The newest episode of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is live! I interview librarian and archivist Stacie Williams about how knowledge and information gathering has always been deeply racialized and gendered, the radical work librarians and archivists are doing to end sexual violence and the carceral state, why digitizing everything is actually a terrible idea with big environmental consequences, and how love is key to how Stacie imagines otherwise
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Stacie’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Stacie Williams
Stacie Williams is the director of the new Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago. She formerly managed the Digital Scholarship Program at Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library.
Stacie is an advisory archivist for A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland and has worked at Harvard University, the University of Kentucky, and the Lexington Public Library in Kentucky.
She is also an essayist whose work has appeared in Bitch, LitHub, New York magazine, Catapult, Gordon Square Review and The Rumpus.
Stacie’s first bibliomemoir on gentrification and race is forthcoming in October 2018 as part of Fiction Advocate’s AFTERWORDS series.
Key quote
“I think that one of the challenges is addressing this idea of libraries as so-called “neutral spaces.” There are a lot of people even in the profession who are deeply invested in this idea of libraries as totally neutral spaces where we shouldn’t be talking about politics, who say we shouldn’t make things political. But there was never any neutrality in the library space. When books began to be printed, they weren’t for everybody. They were for a very small subset of the population. We have to move forward and evolve; we have to understand that the nature of what we do has always been inherently politicized.”
– Stacie Williams on episode 70 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast
