Embracing Place and Naming Placelessness in Librarianship

by Nick Szydlowski

Introduction

Over the past decade, a number of librarians have published calls for libraries to re-localize.¹ Often rooted theoretically in movements for sustainable libraries, and for sustainability more generally, these arguments engage the question of how librarians and libraries can cultivate a sense of place in order to counter broader currents that reduce place to mere location, and which treat places as essentially interchangeable, as though one place is as good as another. Viewed through the lens of environmental crisis, care for place, in the form of re-localizing, can be seen as a counter to powerful actors who appear content to flatten the rich diversity of our planet into a global marketplace.

Amy Brunvand makes a particularly compelling case for the idea of re-localizing the library. She contrasts placeless professional approaches that cast libraries as “portals to a globalized and commercialized online knowledge system” with practices focused on place and locality, including “movements within librarianship that place importance on community resilience, cultural diversity and sustainability.”² Reflecting her commitment to sustainable librarianship, Brunvand situates the question of place, placelessness, and re-localization within the theoretical and historical framework of the Anthropocene. However, discourses of place and placelessness in other academic fields, particularly those in the humanities and those that apply humanities methods in an interdisciplinary context, offer other temporal and theoretical framings for the question of place and placelessness that have the potential to enrich discussions of these topics within librarianship. Scholarship in fields including urban studies, philosophy, Native American studies, and postcolonial studies can help us to situate the question of place in a broader historical context, before the Anthropocene. Scholars in these fields locate the emergence of placelessness in the West much earlier, in currents such as modernism, the Enlightenment, and even the spread of Christianity.

Engaging with concepts of place and placelessness developed in these fields may lead to the conclusion that localizing or re-localizing the library may require or perhaps facilitate a deeper engagement with the philosophical assumptions that shape the field, such as the commitment of libraries to neutrality and the rooting of library values and practices in the European Enlightenment.³ This essay attempts to connect the emerging discourse of re-localizing, with its focus on sustainability, with conversations about place and placelessness in other academic disciplines in order to further explore what it might mean for libraries to re-localize.

More specifically, considering what it would mean for libraries to adopt an ethos of care for place, rather than one of placelessness, requires us to draw on the genealogy of thinking about place in humanities disciplines. The relationship between information, knowledge, and ideas on the one hand, and place on the other, is a fundamentally humanistic question. It engages with core concerns and fundamental insights of the humanities as a whole, and of individual humanities disciplines, including the insight that ideas and concepts originate in specific places and communities, and the insight that subjective modes of communication and experience such as narrative have an important role to play in understanding the way human knowledge is created, experienced, and shared. In order for library and information studies (LIS) to gain a better understanding of the role of place in libraries and in information more broadly, we must adopt humanities methods and turn to scholarship in the humanities that addresses these questions. Moreover, the unique role of LIS as a meta-discipline that concerns itself with information created within other domains of knowledge, including other academic disciplines, opens a door for librarians and LIS researchers to develop methods that bridge disciplines within the humanities to address core questions about the very human endeavor of information seeking and knowledge production.

The conception of LIS as a meta-discipline is developed most completely in the work of Marcia J. Bates, who identifies meta-disciplines as those that address “knowledge in all the conventional fields on the academic spectrum, but [do] so from a particular orientation or position that is needed to accomplish the work and the theorising of its area.”⁴ Citing Bates, Rong Tang et al. write that “the field of information is a meta-field that cuts across conventional academic disciplines, and its boundary can be configured through practices of cross- and inter-disciplinary engagement with other disciplines.”⁵ Tang’s description of the field as one whose boundaries are established and possibly changed through interdisciplinary engagement underscores the generative possibilities of engaging with humanities research in an LIS context.

In addressing the specific question of the relationship between information and place, humanities disciplines provide theoretical grounding that is both valuable and highly varied. Trying to understand the relationship between information and place relying solely on frameworks derived from the social sciences and without turning to the humanities would be like entering a fight with one hand, or perhaps both hands, tied behind our backs. It is past time for LIS to take its role as a structurally interdisciplinary meta-discipline more seriously, and to engage with scholarship and insights from the humanities that address core issues in the field.

Remembering Place

It has often been observed that place is an elusive concept, especially in Western world views and philosophies.⁶ Place cannot be reduced to its precise coordinates like location, or even defined borders, like a country or city. A sense of place may be subjective, and felt or intuited as much as it is known. As an example, researchers studying the boundaries of urban neighborhoods find discrepancies between how different participants draw the lines between different parts of their cities.⁷

Despite its purported slipperiness, the concept of place has been a subject of academic research in a variety of fields, including philosophy, architecture and urban planning, and postcolonial theory. Within LIS, discussions of place are rare, and the relationship between place and information remains undertheorized. One challenge in advancing ideas about place in LIS is that LIS literature is more likely to adopt an ethos of placelessness, seeking to establish librarianship as a profession whose best practices are absolute and standardized, and not contingent on the subjectivity and specificity of place. While many LIS articles report on local projects and practices, our standard of scholarity dictates that these projects be extrapolated to other contexts as lessons or new recommendations. We reward depicting practice as portable and universal, and rarely focus the attention of the field on projects that are deeply rooted in their local context. In the broader profession, placelessness is an unspoken part of our professional standard.

It is worth pausing to distinguish between different meanings of the term “place.” LIS has produced an active scholarly conversation on the topic of “library as place.”⁸ However, this literature is, with few exceptions, focused on the physical buildings in which library services are delivered, and the construction of “library as place” is deployed in implicit and often explicit contrast with its antithesis, “library as digital platform.” For example, in introducing the volume Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space, Kathlin Smith frames the question of library as place as fundamentally related to “the role of the library in the digital age,” asking “what is the role of a library when it no longer needs to be a warehouse of books and when users can obtain information without setting foot in its doors?”⁹ In discussing online information, placelessness is evoked without being explicitly named, using phrases like “without setting foot,” but the possibility that the physical library may itself reflect an ethos of placelessness is not entertained. Due to its focus on the ways the physical library contrasts with and is disrupted by the digital information environment, the literature of “library as place” cannot provide a complete consideration of the ways libraries and information relate, or might relate to places beyond themselves, such as cities, towns, regions, or neighborhoods. While the impact of technology on the physical spaces of libraries is an important topic, the relationship of libraries to place and placelessness presents a different, largely unexamined set of questions.

