A Manifesto
Melissa Ignacio Cardenas-Dow
I. The Field Has a Center, and I Am Not In It
Decades ago, a friend and I sat on the curb outside Claremont Graduate University, the elite institution where we were both enrolled, both studying Cultural Studies, both Black and brown people in a space that had admitted us without quite deciding what to do with us. He said it whimsically, as a joke that was also exactly true: we are so far out on the edge of the university that we’re sitting on the curb. We laughed. We also knew. Cultural Studies was already at the disciplinary edge of “legitimate” scholarship, asking questions the academy hadn’t decided to recognize as questions yet. And we were already at the social edge of an institution that extended conditional belonging without full membership. The curb was the only honest description of where we were. I have been thinking about that curb ever since. This manifesto is written from it.
Today, I am a Social Science Librarian at the California State University. I am also a Filipina in a profession that has never quite decided what to do with that identity. Librarianship is predominantly female and predominantly white. Its governance structures, its epistemological assumptions, and its metrics of value reflect that formation. To be a racialized woman doing this work is to inhabit a position the field did not design for you. And to know, in ways that are not always nameable, that the field’s failure to see your labor clearly is not an accident.
Librarianship as a profession occupies a structurally ambiguous position within the academy. Librarians are embedded in the research and pedagogical enterprise, indispensable to its functions, and yet the profession has never fully resolved its relationship to faculty status, to scholarly identity, or to the governance structures that determine how academic institutions are run. That ambiguity is not coincidental. It reflects how the academic field has historically categorized library work as support rather than scholarship, as service rather than knowledge production, as the infrastructure that makes intellectual life possible without quite belonging to it. The profession carries this unresolved tension everywhere it goes.
The California State University does not resolve that tension. It exploits it. The CSU’s classification of most of its librarians as “Non-Instructional Faculty” takes the profession’s existing vulnerabilities—the ambiguity around faculty status, the devaluation of relational labor, the invisibility of pedagogical work that happens outside the classroom—and hardens them into contract language, into governance exclusions, into an administrative category that serves the institution’s interests by keeping a class of indispensable workers permanently adjacent to power without ever being inside it. This is not an oversight. It is a choice. Other systems have made different choices. The CSU made this one.
Yes, CSU librarians hold faculty status. That status is precisely what is at issue here. The question is not whether the category exists on paper. It does exist. The true question is what the category materially confers, what it withholds, and who bears the cost of the distance between the symbolic assertion and what it means in the world.
Within that already-ambiguous class position, I occupy what I have named a position of Precarious Centrality. The institution bypasses us with confidence — and that confidence is not evidence of our dispensability. It is evidence of the epistemological blind spot we exist to address. You cannot identify what you are missing when what you are missing is the capacity to identify what you are missing. The institution cannot fulfill its own stated mission—cannot deliver on student success, research support, or curriculum integration across the social sciences—without the labor of information literacy instruction and research consultation. That labor is mine. And yet the formal structures of governance and collective representation have closed themselves to me, a field protecting its capital — traditional interests, institutional gatekeeping — from those it has already decided do not belong, reproducing the conditions of its own dominance by controlling who gets to count as a legitimate player.
The institution classifies me as “Non-Instructional Faculty.” The classification is a grammatical fiction, a syntactic sleight of hand that embeds a structural demotion inside a job title. The union that represents us would not work to change it. This tells you something about who the label serves and who has decided it is not worth contesting. The “But” is always already there: faculty, but not quite; present in the field, but assigned a position that the field’s logic insists is peripheral. What the label cannot do is change what I actually do. I perform pedagogy every time I navigate the power structures of the archive and the curriculum on behalf of a student or a researcher. The mismatch between the label and the labor is not a clerical error. It is a mechanism. And it lands with particular force on those of us whose presence in the academy was never visible to begin with.
