Reimagining Workplace Empowerment: Reducing Low Morale for Minority Librarians

Course Description

Kendrick’s second workplace morale study focuses on the experiences of racial and ethnic minority librarians and reveals additional impact factors and enabling systems this group faces during exposure to workplace abuse and neglect. Additionally, literature on workplace issues ranging from bullying and burnout to microaggressions and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts in libraries emphasize an urgent need for dialogue and reflection on low morale outcomes suffered in library environments, particularly as these issues pertain to racial/ethnic minorities practicing in North American libraries.

Employing the use of reflective writing/aesthetic expression, assigned readings, and community participation, this course will offer opportunities for analysis, critique, and reflection on the low- morale experience as lived by racial/ethnic minority librarians. At the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Make sense of their low-morale experiences;
• Identify, reduce, or interrupt the role of occupational, systemic, social, and political barriers to resolving low morale;
• Contextualize the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion impacts on the low-morale experience;
• Identify and cultivate countermeasures that decrease low morale in library workplace environments; and
• Create counter-narratives that empower this group and pushback against dominate discourse about the experiences and outcomes of negative workplace behaviors in a predominantly Caucasian professional field.

Trigger warnings: Participants will be asked to revisit instances of low morale they have faced. As a result, negative memories and associated emotions, including anger, grief, and shame, may (re)-surface.

Enrolled students will be introduced to/have an opportunity to review the following concepts and frameworks:

• The trajectory of the general low-morale experience (Kendrick, 2017)
• Vocational Awe (Ettarh, 2018)
• Contextualize the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion impacts on the low-morale experience;
• Resilience Narratives (Berg, Galvan, & Tewell, 2018)
• Microaggressions (Alabi, 2015)
• Minority workplace ethnography in LIS (Cooke 2014, 2019)
• Racial and ethnic recruitment and retention concerns in LIS
• Equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts in LIS/Whiteness in LIS

Enrollee notice: this course is open to all, and is specifically designed to center the experiences of and support a safe space for racial/ethnic minorities practicing in North American libraries who have faced or are currently experiencing low morale.