These questions are critical because, despite the profession’s commitment to an ethos of placelessness, librarianship remains a stubbornly local and place-bound activity. While there are many exceptions, the vast majority of libraries and librarians do their work in a specific place, for the people who inhabit that place. The attention and care that library workers bring to the local is something we do at times celebrate, especially within individual libraries, but both the academic theory and the financial structures of the field reward work and workers that can easily be transplanted from one library to another.

Similarly, the creation of information—writing, researching, analyzing, synthesizing—has a persistent relationship to place that may be obscured through the interfaces that we construct. The way we organize information, whether online or in the stacks, can flatten this spatial aspect of information in favor of more rationalized and easily searched points of access. While contemporary large language models provide a particularly dramatic example of the ways information and ideas can be radically decontextualized, generative AI is only the latest in a series of technologies that tend to obscure the stubbornly place-bound nature of information, in the pursuit of an ideal or illusion of placelessness.

Placelessness

In order to understand what it might mean to devote more care and attention to place, it is helpful to first explore the concept of placelessness. In particular, looking at how placelessness emerges and evolves as it appears in a few different contexts is one way to enrich our understanding of the role of place in information. Placelessness is not just a carelessness or lack of attention to place; instead, each form of placelessness elevates other values and goals over the concerns of place.

Placelessness in Geography and Urban Planning

In the context of geography and urban planning, Edward Relph observed in Place and Placelessness (1976) that “placelessness is an attitude… which is becoming increasingly dominant,” and as a result, “it is less and less possible to have a deeply felt sense of a place or to create places authentically.”¹⁰ Relph’s focus is on a “self-conscious and deliberate” inauthenticity that he argues animates public and social planning in the modernist period.¹¹ In this environment, “objects are manipulated for the public interest and decisions are taken in a world of assumed, homogeneous space and time.”¹² For Relph and many subsequent thinkers on place, placelessness can be understood as an orientation to the world that embraces inauthenticity in pursuit of technique, a useful category developed in the work of Jacques Ellul.¹³ Relph defines technique as “an overriding concern with functional efficiency, objective organisation, and manipulative planning.”¹⁴ In this context, the practitioner “subsumes their individuality and that of others to a set of procedures which are determined by the technical nature of social engineering and planning.”¹⁵ Relph is careful to argue that this inauthenticity is not inherently worse or better than authenticity, but that its goals and results are quite different.

Technique is a powerful concept to import into librarianship, because it so precisely names the prevailing attitude of the profession. Our reliance on rationality, on procedure and policy, and on an impersonal ethic of neutrality all speak to the centrality of technique to library practice. Relph describes landscapes shaped by technique as “ordered, sometimes blatantly and rigidly ordered, with the lines of good sense adhered to without deviation. It is usually a landscape that has no serious concern with locality and eliminates any traces of its predecessors.”¹⁶ However, the placeless attitude, with its focus on technique, is not without its own attractive qualities. For Relph, technique and planning aim to serve what is framed as the public interest, which is expressed in abstract, typically economic terms, and strongly associated with modernist ideals of architecture and design, producing a landscape that, for Relph, expresses “the myths of reason, of the ideal past and the ideal future, of progress and permissiveness, of individual freedom and material comfort.”¹⁷ The risk of this inauthenticity, though, is that its rational abstractions and shared myths are “divorced from places as we know and experience them in our everyday lives, and quite casually ignor[e] or obliterat[e] them.”¹⁸

While this risk may seem more immediate in the realm of architecture and planning than in libraries and information, it is worth asking if the same framing might apply in our context. How might a librarianship overly focused on technique inflect users’ everyday experiences of reading, learning and research? As a simple example, consider the way the experience of browsing the stacks in an academic library is influenced by design decisions that project objectivity, even in areas shaped by subjective decisions and structures. Picture the labels found on the book stacks at an academic library. In my own experience, these labels contain the call number range of the particular set of shelves, and perhaps a range number, as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. A typical library call number range.

The presentation of the call numbers suggests reason and objectivity. The label itself is legible to some librarians and perhaps to a few experienced researchers, but to everyone else it may as well be a barcode or some other machine-readable format. What if the labels included a few words to capture the contents of the range? How would that change the character of the library, or the experience of researchers? One change might be that these text descriptions would bring subjectivity, and perhaps even eccentricity, into the context of the library stacks. While some ranges would be easy to describe, others might challenge the creativity of the employees charged with creating the descriptions for heterogenous materials.

While we might imagine labels that bring some joy or lightness to the experience of browsing, or that use language designed to be easily understood by users of a specific library, undermining the presentation of objectivity may have other implications in this context. Call numbers are not, of course, merely codes that indicate the physical location of an item, but instead reflect systems of subject classification—systems that encode power relationships through the organization of information.¹⁹ While critical approaches to cataloging and metadata are increasingly widespread within libraries, in the example at hand, neither the subjectivity of classification nor the power relationships at play are legible in the dry, technocratic code of the call number range.²⁰ It may even offer an opportunity for some libraries to use the space of the stack end to surface these dynamics.

Rather than intervening in conversations about classification or making any kind of generalized recommendation for how libraries might improve the browsing experience, the purpose of this example is to demonstrate what it might mean to apply Relph’s critique of placelessness in the built environment to library spaces and services, and to imagine local changes that might foster a sense of place. Conceptions of placelessness developed in geography and urban studies can provide a way of reading the environments that libraries create, and becoming sensitive to the ways the design of a space, service, or website projects objectivity, neutrality, or placelessness. Analyzing and attending to these instances may be a first step on a path to re-localizing.

