Within: Portals and Walls

Positionality: Refusal, Risk, and the Field Within a Field

This project is written from inside the institution it analyzes.

I am an academic librarian and doctoral student researcher studying governance, ethical care, academic librarianship, and institutional life in higher education. I work within a field within a field: library and information science situated inside the broader political economy of the university. My professional role both informs and is shaped by the very structures this project examines.

This is not a neutral vantage point.

My training moves across library and information science, ethnic studies, feminist positions, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology — each of which is itself internally contested terrain. It is important to note that none of these fields are singular or settled. Each contains methodological disagreements, political fractures, and competing epistemologies. I do not treat them as stable intellectual blocs, nor do I claim to represent them in total.

What I draw from them are tendencies and lineages that have shaped how I read institutions and understand my life within them.

Within sectors of LIS, professional discourse has often leaned toward procedural clarity, documentary authority, and the aspiration to neutrality, even as critical traditions within the field complicate and resist those leanings. Ethnic studies and cultural studies, in many of their formations, foreground racialization, power, and the production of consent, while also debating their own methods and commitments. Cultural anthropology has long wrestled with reflexivity, representation, and the politics of speaking from within.

This project does not resolve those tensions. It inhabits them.

Within: Portals and Walls approaches governance not as abstract policy but as lived friction. As the site where professional norms, racialized mandates, institutional consent, and care asymmetries converge and oftentimes collide. I read documents as sedimented power without assuming they are always coherent. I treat discourse as productive without presuming total control. I understand consent as structured and negotiated, not simply freely chosen or wholly determined. I attend to how institutional alignment is felt in the body — as safety, strain, silence, or refusal.

Writing from within carries risk.

Institutional critique can be interpreted as disloyalty. Reflexive positioning can be dismissed as anecdotal or self-indulgent. Naming racialized governance friction can be reframed as interpersonal disagreement. These interpretations are themselves part of the field of power this project analyzes.

Refusal, here, is neither purity nor exit. It is methodological and ethical. A refusal to flatten contested terrain into consensus. A refusal to treat governance as neutral or inevitable. A refusal to amputate intellectual inheritances for the sake of disciplinary comfort. A refusal to deny one’s own implication in the structures under study.

Rather than claiming a position outside the institution or above the field, I write from within it: as a scholar-practitioner who reads the institution while participating in its reproduction. This is not a stance of mastery. It is a stance of situated engagement.

The voice in these pages reflects an integration long in the making. It is definitely not a unified totality, but a self no longer divided by disciplinary permission.

This positionality forms part of a broader commitment to staying with complexity, practicing refusal where necessary, and seeking forms of aliveness that do not depend on simplification.