Keynote at ANZREG Conference 11th June 2025
Slides | Recording [when available]
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I’m going to be talking about reimagining systems today, very broadly. So digital, technical, social, whatever type of system you’d like to picture and feels relevant to you right now.
I also want to acknowledge that there’s a lot going on in the world at the moment, especially in global politics, and a lot of this impacts people, communities, and libraries, locally and internationally. This is in the back of my mind while I present today, even when I’m not speaking directly about any of these events. I’m not giving direct examples, partially because I talk about everything that’s wrong with the world in other spaces, partially because there’s already been a lot of provocations and responses to current global events, but also because this keynote isn’t meant to be for me.
Like with many of my talks, my own lived experience and perspectives are certainly woven into it, alongside research and other scholarship. But I’m keeping this broad so that everyone here has opportunities to respond to things that are relevant to them.
And also, so you can determine where you have agency to reimagine a system or a process in your own institutions and communities. That will look different for everyone. We all have different combinations of people, infrastructure, and resources that we’re navigating systems with.
To help with this, there’ll be some questions throughout which you can answer anonymously, and I hope they’ll challenge your thinking around how we navigate and reimagine systems, regardless of the role or library sector you’re in.
Before I go any further, though, I do want to acknowledge that I’m speaking on the lands of the Whadjuk and Noongar people and acknowledge Elders past and present.
I’ve had the privilege of living and working on this Boodja – or Country – for the past ten months or so. And on this slide is a photo I took earlier this year at Murdoch University of some bees on a banksia flower, which really captured the joy I felt being here.
And I still haven’t even been here a year yet – I was on Yuggera country before this, in Ipswich, South-East Queensland, where I grew up – but I adore Western Australia and Whadjuk Noongar Boodja.
While there’s been a lot of joy, there’s also been new systems for me to learn, explore, and navigate while I was moving. To some extent, systems have always been on my mind. I find them fascinating to study, but also incredibly challenging.
Some of that is on a more personal level. When my wife and I were navigating coming out, we were still within social systems and structures that weren’t accepting. And as someone who is Autistic and disabled, there are some social and digital systems that have been more difficult for me to navigate and make sense of the world through. I might find that they’re not as immediately accessible or as intuitive as we might imagine they are in libraries, or they might not align with the ways I navigate or experience the world.
These experiences mean that over time, I’ve ended up very aware of gaps, inconsistencies, discrepancies, and missing parts of different systems and processes. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through systems-related challenges and understanding where change might be possible.
My personal experiences with systems that aren’t designed with marginalised communities in mind, or have barriers that are exclusionary or require additional time or effort to navigate, have contributed to my understanding of what it means to be part of change and advocacy related to systems, including some of the challenges.
So, when I first started working in libraries, and especially higher education, I heard the word champion used in the workplace a lot and was actually quite confused. I’d constantly hear that such and such is the digital literacy champion, the data champion, or perhaps a diversity and inclusion champion – the list could go on.
Despite knowing the definition, I couldn’t quite grasp what everyone was on about. I remember asking if it was a higher education thing? A library thing? Was it something people volunteer for, or part of a role?
And I never got a clear answer. It’s just something that was.
Over time, I worked out what ‘champions’ were through my own observations. Sometimes these were nominated roles, and other times informal labels people had been given if someone consistently promoted or uplifted something. What mattered was that it was people who were identified as providing support for a particular cause.
At this point, I also started to realise that often the most impactful champions were those who took it upon themselves to be champions. No shoulder tapping or formalities were necessary. They were the ones who saw a need and took it upon themselves to make it happen.
The allies and advocates – sometimes celebrated, sometimes bearing the cost and the weight of this work.
Eventually, there was another word that I’d started to hear a lot, though – and that was provocation.
Discussion question: What words come to mind when you think of ‘provocation’?
So, provocation means doing something (some type of action or statement) that prompts or causes another action to begin in response. Unlike the word champion, I wasn’t so much confused by the use of this word as I was actually a little irritated.
I’m sure a lot of what I write and speak on might count as a provocation – including what I’ll say today – but I’ve come to realise that I don’t have any patience when it comes to ‘provocation for the sake of provocation.’ Essentially, provocation without real purpose. To me, it was starting to seem like, at conferences and in online spaces, we sometimes cared more about provocation itself than change and progress.
Without action, provocations can feel like more noise in an already busy and disruptive world, with many things vying for attention. It felt like sometimes we couldn’t seem to quite bridge the gap between starting a conversation about change and making a meaningful and tangible difference in the long term, especially when it came to equity, diversity, and inclusion.