Placelessness in Philosophy, Intellectual History, and Native American Studies

While Relph associates placelessness with a modernist orientation that dates to the twentieth century, Edward S. Casey’s The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History locates the evolution of placelessness much earlier.²¹ In this comprehensive account of philosophical discourses on place in the Western tradition, Casey outlines the development, between approximately 400 BC and 1800 AD, of an orientation focused on the universal and on a conception of space as both universal and infinite. For Casey, this orientation largely supplanted earlier perspectives focused on place, and on the importance of local knowledge and customs. Importantly, this new placelessness is not contained in a single philosophical or institutional context, but forms a bridge between Christian theology and the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment:

The colonizing tendency of Christianity is echoed in the attempts of Galilean, Cartesian, and Newtonian physics to appropriate whole realms formerly consigned to alchemy and “natural philosophy,” not to mention local custom and history. In both instances, the power of place, uncontested in the ancient world (and still potently present in medieval times), was put in abeyance—indeed, often literally abolished, and with as much relentless force as that with which native peoples were subjected to Christian indoctrination.²²

Casey draws an explicit link between Christian theology and Enlightenment physics, and demonstrates that link in particular through the writings of the philosopher Henry More, an important influence on Isaac Newton, who posited both space and God as “infinitely extended albeit incorporeal substances.”²³ Casey argues that, at least in its relationship to place, physics builds on, rather than contradicts, Christian theology. Here the focus on place calls into question portrayals of the European Enlightenment as a rejection of Christian dogma, perhaps most famously embodied in Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. For Casey, the development of placelessness is a shared project of the Enlightenment and European Christianity.

The connection Casey draws between placelessness and colonialism is equally striking, and his work benefits from being read in conversation with other recent scholarship that attempts to reshape narratives of intellectual history in general and the Enlightenment in particular. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity also hinges on our imagination of the Enlightenment and in particular its relationship to colonialism.²⁴ A key element in their argument is what they call the Indigenous critique of European culture, a clearly articulated intellectual current, expressed by thinkers and intellectuals indigenous to the Americas in response to contact with Europeans. One expression of this critique comes through the thought of the Wendat leader Kandiaronk, whose ideas were captured in a widely read series of debates published by French aristocrat Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan.²⁵ Graeber and Wengrow argue that the Indigenous critique plays an essential and overlooked role in introducing concern with equality and freedom into the European discourse on politics and the state.²⁶ In particular, they trace the influence of this critique on the work of Rousseau and on the French and American revolutions, and argue that “Europeans learned from Native Americans about the connection between reasoned debate, personal freedoms and the refusal of arbitrary power.”²⁷

In making these arguments, Graeber and Wengrow build on the work of Donald A. Grinde Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen, who documented the direct influence of Iroquois forms of government on the drafting of the United States Constitution. Grinde and Johansson focus primarily on the intellectual formation of the United States, but they argue more broadly that “during the Enlightenment, Europe took new knowledge about the ordering of human affairs from all over the world,” but especially from North America.²⁸ They contend that “in essence, American democracy is a synthesis of Native American and European political theories.”²⁹ In presenting their evidence, they underscore that this synthesis was widely understood and remarked upon at the time, and only came to be obscured in later, more Euro-centric narratives.

This story of Native American influence on Western thought is a powerful illustration of what can be gained by approaching information and knowledge with a sensitivity to place. Graeber and Wengrow catalog several forms in which the Indigenous critique was published and widely read in Europe, including accounts of colonial missionaries and fictionalized accounts of the responses that newcomers from America might have when first encountering European society. However, the fact that these works were in most cases credited to European authors and published through European modes of information sharing continues to complicate the claim that the underlying ideas contained in the Indigenous critique originated in the Americas. In questioning Graeber and Wengrow’s reliance on these sources, Robbie Richardson asks the key question about the statements attributed to Kandiaronk: “Do these texts truly grant access to Indigenous thought?”³⁰ From a librarian’s point of view, the difficulty—and perhaps the impossibility—of answering this question, of trying to understand which resources or texts might reliably represent historical Indigenous perspectives and which are merely the projections of Europeans, demonstrates an example of an information environment that has failed to accurately or reliably record the sources of ideas.

However, the concept of the Indigenous critique need not rest solely on the ideas that Graeber and Wengrow attribute to Kandiaronk. Richardson himself is “sympathetic to the claim that Indigenous people produced one of the key conceptual shifts in the European Enlightenment,” and the work of Grinde and Johansen, focusing on the intellectual foundations of the United States government rather than the Enlightenment more generally, makes similar claims on the basis of different historical sources.³¹ Still, claims like the Indigenous critique, which address not just the contents of specific texts but the origins of ideas and intellectual currents, must rely on an information environment that preserves those origins. When considering our current information environment, the risk seems even more severe that ideas that originated in specific places and communities may quickly be carried away from their places of origin, with the attendant loss of both attribution and surrounding intellectual context.

Returning to Casey, is there a way to reconcile these two views of the Enlightenment, in particular with regard to their treatment of place and placelessness? For Casey, the elevation of space and universality over place and specificity is a key marker of this period in the intellectual history of Europe. He draws connections between colonial expansion and the imaginary of the infinite and the unbounded. This orientation may help make sense of the fate of the Indigenous critique, and the ease with which the ideas it contained slipped free of their origin in a particular place—the northeast corner of the Americas—and came to be associated with more abstract and universalist expressions. In this telling, the Indigenous critique emerges as a set of organic observations, rooted not just in a single culture, but in a specific encounter or juxtaposition. Yet that context is obscured, as the critique is incorporated into political theories that imagine the human condition to be universal, rather than specific and place-bound. It is placelessness that removes the Native American origins of this critique and allows us to imagine it as a European philosophy.

