MLIS in Quarantine

By Kristina Santiago

I've been in library school since January 2020, and damn if I'm not exhausted. I finish my MLIS program, earning my Masters degree this December. My nervous system flutters as I move into the transitions ahead: job hunting (the job before the job), researching institutions, pouring over applications and letters of purpose, and of course, stepping off the wild ride of graduate school.

As I veer toward my future as a fully credentialed librarian, the past two years ring through me like a bell's echo. I write this reflection to look back at what I've lived through as a graduate student, and to recognize it as unique. Exceptionally so. Will the interview question "Tell me about your experience with..." send me reeling? There is so much to speak, so much for which to bear witness.

My quarantine in MLIS was decidedly not pretty, for months. If these walls could talk... but no. This is my turn to speak. This is my story.

My experiences as an MLIS graduate student during the era of COVID-19 unequivocally broke the mold of what I ever thought life in grad school would look like. I enrolled as a fully online student from the jump in January 2020, and so of course, I expected hours on end spent working on my computer screen and managing virtual interaction. I never planned for the luxury of a face-to-face classroom, and that starting point likely braced me well for the normalization of Zoom meetings for all things from study sessions to happy hours in the months, years that followed. What I didn't anticipate, however, was the arrival of a devastating global pandemic a mere two months into my degree program. Neither, that the 13-inch screen of my MacBook would prove to play host to every aspect of my grad school life. Often, I teetered on the edge of falling in along with it.

On my better mental health days of 2020, I'd laugh, in distress and chagrin, to think of the irony. I've been an MLIS student at a time when library workers across the nation and the world urged our officials to shut library doors and #CloseTheLibrary. That many of these workers are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) has been significant to me. In the first weeks of my degree program, I witnessed my convictions around 'what libraries are' shift and muddy around this crisis. Is information access more or less sacred than public safety?, is one question I never anticipated asking when I set out on this degree. Perhaps I was naive. It's a trick question, after all. Public safety is enabled by access to information, a truth that is unfurling over time with palpable consequence.

For me, the pandemic closure of libraries meant the slipping away of a refuge that I longed for as a graduate student. A refuge that is a privilege we've long taken for granted: the library as an intellectual space; the library as physical resources; the library as interpersonal connection. The library is a host of lifelines to a student, to a community, and on March 15, 2020 many of those lifelines went flat.

And yet, I chose to continue my pursuit of librarianship. It has been a practice of love, and all my determination, to study and labor for libraries at a time when the library could not return my efforts in kind. For over a year, I wasn't rewarded with the good feeling of browsing shelves and exploring collections, of renting a study room and sprawling my books out on the desk. The library really became an abstraction, an idea. I worked for the library through the web, doing chat reference support and e-instruction. The physical reality of the library split from its energetic presence, as programming went virtual and online collections took center stage.

Undergoing library school during the era of 2020-2021, COVID-19, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, #DefundThePolice, Tr*mpism, the 2020 US presidential election, the Capitol insurrection, escalating climate change, and more... has disillusioned much of my perspectives. As I write this reflection now, it's almost too much to imagine having lived through (and it's not over). I’m graduating with much less a twinkle left in my eye, and more stark vision. I've seen a lot of devastating realities, and I've learned the need for difficult conversations, and this is made harder because I am profoundly tired. But my iSchool (like many) invoked the essence of 'neutrality' in assuring that things, academically, would move ahead at a right pace. Never stopping, never slowing down, nary encouraging students a moment to breathe and take stock of our surroundings.

“COVID has forced me to learn how to allow space for trauma and healing in how I work.”

