Free Library: Our Everyday Forms
Here are all the articles I’m reading and all my notes on them.
Dear Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans Person of Color,
Free Libraries are important to me because academia and universities are built to produce knowledge. And it’s kept out of the average person’s reach. Kept out physically, like in the walls of a university. In terms of language, like the way articles are written. Socially, like how Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans Person of Color continue to be ‘minorities’ in those spaces.
Academia, and the universities that make it up, is a corporate institution with individuals who have had access to bachelors’ degrees, masters’ degrees, and finally, doctoral degrees. Each of us do years of research to an academic standard regulated by an ethics committee at each university and sometimes by an examination process. Researchers then usually publish articles of their findings in private publications. It’s not standard practice for those private publications to pay the authors for their years of work, their findings, or their writing. Those findings might be medical findings that give clinicians new medicine or methods and tools to deliver care. Those findings might be anthropological, about people, that influences how people are taught and treated. Those findings might be technological and affect all parts of our lives. Those findings come in thousands and thousands of more forms.
All of this knowledge and ideas sits on private websites that require the general public and even institutions to pay hundreds of dollars for the knowledge and ideas. Or it sits in university libraries that require student or staff log-in to access it. Even if you do have access to university libraries, to get physical copies of things you need to go on campus then go into the building, you need to show valid I.D. to an security officer, and know how to navigate the university space. Being able to take each of these steps requires an extreme amount of privilege that’s not accessible to the average person. This is not an accident. It is a designed process that dictates who gets to see and work with this huge body of knowledge that is academia and benefit from it financially. I benefit from being part of this institution, and I don’t want to blindly participate in this practice. I’d love to be able to take what I benefit and leave it open for anyone to take.
That is why this post exists. What’s below is an extremely simple way that I’m attempting to break that academic practice. By simple, I don’t mean insignificant, but to point out that it ain’t that hard. It took me half an hour to set up and write this.
📚 📘 Free Library: Our Everyday Forms 📖 📒
This google drive folder is where you can access all the pdfs of the things I’m reading.
I’m always updating it with new stuff, so you can check back once a month and there’ll be new stuff in there. In the folder, you can also find the google spreadsheet DIATTA_Notes on Literature for a summary.
They include stuff about…
home
interiority
reflective, self-critical writing process (‘reflexivity’, ‘critical autoethnography’)
diasporic identities
inter-generational identifications
gendered practices
mis(sed)representations
authentic black aesthetic
decolonizing
invisible
non-verbal
suppression
oppression
cultural hegemony
patriarchy
housing
the oppressor
inter-generational
migrant aesthetics
material culture in the home
materialize
social construction
process of image making
counter-hegemonic world of images
struggle over and control over images
deinstitutionalized practice
importance of image (public and private)
process of decolonization
function of materializing
white gaze
significance of the invisible
recorded, documented
visual politics
If you don’t know about it already, and you have specific essays and papers and topics you want to learn more about, check out this facebook group, Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access. It’s a gem, and people are really active and responsive on there.