Within library science, the Enlightenment and its meaning for libraries has become a site of some contestation. Wayne Bivens-Tatum writes that “the philosophical and political principles of the European Enlightenment provide the philosophical foundation of American academic and public libraries.”³² The Enlightenment lineage has been employed both as a critique and a defense of the intellectual foundations of library praxis. nina de jesus argues that the library’s inheritance from the Enlightenment is not primarily a set of ideas about individual liberty but an ideology that produced and enabled systemic oppression across the globe in the form of white supremacy and settler colonialism.³³ In contrast, John Wenzler relies on this lineage to argue for the continued value of neutrality as a value and ethical imperative for librarians.³⁴ Wenzler points out that both he and de jesus root their arguments in the idea that the genealogy of libraries runs back to the Enlightenment. But what happens to these arguments if we do take seriously the claim that Enlightenment ideas are not as purely European as we might have imagined them to be, but instead have their origins, at least in part, in Native American intellectual traditions? If we separate out the placeless, universalist thread of thought traced by Casey from the Indigenous critique outlined by Graeber and Wengrow, we might argue that de jesus and Wenzler are not, in fact, addressing the same set of intellectual currents when they appeal to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment that de jesus rejects corresponds more closely to the placeless thread that Casey connects to colonial expansion; the Enlightenment that Wenzler embraces may represent a different intellectual tradition, one that only emerged as a result of the encounter between Native Americans and Europeans. While arguments based in a genealogy of libraries are attractive, the ground beneath these arguments may be less stable and more contested than we imagine. On the other hand, any hypothetical attempt to apply Graeber and Wengrow’s work to defend or reimagine the Enlightenment origins of libraries must contend with the failure of libraries to preserve a definitive record of the historical Indigenous critique, and to ask what critical perspectives we may be failing to preserve in the present.

While Casey describes a European philosophical tradition moving away from a focus on place and toward a form of placelessness, scholars working in the field of Native American Studies may be more likely to posit placelessness as a quality of Western thought as a whole, and to emphasize the importance of place in indigenous cultures. Mishuana Goeman emphasizes the role of narrative in creating place, writing that “there are many examples of the ways in which Indigenous people make place through stories. Relationships between land and people are complex and nuanced and shaped from our personal interactions with our environment as well as through collected communal memories.”³⁵ Goeman contrasts this understanding of place with a set of other ways of understanding it: as personal property; as the site of political contestation and state sovereignty; and even as a mode of containment, as the essay contemplates the location of prisons on historical sites of confrontation.

Jay T. Johnson’s account of the concept of the storied landscape makes the relationship between place and knowledge production even more explicit. Johnson proposes two ways of understanding place: “first, place as a way of understanding, knowing, and learning about the world; and second as the embodied location of everyday struggle for meaning.”³⁶ Johnson argues that the storied landscape itself is a form of library, a repository for forms of knowledge recorded and transmitted through place-based narratives.

The notion of place as shaped and defined through narrative practice or as a library of knowledge shared through narratives about specific places is an emphatic example of what it can mean for an intellectual tradition to foreground place. It may be helpful to contrast this conception of place as inseparable from the process of creating and transmitting knowledge with a conception that reduces place to merely or simply a quantifiable location in space. This contrast may help to demonstrate why surfacing the question of place and placelessness may prove helpful in understanding and reconciling the different intellectual traditions that are present in libraries and in our information environment more broadly.

The question of how we understand the intellectual origins of major developments like the Enlightenment or the United States Constitution demonstrates at a macro level the stakes of place within information science and librarianship. In an imagined, idealized library, a user should not only be able to discover facts—the text of the Constitution—but also to access ideas and their origins or attributions. Of course, the origins of ideas will always be contested, but users should also be able to discover those sites of contestation and inform themselves on the state of intellectual contestation.

This is true not only of famous historical moments, but also of the myriad more granular topics of inquiry and contestation that make up the scope of human research and expression. Just as we can ask, “Where did the ideas behind the Enlightenment originate?” we can also ask about the context—not just the location, but the place—where any idea or perspective originates. If we accept the argument, made by Graeber and Weingrow, and before them by Grinde and Johansen, that the catalyst for the Enlightenment was the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, we arrive at a very different understanding of the Enlightenment itself. It was not necessarily a European phenomenon, but instead represented the importation of Native American ideas about freedom, hierarchy, and political organization into a European context in which they were novel and even revolutionary. From this perspective, we can start to see how place might shape information and ideas in more fundamental ways than we typically imagine. Could it be that it was only in a specific set of places and times—pockets of North America in the colonial era—that a mix of individuals and cultures created the conditions for the cultural synthesis that we now call the Enlightenment?

Importantly, the most powerful infrastructure for sharing these new perspectives primarily existed in European capitals. As a result, the Native American influence that these scholars insist on, and that they argue was clearly articulated and acknowledged at the time, has faded from the scholarly record. But there are other kinds of records and histories. Grinde and Johansen write that

American Indian people in their scholarship and tribal traditions … clearly perceive the history of North America as interactive and a product of synthesis. Print-oriented scholars who ignore this understanding of North American history tend to amplify the divisiveness, racism, violence, and segregation that developed out of the eventual domination of European culture.³⁷

The phrase “print-oriented scholars,” and its analog, “print-oriented librarians,” is key here. In this context, “print-oriented” does not mean attached to print books as opposed to digital ones, but attached to print, to text, to books and articles, as opposed to other ways of knowing and sharing information. Perhaps in turning attention to place, librarians will find that that the histories and cultures of many—perhaps most—places are poorly documented in the print record. We may even find that other forms—traditional forms like oral storytelling and community archiving and collecting, as well as emerging forms like mapping and digital storytelling³⁸—are more suited to creating and preserving information resources related to particular places and contexts. Within the profession, some of these practices may be framed as applications of emerging technologies, but perhaps we would be better served by considering the ways these practices apply much older approaches, such as the creation and preservation of knowledge through the relationship between stories and places.

Place in Postcolonial Studies

As we have already seen, foregrounding place can lead quickly to a concern for the history of specific places and ideas that in turn can lead to a consideration of major structures, like colonialism, that have shaped those histories. Within the field of postcolonial studies, however, some scholars note a strong suspicion of considerations of place, which may be attributed to “the strategic uses to which the notion of place has been put over the course of colonial history.”³⁹ In the postcolonial context, the human relationship to place is often shattered, sometimes repeatedly, as people are literally displaced, or as places are renamed and transformed through occupation. As Tosin Gbogi writes:

Places can oppress places, but since these exist in a natural world that is borderless, it is more appropriate to say that humans manipulate places and endow them with meanings that generate harmonious as well as antagonistic relations. The colonial production of place worked mostly in this way.⁴⁰

Understanding place as a primary means of ongoing colonial control and influence, as Gbogi does, complicates the project of developing and articulating one’s own relationship to place, and the expression and analysis of this ambivalence toward place is a critical and distinctive feature of postcolonial literature and of the scholarship that studies it.