And I really like this quote by Junka-Aikio and Cortes-Severino, from an editorial on extractivism, which captures my sentiment here. They write:
“Theorizing social injustice is important; however, the challenge of devising real (and concrete) alternatives … is where critical practice and scholarship is most needed.” (2017, p. 183)
We have countless conversations in libraries about equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, about dismantling unjust systems and practices, and about decolonising and Indigenising collections. We don’t always venture into openly talking about power and privilege, though, and sometimes we just stay at the acknowledging or the provocation phase rather than applying these principles and perspectives to practice.
We need to act on them and be able to reimagine some of the systems and processes that we talk so much about.
And this applies to everything I’m sharing, too. Some of it will be theoretical, and that’s why I ask so many questions. It’s because I want us to be able to identify where we need to critique or challenge, but then move beyond that to find spaces where we can build change with communities.
And sometimes that might start with a provocation.
We often – very rightly – create and celebrate our own provocations in libraries.
Sometimes they’re formal organisation or media statements in response to current affairs and events. And other times, it’s individuals using presentations, social media posts, or the like, to encourage or prompt a particular direction or way of looking at something. And we choose to celebrate a lot of these types of provocations or responses. They’re coming from communities or perhaps professional bodies that we’re part of or care about.
Often, it’s because the problem is outside of libraries, but impacting us, that we come to see ourselves as rising to the challenge of responding. And that’s made me think:
Do we only celebrate provocations when we couldn’t possibly be the problem?
There are a few different ways that we could understand this question or respond to it. I like to use a critical librarianship lens. So here, I immediately want to ask: who is positioned as the problem?
Often, in society, marginalised communities and marginalised people are positioned as being the problem. We see this playing out with a lot of socio-political conversations where historically disadvantaged or marginalised groups are seen as the problem instead of larger systemic issues.
Perhaps they’re not seen as resilient enough, they’re blamed for societal challenges or events, or there’s an excessive focus placed on individuals instead of the systems and structures around them. The reason that someone or a community experiences oppression, structural inequalities, or barriers becomes an entirely individual problem, rather than a structural problem for us all to address.
And we aren’t immune to this in libraries.
We see this a lot when we talk about resilience in libraries and communities.
I’m not here to tell you that resilience is the worst possible thing – personally, I’m a fan of relational resilience, which is focused on our relationships, connections, and community. But we do love narratives about resilience in libraries, and we see a lot of discussion around creating resilient systems, infrastructure, communities, staff, or teams.
But often, resilience narratives end up focusing on individual resilience within systems that aren’t working. People are told to ‘just be more resilient,’ and often individuals from marginalised communities.
To quote one of my previous presentations on resilience:
“We have a lot of research that is focused on the idea of building or enhancing resilience. This, however, means that we may be quick to celebrate how inspirational and resilient a community or individual is without having the courage to advocate for change and to put that community first” (Bell, 2023).
And this is challenging what type of response we’re defaulting to. What type of action are we taking, and how do we respond to provocation ourselves?
If we’re faced with systems that represent inequality or further marginalise or exploit communities, do we ask those communities and people for greater resilience? To continue adapting? Or do we consider what it would mean to put that community first, to advocate for change, and to move past provocation to reimagining our systems?
And this quote by Berg et al. in ‘Responding to and reimagining resilience in academic libraries’ really captures this.
“Resilience tells us to manage up, to return to a status quo which too often upholds silence over difficult change, and reinforces fictions of neutrality.” (2018)
And I’m sure there are probably things that come to mind for all of us with this quote. Whether personally or professionally. To me, it really addresses the potential to reimagine systems by reimagining just one part – resilience. And bringing this back to provocations – when we default to resilience narratives, our provocations can feel quite bold … until we turn them inward.
We might critique problems outside of libraries, we celebrate our own responses to external issues, but we’re often less willing to examine how our own systems, leadership, or ways of working might be creating the need for resilience as well.
Meaningful provocation, the kind that actually leads to change rather than just conversation and upholding the status quo, means we need to move beyond ‘resilience’ within systems and be prepared to fundamentally reimagine those systems ourselves, or at least parts of them, even if slowly.
So, the question isn’t just ‘do we only celebrate provocations when we couldn’t possibly be the problem?’ It’s also: Are our provocations actually challenging systems, or are we just asking people, especially marginalised people, to get better at surviving them?
Do we see libraries as being bold and challenging social systems and injustices externally, while being hesitant and playing it safe internally?
So, now I want to take us beyond challenge and provocation to focus on reimagining systems. And I’m going to talk through it in three parts – care, critique, and community – which is my way of describing how we can:
- Apply an ethics of care
- Engage in critical librarianship, and
- Center community.
