Abstract
Librarianship frequently frames itself as a caring profession, yet its institutional practices often require librarians to absorb harm privately while performing collegiality publicly. What would care look like if it did not require self-erasure or extraction? Drawing on feminist ethics of care, abolitionist approaches to relational accountability, and Ethnic Studies scholarship on refusal, survivance, and relational knowledge, this reflective position piece argues that collegiality in librarianship often functions as a disciplinary norm rather than an ethical commitment. Anchored in two relational figures—Marcie and Peebles, my cats—I advance ethical refusal as a legitimate professional practice that resists care-as-extraction and reframes care as infrastructural rather than dispositional. I argue that refusing to metabolize–to take in, process, neutralize, then render harmless–institutional harm is not a failure of collegiality, but a defense of professional integrity and relational ethics in LIS institutions and spaces.
Introduction: When Care Is Claimed but Not Practiced
Librarianship frequently names itself as a caring profession. Service, equity, and student-centeredness are core to its professional self-understanding. Yet within library institutions, care is often thinly provisioned, unevenly distributed, and quietly withdrawn when it would require structural intervention. Librarians are expected to offer care while managing harm privately, professionally, and without disruption.
This contradiction is not incidental. Feminist scholars have long noted that care, when unmoored from structural responsibility, becomes a mechanism for exploitation—particularly when those expected to provide care are positioned as resilient, flexible, and endlessly available (Tronto, 1993; Ahmed, 2017). Ethnic Studies scholars similarly name how institutions rely on marginalized subjects to absorb harm in the name of harmony, inclusion, or progress, while rendering that labor invisible (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 2002).
In librarianship, this dynamic is frequently reframed as collegiality: a professional virtue that, in practice, regulates dissent, tone, and ethical insistence.
This piece examines that contradiction through a reflective–theoretical lens. Drawing on feminist, abolitionist, and Ethnic Studies frameworks, and grounded in lived relational experience, I argue that ethical refusal is not disengagement from librarianship but a form of professional care. It is one that resists extraction, self-erasure, and moral injury while insisting that care must include the conditions that make ethical practice possible.
Marcie and Peebles: Two Registers of Care
Marcie and Peebles are my cats. Naming this matters.
Marcie taught me that care does not require self-abandonment. Through her presence, routines, and insistence on proximity without demand, she modeled a form of care that was principled, defined, and steady. Care that remained relational without becoming consumptive. Her companionship clarified for me that ethical life is not synonymous with endurance or sacrifice, but with discernment—knowing when presence sustains and when it becomes consumptive and insatiable in its extractiveness.
After her death, that ethic did not disappear. It changed registers, shifting from something I could articulate into something I experienced bodily, now from solely within me, before it was recognizable as ethics at all.
Peebles stayed with me through the night. Not as comfort framed for effect, not as intervention, not as a response to a request. Her care was bodily, immediate, and untheorized. She did not ask me to narrate my grief, to make meaning of it, or to regulate it for acceptability. She simply stayed.
Together, Marcie and Peebles illuminate two registers of care that are rarely held together in professional ethics discourse:
- Articulated care, which can be named, defended, and refused when necessary.
- Somatic care, which sustains the conditions for survival without explanation or demand.
Ethnic Studies scholarship has long insisted that knowledge is relational, embodied, and forged in conditions of survival rather than abstraction (Anzaldúa, 1987; Vizenor, 2008). Within this tradition, presence, attunement, and staying are recognized as ways of knowing. Care offered by nonhuman companions is often dismissed as sentimental or irrelevant to professional ethics, yet Peebles’ staying exemplifies precisely this epistemology: care as presence that precedes utterance and articulation, and makes reflection possible.1
Feminist, Abolitionist, and Ethnic Studies Ethics of Care
Feminist ethics of care rejects the fiction of the autonomous moral subject and challenges the assumption that ethical action can be abstracted from relationships, bodies, and power (Held, 2006). Importantly, feminist scholars warn that care becomes unethical when it demands self-erasure from those positioned to provide it, particularly within feminized professions (Ahmed, 2017).
Ethnic Studies deepens this analysis by naming refusal as a form of survival and integrity rather than withdrawal. Refusal, in this tradition, is not opposition for its own sake, but a refusal to be incorporated into systems that require one’s diminishment (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Care, from this perspective, is inseparable from dignity.
Abolitionist care frameworks sharpen these insights further by insisting that care cannot coexist with systems that normalize harm, privatize suffering, and discipline those who name injustice (Davis, 2003; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018).
Peebles’ care exemplifies non-carceral, non-extractive care. She does not surveil, correct, evaluate, or redirect. She does not demand productivity, coherence, or institutional legibility. Her presence is unconditional and non-instrumental.
Marcie’s articulated ethic, paired with Peebles’ staying, offers a composite ethics of care that is relational but defined and bounded, present but non-extractive, sustaining without being disciplinary. This composite stands in direct tension with how care is operationalized in LIS institutions.