In considering how, or if, postcolonial studies may be relevant to relationships to place in countries shaped by settler colonialism, it is important to balance criticisms levied against the field as insufficiently attuned to the structures of settler colonialism with the applicability of its insights to the experiences and orientations to place of individual library users.⁴¹ Taking the United States as an example, while the government and power structures of the country are more accurately described as setter colonial than postcolonial, the personal relationships of individuals—library users—to colonialism may take many forms. For example, a library user in the United States may locate themself as both a settler on Native American land and as a person displaced from their own ancestral home due to colonialism.⁴² Each of these perspectives may shape that user’s relationship to place. When considering possible orientations to place, the insights of postcolonial studies have applications for understanding individual orientations and experiences, even in settings where structures of colonial power persist.

In tracing scholarly approaches to place in the field of postcolonial studies, Eric Prieto distinguishes between a more space-oriented or universalist group, whom he refers to as neo-Marxists, and a place-oriented group, who he dubs culturalists. The neo-Marxists “describe a global space segmented into geopolitical territories but shaped increasingly by an abstract network of economic forces that is able to cross national borders with ease.⁴³ In contrast, the culturalists argue that “any totalizing theory claiming to have universal jurisdiction is bound to have unforeseen implications when transported from one cultural context to another.⁴⁴ Prieto credits the culturalist position with seeking a middle ground

between the extremes of ethnocentrism and universalism, in which the concept of place has a critical role to play. By emphasizing the ways in which geographical identities cut transversally through ethnic and social (class) affiliations, their work makes it possible to convey a sense of place as a base from which cultural differences can be preserved in the face of globalization and standardization without succumbing to the exclusionary and discriminatory temptations evoked by both the neo-Marxists and the universalizing humanists.⁴⁵

The postcolonial lens, then, complicates our conceptions of both place and placelessness by emphasizing the ways in which our relationships to these contexts are shaped by history and power. Placelessness may exist not only as a choice or orientation, as in the Western philosophical discourse discussed earlier, but as a condition imposed upon an individual or a people. However, by outlining the many relationships to place expressed through the postcolonial tradition, Prieto demonstrates that placelessness—an ambivalence toward or rejection of the experience of place as place—is not synonymous, or even necessarily correlated with statelessness or exile. George B. Handley captures this dynamic in an essay on the work of the poet Derek Walcott:

The problem is that the very locale of the postcolonial subject has in fact been determined by imperial powers. Therefore, the postcolonial subject is not only placed in a discontinuous relation to the imperatives of European colonialism and history, but is also placed in a problematic relation to land since land represents both the site of one’s emotional and cultural development and perhaps of one’s history of displacement and alienation.⁴⁶

For librarians in the Americas, engagement with place cannot be simple. Handley reminds us that what may appear to be

a moral crisis of placelessness can also be understood as a political crisis as well if we consider the displacement and murder of Native Americans, the violent transplantation of Africans, and the chaotic scattering of many Europeans, Asians, and others in New World history, factors that have all been more difficult to ignore in areas like the Caribbean.⁴⁷

By recentering discourse on places—like the Caribbean—where the impacts of colonialism are most immediately visible and least easily disguised, the postcolonial discourse on place forces us to notice the way our own locales, and our own histories, have been shaped by the same violent and chaotic forces.

In applying the insights of postcolonial scholarship to professional practice in our library, I often refer to the work of Roopika Risam, which encompasses postcolonial studies and digital humanities approaches. Risam writes that

digital humanities, as a field, can only be inclusive and its diversity can only thrive in an environment in which local specificity—the unique concerns that influence and define digital humanities at regional and national levels—is positioned at its center and its global dimensions are outlined through an assemblage of the local.⁴⁸

The orientation Risam suggests for digital humanities can also be applied to librarianship, with the implication that the profession can embrace the diversity of local practice and define itself not through the placeless lens of technique, standards, or best practices, but as an assemblage of locally specific approaches and concerns.

More broadly, however, the discourse on place that emerges from postcolonial studies complicates the relationship between place and placelessness by foregrounding experiences of violence, displacement, and exile that may introduce a specific mode of ambivalence around the concept of place. One expression of this perspective comes through explorations of postcolonial cosmopolitanism.⁴⁹ In a reading of the work of Frantz Fanon, Julian Go writes that “Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitan embraces and advocates a worldwide citizenship, a global humanity, in dialogue with the fact that European imperialism and its associated exploitations and dominations have so long repressed such humanity. It [is] in the spaces that colonialism left behind that [the] postcolonial cosmopolitan emerges.”⁵⁰ Postcolonial cosmopolitanism emerges quite literally from a different place, or set of places, than more widely discussed forms of cosmopolitanism that originate in Europe and parallel the intellectual currents of placelessness.

Synthesizing Place and Placelessness across Disciplines

Rather than helping us arrive at a single understanding of place and placelessness, examining the way these concepts play out in different academic disciplines and discourses can serve to illustrate the many resonances and potential meanings of place. As a core component of human experience, place cannot be made simple.

Table 1 presents a set of associations with place and placelessness as a step toward synthesizing the various insights and perspectives that different academic disciplines bring to the question of place and placelessness.

Table 1. Subjective Associations of Place and Placelessness across Disciplines

Seen in this way, a pattern begins to emerge that associates placelessness with the philosophical and ideological currents that undergirded European colonialism, along with later intellectual currents such as modernism and technological solutionism. However, work in postcolonial studies provides an important counter-pattern, especially through the concept of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. Seen through this lens, it may not be possible to recover a precolonial relationship to place. It may not be possible to separate place from its role as a physical site of colonial extraction.