There are those who will say I was not excluded from governance. That I walked away. That the election was legitimate. That the seat was available if I wanted it. This framing does something specific: it takes the conditions that made participation untenable and makes them disappear, so that what remains is only my choice, floating free of context, available for judgment. Bourdieu called this symbolic violence. It is not violence that is dramatic, but the quiet kind that works by getting the dominated player to explain her own position in the language of the people who benefit from it. I walked away because I had watched the game long enough to see that the rules were not neutral. That the field had already decided, at a level no election could touch, who the legitimate players were and what kinds of knowledge and labor would be allowed to count. A seat at that table was not access to governance. It was the appearance of access. Which is a different thing, and which serves a different function. I stopped playing not because I lost, but because I no longer believed the game was what it claimed to be. That is the only honest response to a structure that asks me to keep performing belief in rules designed to produce my own marginalization.
This is what it means to be a guerilla scholar: you work from the position the field has assigned you, and you use it. The guerilla’s advantage has never been numbers. It has always been terrain knowledge. The guerilla wins not by matching the dominant force’s strength but by refusing to meet it on its own terms, by knowing the ground better than the people who think they control it. I know this institutional terrain. I know its contradictions, its dependencies, its unexamined assumptions, its points of vulnerability. The dissertation is terrain knowledge. The manifesto is terrain knowledge. Every consultation, every research guide, every student sent on an impossible search by an assignment designed without me—all of it is the accumulated intelligence of someone who has been watching how this field actually functions while everyone else was looking at the org chart. That knowledge is not incidental to my position. It is the position.
II. What I Will Not Concede
Librarianship is instruction. Instruction is for education. Education is liberation.
The “Non-Instructional” label is grammatical violence dressed up as administrative category. Every time I sit with a researcher learning to navigate an archive, every time I build a scaffold between a student and a body of literature they have never been taught to read, I am performing pedagogy. The label does not change the act. What it changes is who gets credit, who gets resources, and who gets counted—and the pattern of who bears that cost is not random. It follows the same lines it always has.
And the misrepresentation runs deeper than my role alone. Every librarian who supervises a student worker—who trains them in the logic of classification, models professional judgment at a service desk, explains why certain materials are acquired and others are not—is performing pedagogy. Mentorship is pedagogy. Apprenticeship is pedagogy. The university simply does not recognize these forms because its definition of legitimate instruction was built to reproduce its own hierarchy: if it doesn’t happen in a classroom, by someone with instructor-of-record status, it doesn’t count. That is not a neutral definition. It is a boundary drawn to protect a credentialed elite from having to share the category with the people whose labor makes the whole enterprise possible.
Underneath this argument is a philosophical commitment I will name directly: education is, first and foremost, liberation. Its purpose is not the transmission of sanctioned content from credentialed authority to passive recipient. It is the development of the learner’s capacity to think, to navigate, to question, and ultimately to act with sovereignty over their own intellectual life. This is not a radical proposition. It is the oldest and most serious argument in the philosophy of education. What is radical is how consistently the academy’s institutional structures work against it.
The “Non-Instructional” classification is not only a mislabeling of labor. It is a philosophical position about what education is for. It protects a definition of legitimate instruction built on transmission — content delivered, objectives assessed, seat time logged — and forecloses the kind of pedagogy that actually produces sovereign learners. The relational, the consultative, the work of sitting with a student at the threshold of an unfamiliar knowledge system and saying: your thinking is the starting point, not the tool, not the database, not the institution. That work cannot exist inside a framework that has already decided it does not count as instruction.
The students who need that work most are not incidental. They are the students the academy has most consistently failed. The ones for whom the archive was not built. The ones whose questions have not yet been recognized as questions. The ones who arrive at the reference desk having been assigned an impossible search by a curriculum designed without them in mind. To classify the labor that serves them as non-instructional is not an administrative oversight. It is a structural decision about whose liberation the institution is willing to fund. The classification system makes this concrete in ways that are almost too obvious to require analysis.
