in a Nordic context for the sake of our profession’s validity as part of the democratic infrastructure of the welfare state. This literature review takes shape in themed subsections in its main part, before scrutinizing in a review the material at hand with my research questions in mind.