Writing in a postcolonial context, many literary authors have turned to the figure of a precolonial Eden or paradise. Sharae Deckard finds that “throughout this literature, paradise begins as a geographical topos motivating European exploration and colonization, evolves into a myth justifying imperial discourse and praxis, and finally becomes an ironic motif responding to neo-colonialism and global capitalism.”⁵¹ In one way of understanding this construction, postcolonial subjects inhabit a fallen world, in which there is no hope of regaining a prelapsarian relationship to place. In this context, one’s relationship to place becomes more complex, perhaps layered in irony or marked by painful history.

Building on the idea that place can shape ideas and information, perhaps one way of reconciling these different positions is to consider the types of places, and by extension the perspectives, that are foregrounded by each of these disciplines. The different associations with place and placelessness that we see in Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies reflect different relationships to place produced by different localized historical experiences. If libraries are to effectively re-localize, we must consider that different library users will seek out or be open to different ways of relating to and engaging with place.

Here Bates’ conception of LIS as a meta-discipline is of particular importance.⁵² Librarians and LIS researchers do not necessarily need to consistently choose one particular disciplinary framing or set of associations when developing an understanding of how place shapes information. We do not necessarily need to choose, either as a field or as individuals, the framing of Indigenous studies over that of postcolonial studies or vice versa. We have the opportunity instead to frame each of these approaches as valid within their respective communities of practice, as different ways of developing and shaping knowledge on the concept of place. LIS scholarship may then serve, just as the library itself does, as a space where different disciplinary perspectives interface and exist beside one another. Michael Dudley writes that “as a meta-discipline, LIS can afford the scholar a catholic perspective on research problems external to librarianship itself, one potentially liberated from internecine debates and disciplinary conventions that might constrain other scholars.”⁵³ The meta-disciplinary perspective of LIS presents opportunities to productively synthesize and compare the perspectives of different fields on issues relevant to libraries and information. This meta-disciplinary perspective is as applicable to practice as it is to research, carrying the potential to support a highly localized approach to library practice. In engaging with place, some libraries may find a particular disciplinary approach to be more relevant in their context, and to the communities that they serve. A complete understanding of the ways people relate to place and the ways place may in turn inflect their experience of information cannot be captured by a single discipline or tradition, but both research and practice in LIS represent sites where the understandings of different disciplines can coexist in synthesis and contrast.

Libraries as Sites of Engagement with Place

While I would argue that the practice of librarianship is almost unavoidably engaged with place, discussions of place in librarianship tend to focus more narrowly on collecting and programming related to local history. Many library users wishing to build and engage with a sense of place may take an interest in local history, and some local history programs both within and outside of libraries explicitly address their impact on participants’ sense of place.⁵⁴ However, the concept of local history is one that may resonate in different ways for different library users. For community archives in particular, subjective impressions of places and communities may shift over time as “community archives users form and utilize their imaginaries both to continually define their communities, by negotiating and imagining elastic boundaries, and to anticipate future shifts in the boundaries of their communities.”⁵⁵ The question of community boundaries—of whose stories are included and whose excluded—is relevant not only for community archives organized within marginalized communities, but for all local history collections. The intertwined concerns—that North American archival collections fail to reflect the histories of marginalized communities and that they fail to reflect ordinary people in general—date back at least fifty years.⁵⁶

Local history, then, is a contested space in which multiple groups and points of view co-exist. From the perspective of the United States, this may reflect the reality of the Americas, shaped by colonialism, where both individual and group relationships to place can be complex and sometimes contradictory. In this context local history programs may benefit from considering the complex currents that shape the places they seek to document, or even imagining themselves as spaces in which conflicts and differences of perspective are permitted to surface. Moreover, for many individuals, their own relationship to place may be eccentric or personal, and therefore not reflected even at the margins of the space we call history.

Engagement with place is not synonymous with parochialism or nativism, and this is particularly true when multiple ways of thinking about place are cultivated. One reason to ground our work in this area in a wide range of scholarship, and in fields like Native American and postcolonial scholarship in particular, is to broaden our sense of the ways librarians and library users may relate to place. Our relationships to a particular place may be emphatic or ambivalent, new or deeply rooted, knowledgeable or naive, affectionate or critical. All of these possible orientations, though, differ categorically from the orientation of placelessness, which proposes that one place is as good as another, and that all of these relationships are merely sentimental distractions from a rational, technical approach to the work of libraries.

One way to think about localizing or re-localizing the library may be to imagine or reimagine libraries as sites that facilitate or encourage engagement with place. In order to support and cultivate the rich diversity of possible relationships to place, libraries and librarians would need to go about re-localizing in a way that supports authentic, varied and personal relationships to place. Here Relph is helpful in identifying inauthentic approaches to place, and in particular highlighting the style and attitude of kitsch, in which “the trivial is made significant and the significant is made trivial.”⁵⁷ While it is easy to identify kitsch in tourist gift shops and chamber of commerce advertising, libraries adopting a program of re-localization must be careful to avoid repeating familiar narratives that elevate superficial symbols of place above the subjective individual experience of place.

Perhaps, then, an important step in any shift toward a more place-oriented practice is individual reflection on one’s own relationship to place. This type of reflection may be particularly valuable for library workers who don’t typically consider their own relationship to place. In that spirit I would propose to situate this argument with a brief personal reflection. I have throughout my life experienced a deep connection with the place in which I was raised: the city of Boston, Massachusetts. As a young musician and aspiring writer, the city featured prominently in my creative work in songwriting and fiction, and in my own sense of my place in the world. Libraries played a significant part in developing my personal imaginary of Boston, with the exhibits at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library making a permanent impression on my sense of the city. Less romantically, my time as a preservation assistant in the MIT Libraries often found me hunched over damaged government documents from the urban renewal period, and details from those documents shaped my understanding of the city’s history and built environment.

Later, in my early forties, circumstances caused me to relocate, somewhat suddenly, to the Bay Area in California. Here I noticed something unexpected. The manner in which I relate to Boston seemed surprisingly transferable. That is to say, I found myself seeking out a relationship with my new place, and I gravitated toward the ways of relating to the place that I had absorbed in Boston. Here, too, I am drawn to learn more about the complex and violent history of the place where I find myself, and to try to use that sense of place to understand the things I see.