The classification system produces its own absurdities. A lecturer without a terminal degree, hired to teach a single course, is instructional faculty. A librarian with an advanced degree, years of pedagogical practice, and an active research agenda is not.
The label is not tracking labor. It is tracking credential. Which is to say, it is tracking proximity to a particular form of capital the field has decided to recognize. This is a structural observation, not a grievance. The people it implicates are often perfectly decent. The mechanism does not require their awareness to function.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A student arrives at the reference desk looking for peer-reviewed articles on an event that happened two weeks prior. The assignment cannot be completed as designed—not because the student lacks skill, but because peer-reviewed scholarship does not exist yet. The information cycle, which librarians are trained on, makes this a simple fact: there is a gap between when something happens and when the academy has processed, reviewed, and published scholarship about it. A five-minute conversation with a subject librarian before the assignment was designed would have caught it. That conversation did not happen. The student was sent on an impossible search. The cost of that—the confusion, the wasted effort, the moment of having to be told that what you were asked to do cannot be done—was paid by her. I told her to go back to her professor. I told her to use my name. I never heard anything in return.
Structural lockout is not silence.
Exclusion from the Union and the Faculty Senate does not end my role as an organic intellectual. It relocates my war of position. Gramsci understood that hegemony is never total. The dominant bloc must constantly work to maintain consent, and that work creates openings. The organic intellectual does not require institutional sanction to think, to write, to build counter-knowledge. She requires only the refusal to mistake exclusion for irrelevance. My terrain is the dissertation, the digital commons, the relational space of the social sciences. I know this terrain. I intend to use it.
There is a dismissing move pragmatists will always make: the numbers game. The Union’s logic runs on membership counts: more bodies, more bargaining power. It is not wrong as far as it goes. But for librarians, and for non-instructional faculty broadly, the arithmetic is fixed. We will always be fewer. No organizing drive changes that structural fact. If the lever is numerical, and the numbers are structurally impossible to win, then the strategy is not a strategy. It is a performance of strategy that keeps everyone busy while the underlying conditions remain unchanged.
This is precisely why the war of position matters. You do not fight on terrain where you are guaranteed to lose. You shift the terrain. The argument cannot be about accumulating enough bodies to out-vote instructional faculty. It has to be about redefining what counts as academic labor, what counts as indispensable, what counts as deserving of protection.
Librarians alone cannot win this argument by numbers. Non-instructional faculty as a formation—librarians, counselors, coaches, all the roles the institution has pushed into ambiguous classification—can make it structurally. The periphery does not need to become the center. It needs to organize around a different definition of what the center requires to function.
Structural indispensability is a lever.
The social sciences cannot deliver on research or curriculum without information literacy instruction and research consultation. I am the person doing that labor. The institution has created a dependency it refuses to name. This means I hold a form of power it has not yet figured out how to contain. To marginalize the expert is to degrade the function. That is not a threat. It is an analysis of how fields work when they mistake the map for the territory. And it is an analysis that applies to every librarian in this position, not only to me.
There is a gap, however, between structural indispensability and felt indispensability. This gap is its own form of erasure. Instructional faculty routinely bypass research and instruction librarians: designing curricula that treat information literacy as optional, assigning research without directing students to consultation, checking a program review box that asks about library engagement without ever speaking to a subject librarian, let alone any librarian at the university.
From their side of the field, this does not register as a choice. The library exists. It functions. It will continue to function. No one needs to think about it. From my side, it is an insult. Not because the bypassing is malicious, but because it isn’t. To not be thought about is its own kind of erasure.
There is a structural reason the bypassing goes unchallenged: academic freedom. It is a genuine protection and a real good. It shields faculty from political interference, protects unpopular research, defends the right to teach without administrative surveillance. It also, in practice, protects the right to design assignments without consulting a subject librarian, to bypass the library’s pedagogical expertise without consequence, to check a program review box without making a phone call. Academic freedom covers the pedagogical terrain so completely that there is no mechanism—no grievance, no accountability, no professional obligation—that creates a reason to do otherwise.