Collegiality as Discipline in Librarianship
Within librarianship, collegiality is often framed as a professional virtue associated with collaboration, shared governance, and mutual respect. In practice, collegiality frequently functions as a regulatory norm: one that disciplines dissent, flattens ethical urgency, and rewards silence (Drabinski, 2014).
Ethnic Studies scholarship names this dynamic as a demand for accommodation: a requirement that marginalized actors smooth over conflict in order to remain legible within dominant institutions (Anzaldúa, 1987). In librarianship, collegiality often operates in precisely this way.
In the institutional frame of practice, collegiality asks:
- Are you agreeable?
- Are you maintaining harmony?
- Are you making things easier?
In stark contrast, care asks:
- Are people protected?
- Is harm interrupted?
- Can someone remain whole?
Ethnic Studies scholarship names this dynamic as a demand for accommodation: a requirement that marginalized actors smooth over conflict in order to remain legible within dominant institutions (Anzaldúa, 1987). In librarianship, collegiality often operates in precisely this way.
Peebles offers a counter-model. She does not withdraw when discomfort in me arises. She does not require my emotional regulation to remain near. Her presence clarifies what collegiality, as rendered by institutions, is not—and what librarianship often fails to provide.
The differences are deeply meaningful. This piece does not offer an alternative model of collegiality. Instead, it insists that naming the harm done in the name of collegiality is itself an ethical intervention.
Ethical Refusal as Professional Practice
Within LIS institutions, refusal is frequently misread as negativity, selfishness, inflexibility, or lack of team spirit. Feminist and Ethnic Studies traditions insist on a different interpretation: refusal can be a practice of care, survival, and integrity (Ahmed, 2017; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Taken further, ethical refusal can be rendered as a legitimate professional practice and as a significant contribution to how care is theorized and enacted in LIS institutions.
Ethical refusal names a boundary:
- I will not consent to being the site where institutional harm is metabolized.
- I will not translate injury into collegial language to preserve organizational comfort.
- I will not mistake silence for professionalism.
In institutional contexts, legibility often names not clarity but acceptability—what can be recognized and absorbed without disruption, and what must be smoothed, translated, or silenced to remain professionally acceptable. Ethical refusal names a boundary that does not separate library workers from librarianship. Instead, it asserts a position from within. By acknowledging and naming harms within our institutions and the profession, we adhere closer to our articulated professional values and embody them with faithfulness.
Like Peebles’ staying, ethical refusal remains present without consenting to extraction. It is a way of practicing librarianship that refuses false collegiality in order to defend relational accountability, pedagogical integrity, and moral clarity.
Care as Infrastructure, Not Disposition
Librarianship often treats care as a personal disposition—something ethical individuals provide despite institutional constraints. Feminist and Ethnic Studies scholars alike caution that this framing obscures structural responsibility by locating care in individual character rather than in environmental conditions (Tronto, 1993; Delgado Bernal, 2002). Framing care as disposition allows institutions to praise care while refusing accountability for the environments that make care possible or impossible.
Care is infrastructural. It requires time, continuity, proximity, and shared risk—not as individual virtues, but as conditions that must be materially sustained and collectively protected. When these conditions are absent, care does not fail because individuals are insufficiently ethical. It fails because institutions have been designed to fragment responsibility and privatize harm.
Institutions that fragment time, professionalize distance, and privatize suffering cannot meaningfully claim care. They can only request resilience, asking individuals to absorb what structures cannot–or will not–hold.
Peebles offers what institutions cannot—or will not—design for: staying without evaluation, presence without documentation, care without conditions. Her care exposes not a personal virtue gap, but an institutional design failure: the absence of structures that allow care to remain without becoming extractive.
Conclusion: Staying Is the Work
Marcie articulated the ethic. Peebles sustains the conditions under which that ethic can live.
That they are cats does not diminish the argument. It clarifies it. Their care is not professionalized, instrumentalized, or contingent on performance. It exposes the hollowness of institutional claims to care that cannot—or will not—stay.
Ethical refusal is how librarians protect the possibility of care within institutions that too often ask for it while withholding it.
Librarianship does not need more care language. It needs care that remains without consuming the self who offers it.
She is gone, but she used to be mine.
~ Sara Bareilles, 2016
References
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.
Delgado Bernal, D. (2002). Critical race theory, Latino critical theory, and critical raced-gendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126.
Drabinski, E. (2014). Toward a kairos of library instruction. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 40(5), 480–485.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.
Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry [Research note]. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), Article N17.
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–247). SAGE Publications.
Vizenor, G. R. (Ed.). (2008). Survivance: Narratives of Native presence. University of Nebraska Press
- On nonhuman relational ethics: Feminist, Indigenous, and Ethnic Studies scholars have long challenged human-exceptionalist ethics that treat nonhuman relationships as sentiment rather than knowledge. Relational epistemologies emphasize that care, attunement, and survival are often learned through multispecies relations, particularly in contexts where institutional care is absent or harmful (Haraway, 2008; TallBear, 2014). Naming Marcie and Peebles as ethical teachers is therefore not metaphorical but epistemic. Their care constitutes a legitimate site of ethical knowledge production. ↩︎