And as I mentioned earlier, I’m not prescribing one specific way of navigating change or systems in libraries, but these are ideas and values that I think are valuable and make the process of reimagining systems as important as the outcome.
It’s almost a guide through individual ethics, to critical analysis, and then to action through community.
Additionally, at a time when there is so much disruption, especially in politics, technology, and libraries, I believe that the values and approaches that underlie care, critique, and community can be a way to uplift and provide spaces for communities in our work.
And I wanted to start with an ethics of care.
An ethics of care is a feminist type of approach to ethics. It sees our morals and actions as needing to centre interpersonal relationships, and it brings a social responsibility to care. So, relationships are at the centre of decision-making and action. And that’s rather than universal or abstract moral rules.
It’s very focused on the context and presence of relationships, and our capacity to care in guiding our decisions and actions. It’s an ethics that’s relational, contextual, and responsive to needs around us.
And one way we can think about care is through how we respond to user needs, research needs, community needs, and what these needs look like in our local library context. And what those relationships or partnerships might look like, too. There’s also another aspect I want to address here.
The quote I’ve chosen for this slide is by Cara Bradley, in a library journal article focused on open access. The quote reads:
“The ethics of care challenges us to think about systems, our place within them, and how we might challenge them.” (2021, p. 10)
And that challenge part is important.
There’s often a tension between thinking about care and critique. When we think about caring, we might not immediately jump to challenging. But an ethics of care is responsive to inequalities and challenging the status quo. It isn’t removed from the politics of power and inequality in the systems we exist in.
And we exist in systems that often place constraints on caring. Systems and structures that don’t care about caring, or that feel like they better fit with different or more abstract ethics frameworks.
There are a few ways we could approach care here. It could be care through considering digital accessibility, how AI is or isn’t adopted, the language we use or cultural protocols, or many other aspects.
One more obvious way that library professionals engage in care work is through supporting access and user needs. Access is something that’s deeply embedded in the purpose of many of our digital resources, systems, workflows, and processes, regardless of role or sector.
And Bradley (2021) describes how often our library users are accustomed to care. Care in the form of access.
Yet, our approach to access in libraries might limit this care. The user categories we set up, fines, or institutional conditions and policies we place on access can mean restrictions. It inhibits who can access digital resources and databases beyond our core users (Wilson et al., 2019).
So, if we’re seeing our work around access and discovery as being a form of care, how are we demonstrating care in our digital resources, systems, infrastructure, and workflows? What does care look like for you or your library when we bring GenAI into the picture? Does care look different for different user groups?
Discussion question: What does care look like in your work?
So, with that, next, I want to bring us to critical librarianship.
And the basis of critical librarianship is critical theory and social justice – these provide a framework and guiding principles for the critique and evaluation of our library practices.
Critical librarianship – or critlib – is about examining social and cultural dynamics to help unveil and critique power.
And I mentioned some of the tensions and challenges that we get with an ethics of care, because we are caring about things while working with and within imperfect systems, and those systems and the ways we approach care aren’t neutral.
Critical librarianship invites us to address the underlying systems that create that injustice or cause harm.
And, I’ve said this in a previous talk on critical librarianship – we’re in a profession that is focused on information, and we support the access and dissemination of knowledge. We can’t easily, and shouldn’t, separate conversations about knowledge from conversations about power. These conversations flow into all of our work.
Whether we’re focused on metadata, subject headings, systems or resources librarianship, digital user experience, open access, or any other area, our work overlaps with power, injustices, and harms. And some of these harms might not be immediately evident.
A question that I’ve been asking for the last few years is: Whose voices, perspectives, and values are reflected in and contribute to our work?
And today I’m going to add something else in:
Who do we care for in our work, and who is allowed to show care?
This can be a more challenging question when it comes to roles that are either behind the scenes or focused on technical processes. Not always, but sometimes. We may think about care in a very interpersonal way, and associate it with other professions, like nursing, or we might limit it to different roles.
So, I’d encourage you to think through what relationships look like when we’re reimagining our systems. Who is told the things they care about are ‘too much’ or not important? Who is missing from our care or our partnerships? How are we integrating critical perspectives into the things we care about?
Part of this comes back to also questioning who we might be positioning as the problem within a system, and how we might demonstrate care by addressing problems that are inherent to the system itself instead.