I share this reflection to underscore that relationship to place is not merely relationship to any specific place—to home, or the place one feels most connected to. There are other places as well—places or exile, of immigration, of convenience, of fascination. On an individual level, engagement with place entails the development of a rich internal and perhaps external vocabulary for one’s own relationship with the places one encounters. Even more powerfully, we can build on this vocabulary to better understand the relationships that others have to place, and to particular places.

Placelessness, on the other hand, favors a dulling of this internal sense, seeing it as a source of friction that slows the transmission of people, capital, or (most relevant for libraries) information, through uniform, decontextualized channels. It favors environments that flatten or caricature the distinctive cultures of places, erasing or simplifying their histories.

The way one develops a sense of place may be idiosyncratic, but it is also deeply cultural. As Casey, Johnson, and Goeman argue, the alienation from place that develops into the placelessness of our current era is deeply rooted in certain strains of Western and colonial philosophy and ideology.⁵⁸ Placelessness itself originates from a specific place. The same is true of other ideas, and of information in general.

Returning to Relph, whose work on place and placelessness formed our starting point, it is notable that he refuses to argue that an engagement with place is superior to placelessness. His work instead focuses on naming and differentiating these two phenomena. We may need to articulate, then, why placelessness is a particularly unproductive orientation for libraries. As a field, we have neglected to notice the extent to which libraries are sites where relationship to place is fostered and cultivated. Place is not only a subject, the topic of some subset of library resources. Relationship to place is a fundamental human capacity and one that—especially in areas like the Americas, which bear the scars of displacement and colonialism—requires cultivation. Fostering this capacity is a fundamental but unstated function of both public and academic libraries. An atmosphere of placelessness threatens our ability to serve this function.

More broadly, foregrounding place and placelessness in the professional and scholarly context of libraries has the potential to bridge theory and practice in a way that speaks directly to the material realities of librarianship. This framework provides an opportunity to build on critiques of neoliberal and authoritarian currents affecting the profession by arguing for the viability and value of practices rooted in the needs and cultures of specific places and user communities. It also creates possibilities for discourses of culture and lived experience that are more specific and more varied, avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism, tokenism, and kitsch.

Libraries already provide sites where users can develop and enrich their ability to relate to places—not only their current place, but any place they may remember or encounter. We do this through collections, of course, but also through active programming. What we rarely do is conceptualize our role in this process. We rarely think of a relationship to place as one of the human capacities we support. Naming this capacity also gives us an opportunity to approach it more thoughtfully, and to draw on the many fields of scholarship that address the ways people relate to places and the ways history and power shape those relationships.

Nor do we name placelessness in our field. Naming placelessness presents an opportunity as well, for with this vocabulary we may point out policies and practices that flatten the distinctiveness of our libraries and the user groups they serve. The discourse of placelessness is particularly urgent in our current technological environment. The increasing application of generative AI in information seeking contexts normalizes the practice of decontextualizing information. As knowledge and information created by human beings in specific locations and contexts is removed from physical space and encoded into the vector space employed by large language models, the connection between information and place is further obscured. While this is merely one of many salient critiques that may be leveled against AI, it illustrates the way our information environment may develop according to an ethos of placelessness. In discussing concepts like the Indigenous critique and postcolonial cosmopolitanism, we have seen concrete examples of how ideas emerge from specific places and contexts, and of how this connection between knowledge and place can change how an idea is received or understood. The practice of disconnecting knowledge not only from its place of origin, but from the physical source or document in which it appears is not a neutral one, but is instead part of the flattening, universalist ethos of placelessness.

Lastly, understanding the complex currents of place and placelessness requires the application of methods and knowledge from disciplines in the humanities that have a long history of engagement with these topics. The position of LIS as a meta-discipline provides a platform on which to engage with complex research in a way that resonates with the diverse perspectives that library users and information seekers bring to the experience of place.

