Not a pitch: Why libraries need epistemic inclusion, not benevolent influence

The best library and leadership spaces I’ve ever been in involved epistemic inclusion. That is, inclusion related to knowledge. Specifically, uplifting and legitimising diverse and marginalised ways of knowing.

Libraries have always been about information and knowledge. But we haven’t historically gotten our own influence right. The history of libraries holds a civilising legacy, often tied to the positionality of white women in society. Contemporary library practices often still contain remnants of this legacy, which is one of benevolent influence.

In The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library, Schlesselman-Tarango describes the need to interrogate the benevolence of our own profession to reveal:

“the ways in which its assumptions and logics work to quell aspirations of a more reciprocal, respectful, and responsible relationship with users.”

We don’t always equate benevolence as a governing type of influence. Yet, it can shape how a community defines their needs, narratives, and solutions. And the risks of benevolent influence have been reflected in some of my recent reading.

In ‘Against technoableism: Rethinking who needs improvement’ by Ashley Shew, I’ve been reminded that people educated in ‘helping’ professions (of which I’d include libraries and education) often have very different views on problems/solutions than disabled people do. Often, disability is framed as a ‘problem,’ leading to solutions delivered without an understanding of where the problem might actually lie.

Then Angerbauer and Sedlmair write on the need to shift from “being like” (empathy approaches to design) ¹ to “being with” (sharing experiences together in design). They describe how this keeps user-centred design approaches from mirroring existing societal power structures and empathy-based approaches from undermining marginalised experiences.

In essence, empathy and benevolence are not enough to define or fix systemic problems. And prioritising humility (over empathy) means we avoid telling the wrong narrative and providing unwanted solutions and advice.

Not a pitch

I once had someone turn to me directly in a meeting and state, “not a pitch.” I don’t know if they’d picked up on the fact that I wasn’t someone who’d appreciate being pitched to (let alone surprise pitches), but it stuck with me and made me smile.

And upon reflection, they would have been right. Pitches, in the traditional sense, are smooth. They’re built to make you feel a certain way (quickly) and arrive at a conclusion without necessarily knowing you’re being led there.

Personally, I like to feel my feelings, just as they are, and I don’t like being led toward a conclusion (without explicitly knowing what it is). So pitches feel (somewhat) antithetical and disruptive to my natural state of being – despite my still having opinions on them.

I also once received a pitch that immediately put me offside.

It failed to grasp that working with marginalised communities and leaders required being mindful of influence and power dynamics. It revealed an intent and structural dynamic that left me unimpressed (though it was helpful to know). And it missed every single mark on trust-building and relationships before transactional conversations.

In short, I experienced it as disrespectful and disruptive.

By comparison, “Not a pitch” wasn’t really about pitches. It was someone telling me that I got to retain agency in that room, and that they respected that.

Benevolence and design

We do care about inclusion in libraries. We’re community-focused. We engage with decolonisation and Indigenisation, access for neurodivergence and disability, and social cohesion.

Yet while we’re often ready to acknowledge how our own privilege enables us to improve the world, it is also heavily tied to our own influence.

Melissa Lucashenko writes on social cohesion as a “white man’s fantasy, issued only on the terms of the dominant society,” locating the unravelling of social cohesion in Australia in its history of colonisation.

In Australian library contexts, we find an account of someone whose family migrated to Australia when they were a child and, as an adult, reflected that her parents chose the library as a space for her to learn to fit in because of its whiteness. It prompted reflection that, as welcoming as libraries are, that does not mean that they “are culturally neutral zones and/or are as inclusive as one would like to think” (Blackburn, 2015).

Our language of influence in libraries still follows the traditions of dominant society. When we talk about marginalised communities, libraries still remain positioned in service to ‘vulnerable people,’ with that vulnerability label often created by or reinforced through structural and systemic dynamics.

This is not to say that vulnerability does not exist, or is not in the purview of libraries, but that we must act with reflexivity. Doing so ensures we avoid reinforcing paternalistic understandings of marginalised communities or creating ‘pathogenic vulnerability’ (vulnerability exacerbated by interventions and dynamics that inadvertently create new harms).

The notion that libraries are inherently inclusive by virtue of providing community access overlooks the design processes that shape how the decisions and solutions we put in place are received and their actual impact beyond our own professional influence.

Returning to The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library:

“…if the ideal library worker, understood as Lady Bountiful, is not simply white, female, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle or upper class, but also subscribes to a specific type of benevolence, what sort of role does she play in regulating the types of people who desire to enter the library workforce today? … Does this figure somehow influence librarians, archivists, library workers, and LIS students to conceive of those who benefit from our services; in particular, those who have historically been or are presently Othered as being deficient, inherently needy, or in need of saving?”

Where libraries engage in benevolent influence rather than epistemic inclusion, they reproduce dominant societal assumptions. Such assumptions reinforce how, in the words of Grunsven et al. (2026), writing on design, “vulnerability is conceived and designed for.”

Indeed, in 2019, Sierpe wrote about how libraries have nurtured a neutral and “unassailable public image of virtuous liberal benevolence and near mythical devotion to the highest ideals of freedom, individual rights, and democracy,” yet resist scrutiny of their own exclusions.

Solutions?

The history of libraries and the contemporary challenges they face can sit uncomfortably as we seek to reinforce our value and impact (significance) by providing access and helping communities that may be perceived as vulnerable or as lacking access without our profession’s care.

For libraries to move beyond benevolent influence, as our self-conception, requires epistemic humility, inclusion, and justice. This includes finding our worth and influence in reciprocal relationships and partnerships, looking beyond our own credibility to understand different ways of knowing, engaging in ethical knowledge brokering, and proactively elevating the perspectives of marginalised communities.

The value of libraries, then, lies not only in the benevolence of access outcomes but in the process of epistemic inclusion, with design humility that focuses on experiencing ‘with’ rather than empathetic being ‘like.’

1. Such as in the case of disability simulations. ↩︎