Asking ‘who do we care for?’ also connects to some of my work in evidence-based practice. It makes me consider how we incorporate individual feedback into our work and systems as part of a bigger community picture. How we take on board individual staff and client feedback has actually been some of the most interesting work to think through in evidence-based practice. I’ve led research projects and built dashboards as part of using data and evidence in decision-making around systems and services, but I keep coming back to individual feedback as something that seems to challenge us.
So, in turn, I’ve sought to understand how the context and lived experience that can exist around one person’s story, the intersection of one person’s experiences, can also contribute to being part of a bigger community picture. Their story might be the one that reveals a gap, an inconsistency, or a problem within a system.
To take the time to set aside our own methods around user experience, for just a moment, and consider that person’s lived experience as a data point and a story, in its own right, takes humility from us as a profession. It sometimes means setting aside our own preconceived ideas of what ‘counts’ as evidence, and whose lived experience and whose community is deserving of a change in our systems. It means asking – critically – who we care for and what we care about in our work, and who gets to show up in that system with their community.
Discussion question: What is something about a system you have needed or wanted to critique/challenge in the spirit of care?
And finally, we come to community. Like resilience, we talk about community and communities a lot in libraries. Sometimes, it’s in a very abstract way – in the sense that we’re trying to reach a community, engage the community, or respond to community needs. And I’d like to challenge how we think about community in libraries and systems work.
I’ve turned to a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which is called ‘Generous Thinking.‘ Fitpatrick also addresses the idea of critique, but in a different way and perspective from what I have today. So, I just want to focus on how community is considered. And Fitpatrick writes about how communities don’t just exist, they’re built. They’re not just abstractions that are separate from us – they’re complex, they require negotiation, and need to be maintained.
In essence, communities are social constructions.
We see similar themes in a 1983 book by Benedict Anderson on nationalism called ‘Imagined Communities.’ Anderson theorises about the role that print media and print language played in national communities and explores how community exists even though most people in a national community won’t ever directly know all the other members of that community.
The important part here, though, is that community is constructed or created, and the people within a community perceive themselves to be part of it. Even without meeting, it’s the shared identity, sense of belonging, and the narratives that help create this community identity.
And in libraries, we might sometimes see community as something that we’re not involved in building, or, again, that we’re separate from. We might see community as something that already exists outside of the library, perhaps just slightly out of reach of our own roles. Or perhaps something that we’re part of only outside of our roles.
When we talk about engaging our community, or outreach, then, is that a community we’ve been part of building? Or are we just seeing community in a transactional way within our systems?
So, if there has to be a provocation I leave you with, it’s how can we move from individual transactional approaches to transformative community approaches when reimagining systems?
I studied international relations as part of my undergraduate degree, and these are concepts that I’ve drawn, very broadly, from international and community development approaches.
And when working with communities and systems, there are some approaches that have an excessive focus on individual intervention. The solution to systems change and development is focused on the personal level and might be limited to training or services for the individual.
And the impact of this is that structural inequalities or disadvantages can become more established and difficult to shift. Any change that’s made is incremental.
There’s an alternative approach to navigating the change and development of systems, though. And rather than focusing on individuals and incremental change, it emphasises transformative and community-oriented approaches to change. The key part here is being transformative, and I’m drawing from research I recently came across on community development.
And concepts in this, like meaningful participation, can be difficult to define. What we think is meaningful participation can easily end up being tokenistic, symbolic, or self-centred.
So, instead, a transformative approach empowers. It allows for influencing decisions, representation and developing leadership, and collective advocacy for transformation. It also acknowledges the community’s agency (especially marginalised communities) to either resist or change parts of development.
This is the opposite of resilience as a response to provocation. It’s having the opportunity to re-imagine a system.
And I’ll leave us with one more question.
Discussion question: What is one step you can safely take to reimagine a system or process you work in or with?
We’ve talked about moving beyond provocation for the sake of provocation, beyond asking people to just be more resilient within systems that aren’t serving them, and toward actually reimagining our systems through care, critique, and community.
And if we think about how I was confused about what champions were when I first started working in libraries? When I eventually recognised champions as people who saw a need and took it upon themselves to make change happen, I connected that back to care, and a willingness to turn critique inward at times, too.
When we bring together care, critique, and community, when we centre relationships in our decision-making, when we’re willing to examine power in our own systems, and when we move from transactional to transformative approaches, we’re not just responding to abstract problems. We’re providing people and communities with the option to reimagine.
And that’s not easy work. It requires us to sit with discomfort, to question systems we’re part of, and to centre voices and communities that might challenge how we’ve always done things.
But if we’re serious about the values we say we hold in libraries, then this is the work. Not just celebrating our bold external provocations and advocacy, but being willing to provoke ourselves toward something better, too.