Notes

• 1. See Amy Brunvand, “Re-Localizing the Library: Considerations for the Anthropocene,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.94; Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World (ALA Editions, 2018), 36–41, 71–76; Alex Crowley, “Proactive Public Libraries for Community Resilience and Ecological Sustainability” (master’s thesis, Queens College, City University of New York, 2021), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_etds/25; Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, “Local Supports Local,” Library Journal, July 11, 2016, https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/local-supports-local-sustainability; Amy Brunvand, “Re-Localizing the Academic Library: Comments on an Essay by Rebekkah Smith Aldrich,” American Library Association Sustainability Roundtable Blog (2016), https://www.ala.org/sustainrt/Re-LocalizingtheAcademicLibrary-Commentson-an-essay-by-RebekkahSmithAldrich.
• 2. Brunvand, “Re-Localizing the Library,” 2, 19.
• 3. See Wayne Bivens-Tatum, Libraries and the Enlightenment (Library Juice Press, 2014).
• 4. Marcia J. Bates, “The Information Professions: Knowledge, Memory, Heritage,” Information Research 20, no. 1 (March 2015): n.p., https://informationr.net/ir/20-1/paper655.html. See also Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 12 (1999): 1043–50.
• 5. Rong Tang et al., “Framing a Discussion on Paradigm Shift(s) in the Field of Information,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 72, no. 2 (2021): 256, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24404.
• 6. See, for example, Yi-Fu Tuan, “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” Geographical Review 65, no. 2 (1975): 165, https://doi.org/10.2307/213970.
• 7. Elizabeth Campbell, Julia R. Henly, Delbert S. Elliott, and Katherine Irwin, “Subjective Constructions of Neighborhood Boundaries: Lessons from a Qualitative Study of Four Neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban Affairs 31, no. 4 (2009): 486, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.2009.00450.x.
• 8. See, for example, Marika Kawamoto and Masanori Koizumi, “Library as Place: Conceptual Model for Public Libraries and Their Transition,” Journal of Documentation, 79, no. 2 (2023): 376–97, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2022-0046; Michael J. Khoo et al., “‘A Really Nice Spot’: Evaluating Place, Space, and Technology in Academic Libraries,” College and Research Libraries 77, no. 1 (2016): 51–70, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.1.51; Svanhild Aabø and Ragnar Audunson, “Use of Library Space and the Library as Place,” Library & Information Science Research 34, no. 2 (2012): 138–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2011.06.002; Abigail Ayres Van Slyck, “The Librarian and the Library: Why Place Matters,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 36, no. 4 (2001): 518–23, https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2001.0073.
• 9. Kathlin Smith, “Preface,” in Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2005), vii.
• 10. E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (Pion Limited, 1976), 80.
• 11. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 81.
• 12. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 81.
• 13. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 79-81.
• 14. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 81.
• 15. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 81.
• 16. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 125–26.
• 17. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 138.
• 18. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 89.
• 19. See Violet B. Fox and Tina Gross, “A Short History of the Long Tradition of Inclusive Cataloging—Critiques and Action,” in Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches, ed. Amber Billey, Elizabeth Nelson, & Rebecca Uhl (ALA Editions, 2024), 15–27; Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (2015): 677–702, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396.
• 20. Karen Snow and Beth Shoemaker, “Cataloging Ethics Definitions Revisited: Practitioner Perspectives Five Years Later,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 63, no. 8 (2025): 684–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2025.2562548.
• 21. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press, 2013), 124–29.
• 22. Casey, The Fate of Place, 77.
• 23. Casey, The Fate of Place, 150.
• 24. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), 44–59.
• 25. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument that Lahontan’s work captures the words and perspectives of Kandiaronk, and can be viewed as an authentic expression of his perspective, is a contentious thread of their argument. Discussion on this topic is well represented in Robbie Richardson, “The Indigenous Critique,” Journal18, July 18, 2023, https://www.journal18.org/meta/the-indigenous-critique-by-robbie-richardson; Luc Wodzicki, “Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” Cromohs 25 (2023): 210–14, https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-14216, p. 212; David A. Bell, “A Flawed History of Humanity,” Persuasion, November 19, 2021, https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity. For further reading on the reception of The Dawn of Everything, see Jonah Walters, “Chastening the Past,” Strange Matters, May 27, 2023, https://strangematters.coop/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow-review; Arjun Appadurai, “The Dawn of Everything?” Anthropology Today 38, no. 1 (2022): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12694; and Rachael King, “The Line of Development: Conjectural History and the Indigenous Critique,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 55, no. 1 (2026): 289–94, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2026.a985079.
• 26. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 48.
• 27. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 44.
• 28. Donald A. Grinde and Johansen, “Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy,” Native American Politics Series no. 3. (American Indian Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), xix.
• 29. Grinde and Johansen, “Exemplar of Liberty,” xxiv.
• 30. Richardson, “Indigenous Critique.”
• 31. Richardson, “Indigenous Critique”; Grinde and Johansen, “Exemplar of Liberty.”
• 32. Bivens-Tatum, Libraries and the Enlightenment, ix.
• 33. nina de jesus, “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, September 24, 2014, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-the-library-in-institutional-oppression.
• 34. John Wenzler, “Neutrality and Its Discontents: An Essay on the Ethics of Librarianship,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 19, no. 1 (2019): 64, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0004.
• 35. Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 24, https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v1i1.20.
• 36. Jay T. Johnson, “Place-Based Learning and Knowing: Critical Pedagogies Grounded in Indigeneity,” GeoJournal 77, no. 6 (2012): 830, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9379-1.
• 37. Grinde and Johansen, “Exemplar of Liberty,” 248.
• 38. Takayuki Suzuki and Andrew Dillon, “The Emergence of the Placial-Technical: Digital Placemaking as Information Practice.” Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 48, no. 2 (2025): 103, https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v48i2.23115.
• 39. Eric Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 139–52.
• 40. Tosin Gbogi, “Place and the Postcolonial Poetry of Nigeria,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 3 (2022): 296, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1999304.
• 41. See Jane Carey and Ben Silverstein, “Thinking with and beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories after the Postcolonial,” Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1719569.
• 42. For a compelling example in the Australian context see: Mythily Meher, “Displacing Place, Unstating Feminism (or: One Migrant Settler’s Quest for a Standing Place),” Australian Feminist Studies 34, no. 102 (2019): 454–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2019.1702872.
• 43. Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, 146.
• 44. Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, 148.
• 45. Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, 149.
• 46. George B. Handley, “A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7, no. 2 (2000): 9, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/7.2.1.
• 47. Handley, “A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott,” 9.
• 48. Roopika Risam, “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 359.
• 49. See Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Whither Europe?: Postcolonial versus Neocolonial Cosmopolitanism,” Interventions 18, no. 2 (2016) : 187–202, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1106964; Rihul Rao, “Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: Between Home and the World” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2007), https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2a2ffeda-1184-4bdb-a992-d2e751a4f442.
• 50. Julian Go, “Fanon’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” European Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 2 (2013), 221, https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431012462448.
• 51. Sharae Deckard, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden (Routledge, 2009), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203865170.
• 52. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” 1044.
• 53. Michael Dudley, “Liberating Knowledge at the Margins: Towards a Discursive-Transactional Research Paradigm in LIS,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 5 (2019; updated February 28, 2023): 4, https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v5.29905.
• 54. Caroline Hood and Reid, “Social Media as a Vehicle for User Engagement with Local History: A Case Study in the North East of Scotland,” Journal of Documentation 74, no. 4 (May 8, 2018): 759–60, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2017-0167.
• 55. Gracen Brilmyer, Joyce Gabiola, Jimmy Zavala, and Michelle Caswell, “Reciprocal Archival Imaginaries: The Shifting Boundaries of ‘Community’ in Community Archives,” Archivaria 88 (2019): 46, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13695.
• 56. Dominique Daniel, “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives,” The American Archivist 73, no. 1 (2010), 82, 102–4, http://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.k2837h27wv1201hv.
• 57. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 83.
• 58. Casey, The Fate of Place, 77; Johnson, “Place-Based Learning and Knowing,” 830; Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again,” 25, 30–31.

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