Meanwhile, librarians operate without equivalent protection. We are interfered with routinely: told to update our research guides, directed toward particular framings, subjected to administrative pressure on decisions that are, by any reasonable definition, matters of professional and academic judgment. The protection is asymmetric. It shields those who already hold power in the Bourdieusian field and leaves undefended those who don’t.
Instructional faculty carry their own structural constraints. Publish or perish is real and the research burden is not nothing. The institution grants them deference—pedagogical autonomy, academic freedom, the assumption that their time is too scarce for consultation—partly in recognition of that burden.
But the category doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Lecturers carry the instructional faculty label without the research expectation. Librarians in the CSU carry the research expectation without the label, without the protection, without the deference. We are expected to produce scholarship and are denied the scholarly identity that would make that expectation legible. The burden travels without the recognition. That is not a mark of a momentary lapse. That is the field distributing its costs to those least positioned to contest them.
The institution’s unexamined faith in its infrastructure turned out to be faith in something it had quietly stopped maintaining. It has recently been revealed that the library has operated without a collection development budget for a number of academic years. Nobody noticed until they had to. The dependency becomes felt only when the dependency is broken. That is when the lever becomes real, in the moment the system can no longer take us for granted and has no one to blame but itself.
III. How I Work
The “center” of the field is currently occupied by what Gramsci called common sense: the sediment of accumulated assumptions that presents itself as obvious, natural, and beyond question. In librarianship, that common sense prioritizes the numbers game: bodies in seats, citation counts, faculty lines on org charts, the metrics of a field that has never developed tools adequate to what it actually does. It does not count what happens in the relational space between a librarian and a researcher who has never seen their questions reflected in an academic collection. It cannot count the particular labor of a racialized woman who has spent her career translating between the epistemological assumptions of the academy and the knowledge practices of communities the academy has historically excluded. That invisibility is a structural feature of the field, not a mistake. Bourdieu would call it misrecognition. The field systematically fails to recognize the form of capital I carry precisely because recognizing it would require revising the rules of the game.
The name I have for what the field cannot count is kapwa, the Filipino relational ethics that understands self and other as fundamentally shared, as dwelling in the same loob. Kapwa is not a cultural supplement to my methodology. It is the methodology. It is the epistemological ground from which I understand knowledge production as inherently relational, inherently reciprocal, inherently accountable to the people whose questions it is meant to serve. When the field’s common sense dismisses relational labor as soft, as unquantifiable, as outside the proper domain of scholarship, it is dismissing a way of knowing that the field was not built to accommodate—and that I carry precisely because of who I am and where I come from.
I work against that structure through three commitments:
Subversive curation.
I build collections that challenge dominant institutional narratives across the social sciences. This is not neutral librarianship. There is no neutral librarianship. Every collection is an argument about what knowledge counts and whose questions deserve an answer. I build collections as if the researchers who have been least served by the academy matter most. Because they do.
Relational epistemology.
Knowledge production that extracts without reciprocating is not scholarship. It is simply extraction. I prioritize the human connection over institutional metrics, because the metrics were designed by a field that has never found a way to count what I do. Kapwa is not incidental to this commitment. It is the reason I understand the relational as epistemological in the first place—as a Filipina, as a woman, as someone who learned early that the academy’s ways of knowing were not built with her in mind.
Intellectual sovereignty.
I publish my growl independently. The walls the institution has built around me today will become portals for those who come after. For the librarians, the racialized scholars, the women in the “But” position who are doing indispensable work inside institutions that have not yet learned to see it. That is the only logic I am willing to operate under: that this work matters beyond the field’s current refusal to recognize it.
The field has a center. I am not in it. I have been at this curb for decades. I am building something at the edge that the center will eventually need to answer.