Corble, Alice Rose. 2019. the Death and Life of English Public Libraries: Infrastructural Practices and Value in a Time of Crisis
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Corble, Alice Rose. 2019. The Death and Life of English Public Libraries: Infrastructural practices and value in a time of crisis. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26145/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] The Death and Life of English Public Libraries: Infrastructural practices and value in a time of crisis Alice Rose Corble Goldsmiths College, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. in Sociology January 2019 1 I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where I have consulted the work of others this is always clearly stated. ………………………… Date: 25th January 2019 Alice Rose Corble 2 Acknowledgements This thesis argues that libraries are made of people above all else. I am therefore indebted to the many and diverse library people who have opened up their experiences and spaces to my ethnographic eyes and ears. I am especially grateful to my key research participants Gill Hart and Kathy Dunbar in New Cross, and John Dolan in Birmingham, who have not only connected me with wider networks of library respondents and practices, but also generously accommodated endless lines of curiosity and enquiry from me over the past few years and shared their knowledge, practices and values with honesty, integrity and good humour. These research relationships have furnished me with important intergenerational reflections on how knowledge is shared and produced – a journey which began with my traineeship at the Feminist Library in 2010, for which I am also grateful as it sparked the genesis of this thesis and an enduring commitment to making visible the politics and publics of knowledge-making. This thesis is also about crisis, and there have been times when different crises in my personal, student and professional life have greatly compromised my ability to continue the work of this project. I am grateful to the feminist friends and alliances I have formed and forged through some of these struggles, at Goldsmiths and beyond. Important thanks go to the Goldsmiths Sociology department for welcoming me from other disciplines and routes in to the PhD, and to Mariam Motamedi-Fraser and Nirmal Puwar for having faith and patience in my ability to make a contribution with this project through all its twists and turns. Alex Rhys-Taylor has been an invaluable addition to my supervisory team in the last eighteen months of the project and I feel lucky to have had a mix of advisory perspectives on my work. Bridget Ward, Postgraduate Research Officer, has been a remarkably caring presence throughout my thesis journey in the sociology department at Goldsmiths, as I know she has been to so many others. This highlights need to recognise the oft-invisible yet vital labour of administrative and pastoral infrastructures of provision in academia. Thank you to my lovely office mates and PhD student peers Miranda Armstrong, Valentina Alvarez Lopez, Ignacio Rivera Volosky and Sian Gouldstone for sharing the trials, tribulations and triumphs of PhD life together; to student and faculty members of the NYLON research group, which has taught me the vital importance of shared spaces of sociological knowledge-in-formation; and to Katherine Robinson for many valuable conversations about our common research interest in public libraries and for reading one of the final chapter drafts and offering insightful feedback. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my partner in life, love, and libraries Vanessa Farrier, whose unwavering support, incisive reader’s eyes, patience, pride and pragmatism have kept me sane and safe through the most difficult parts of this journey. 3 Abstract This thesis examines the changing identity, spaces and fortunes of English public libraries in the context of 21st-century austerity and neoliberal reform of local government services. It interrogates what we can understand the practices and values of public libraries to mean at a time when the very notions and forms of what is ‘public’ and what is ‘a library’ are up for grabs. Since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, public libraries developed with a mission to enable social change through providing free and equal access to learning resources and knowledge spaces for all. This thesis asks how far public libraries can maintain this foundational identity as institutional agents of social change, while simultaneously being forced to change their organisational forms in present conditions of crisis. It reveals what is getting both lost and gained through this double valency of change and articulates how reading library crises at the local level sheds light on a wider national condition of crisis. Based on multi-sited ethnography and interviews in London and Birmingham between 2013-2017, it examines what kinds of publics, values, and arguments for public value are produced and contested in these different library contexts. An analysis of the social and infrastructural relations between ‘local’ and ‘central’ forms of power and (counter)publics connects the case studies. A temporal skein also threads the cases together, using a conjunctural analysis approach to trace how historical moments of social and political change are embedded within emergent organisational and cultural transformations in the unfolding present. Scholarship on the practices of public libraries is scarce in sociology. This thesis bridges this gap and develops existing knowledge with a lively ethnographic imagination, addressing the urgent need to articulate and make visible the multi- dimensional value of these quickly-disappearing public infrastructures. By exposing the practices that make and un-make the public library, the thesis argues that the state of the country’s libraries can be read as a critical diagnostic barometer for the life and death of municipal England. It also argues that the public library’s future survival as an enabler of social change depends upon mobilising political conversations across sectors and academic disciplines with a view to bridging activist and professional practice. 4 Table of Contents Table of figures ........................................................................ 10 CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................ 13 Introduction ........................................................................... 13 1.0 What is a public library? ........................................................ 13 1.1 Public library crisis accounts: states of emergency ......................... 17 1.2 Research aims, questions and methods ....................................... 24 1.3 Analytical approach and rationale ............................................. 26 (i) Thinking library times conjuncturally and rhythmically ............. 28 (ii) Thinking library spaces and places relationally and temporally ..... 35 (iii) Thinking library publics and publicness figuratively and politically 38 (iv) Thinking library infrastructures through intersecting practices ..... 40 1.4 Structure of the thesis ........................................................... 44 CHAPTER TWO ....................................................................... 48 Reading between the lines of the public library: telling the time 2.0 Introduction ...................................................................... 48 2.1 Reading public libraries historically ........................................... 50 2.2 Sphering the public library ...................................................... 62 2.3 Millennial public library crises and struggles ............................. 69 A Beeching Moment ................................................................. 72 2.4 Conclusion ........................................................................ 79 CHAPTER THREE .................................................................... 81 Articulating multi-sited research: methodological mapping ......... 81 Preface: Time bridges ................................................................ 81 3.0 Introduction ...................................................................... 82 3.1 Entering and journeying through field ........................................ 83 5 3.2 Oblique relationality: ethnography at the interface ........................ 86 3.3 Articulating the multi-sited research field.................................... 88 3.4 Primary empirical sites and methods ......................................... 91 New Cross Learning (NXL) ........................................................ 93 Connecting sites through temporalities and ethics of enquiry .............. 101 Library of Birmingham (LoB) .................................................... 106 3.5 Conclusion ...................................................................... 113 CHAPTER FOUR ................................................................... 115 Storying the library and the city: three centuries of ‘thinking, feeling and building’ Birmingham’s centre ............................... 115 4.0 Introduction.................................................................