DLA

CRLD 2025 Winter Program

Seeing Ourselves as Workers: Exploring Burnout & Worker Solidarity in Academic Libraries

When: January 30, 2025 at 2:00pm
Where: Zoom

The combination of vocational awe and academic exceptionalism predisposes academic library workers to think of their work as something more than work. One effect of this combination is that academic library workers may become martyrs or surveillant colleagues who test each others’ commitment to the profession and to our users (Fobazi Ettarh refers to this process as a vocational purity test). As a result, we prime ourselves and each other for exploitation while eroding worker solidarity both within the library and across types of academic work, and this exploitation leads to academic librarian burnout. Organized labor provides opportunities to build worker solidarity, ensure adequate job resources for library workers, and build coalitions with colleagues beyond the library with possible effects for burnout and occupational health psychology more broadly.

Matthew Weirick Johnson is an Associate Librarian and the Director of Research & Instruction at the University of South Florida Libraries and a PhD student in Educational Measurement and Evaluation also at USF. They’re the editor of Training Library Instructors, a two-volume work that details examples of programs that teach LIS students and librarians how to teach. Their research on academic librarian burnout has been published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Library Administration, and Academic Librarian Burnout: Causes and Responses.

To register, please follow this link.