This is worth calling attention to. The pace of graduate school, even pre-pandemic, has always been unsustainable. Come COVID, not only does academia never slow down to allow recognition of this crisis, the iSchool makes little effort to absorb the reality of pandemic circumstances to inform the way that libraries, and library workers, are discussed in curriculum. The problematic tropes maintained themselves: library neutrality, the sanctity of the library as public space, the role of library workers as embodying the values of the institution, etc. All of this, as we literally cried to close library doors to save lives. It's been highly disorienting, even dissociative, to receive such LIS indoctrination while paying attention to what was really happening in the world. I think this is intentional—grad school is designed to break you down, to force you to conform to its own standards in order to achieve the degree. It’s gatekeeping.

What grad school looked like for me in real time: My 500 square-foot home has been magicked to serve all of my needs, and my partner's needs, at all times, as best it could, over the span of 6 semesters (including two summers) from start to finish. My couch and my bed have been my desk. Square Zoom boxes, my classrooms. My computer, tablet, and cellphone the windows by which I could reach academia, my peers, my friends. From our homes and safe havens my classmates, colleagues, and I convened in an other world, a place in space, where we could be safe. My mind has worked in these worlds of our making and, at day’s end after closing my browsers, returned to my body here again within these same four walls. This, every day.

COVID has forced me to learn how to allow space for trauma and healing in how I work. I don't think this is talked about enough, certainly not in MLIS programs. The capitalism & white supremacy of the library wants its neutrality so bad that it's ever-ready to deny its workers and users our voices, presuming instead to claim us as an extension of itself. That just was never going to work for me. I'm a people person, which libraries love, but what that really means is I'm deeply empathic. Witnessing this pandemic has brought out my rawest grief, anger, and sadness. There were weeks I dove into curriculum and the extra curricular to avoid the feelings in my chest, and there were weeks I let myself weep and scream. I've been walking a tightrope this whole time, and these two extremities have been the edges of my experience.

I've walked that tight rope well, better than I could have hoped for. I've earned accolades and scholarships. I've applied my passion for centering BIPOC to gain scholarship funding with both Knowledge River & the ALA Spectrum program thereby greatly reducing my personal financial debt of pursuing this degree. I've applied my studies in critical perspectives to land jobs with We Here and up//root, where I further efforts to highlight and celebrate the knowledge & experiences of racialized people in LIS. I’ve volunteered on committees and associations, and done public speaking. My participation in these extracurriculars truly sustained me, and opened the worlds I could access working from home. I don't think I would have made it this far, with this much hope and insight, if it weren't for the critical, antiracist, and really real communities of praxis I’ve tapped into. My most urgent tip to anyone in an MLIS program: find your people outside of your iSchool. I'm surrounded by warriors, and it strengthens me.

Now I'm nearing the end of the tightrope, not quite sure how I got here, and I’m still seeking to find where the platform is. I'll say it again, as it bears repeating: I'm tired, y’all. And because I keep an eye and ear trained to Black, queer, femme, people of color in this profession I know that even beyond COVID what awaits me in librarianship will be challenging. I'm stepping into a career that wants nothing more than to break me down, deny my humanity, and make me a vessel for maintaining its own image. A profession that wants to appropriate my convictions & my identity to make me a trophy for itself. And to that I say, I'm no showpiece.

I've made it this far, and it's just the beginning. The beginning of my career, of my mark on the world, of my impact. And in my quiet moments, I know that I'm simultaneously approaching a significant ending. I'm graduating. I'm going through the eye of the needle. I’m achieving something that was structurally built to exclude me. I’m exceeding my ancestors’ wildest dreams. And I want to remember, really remember, what this experience has been. One of my biggest fears is that the narrative of student life in COVID will, like so many other COVID narratives, fade away by a collective desire to forget.

I don't want to forget. I want to feel. I want to heal. And for that, we must remember. I want to see the archives we’ll make of this time. We need to sit with our stories, and the stories of our neighbors, our friends, and the millions of strangers who, like us, have been brought to their knees by this most isolating and collective pandemic. My story is just one, and these words are but a glimpse of it, but it is mine. And for that, I tell it. I hope you'll do the same.

MLIS in Quarantine

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