make/shift

Lia Friedman is what some might call a super-librarian. She's the head of public services at the UCSD Arts Library, the staff librarian for make/shift magazine, and an active member of Radical Reference (an organization whose Portland chapter helped set up the Bitch Community Lending Library). Bitch recently caught up with Friedman, who told us a bit about where librarianship and social justice intersect.

A lot of folks have been talking about Courtney Desiree Morris' article in make/shift, "Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements." I read the whole thing over at the INCITE! blog. Starting from a discussion of Brandon Darby, an FBI informant who infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention in 2009, Morris suggests that left wing movements are easy to infiltrate because they are uncritical of themselves. The uncriticalness that allows informants to infiltrate as long as they can appear devoted to the cause, is what also allows gender violence to go unchecked. Morris' article provides definite food for thought, in terms of what we will put up with "in service of the movement" that we would never put up with elsewhere.