Trapped in Our Own Discursive Formations: Toward an Archaeology of Library and Information Science

Knowledge Organization: A Sociohistorical Analysis and Critique

“…In several writings, some of which were published in this journal, Gary Radford (occasionally with Marie Radford) has demonstrated the value of using Foucault's ideas to address LIS research issues [see, e.g., [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Although Radford has touched upon a range of important theoretical and methodical problems, he and others with him [18] have not directly connected Foucault to knowledge organization [see, e.g., 12].…”

Transgression or Stasis? Challenging Foucault in LIS Theory

“…This is the American, lit-crit Foucault that essentially turns Wiegand on his head: that libraries are such a commonplace "good" makes their power discourse all the more sinister and hidden, perhaps even demonstrating that libraries and reading are more culturally and economically domineering than McDonalds-or television. Libraries in this LIS selection and reading of this literature are equated with fortresses, cathedrals, tombs, crypts, labyrinths, monasteries, otherworldly and intimidating edifices, violence, control, constraint, humiliation, and the borders between coherence and incoherence [29,28,7,6,38]. This echoes the weakness noted previously in the critiques of Walzer and Giddens, and the focus represents a choice (and an exercise in power?)…”

“…However, it would be fair to characterize Radford over the years as focused more on specific library practices and images of libraries/librarians as the discourse to be unpacked. For instance, he often cites as a basis of analysis libraries' organized collections of texts and the "ensemble of rules [by] which the true and false are separated" [28, p. 418; see also 5,7] or the contrasts between the library as discourse under control/surveillance and the power embedded therein and the (sometimes) contrasting media discourse of stereotyped images of librarians [21,29]. He is the author most explicitly concerned with explaining Foucault and his meaning for the field and arguing that discourse "itself [i]s a legitimate object of inquiry," going on to write in the article he wrote about the article he had written that was being read at that moment: "What is important is not what [a prior] sentence means, but that it has appeared in this article."…”

“…Finally, a definitional note on the use of the terms "theory" and "theoretical" is also needed. A helpful recent study on the use of "theory" in the LIS literature reviews many working definitions of the term but casts "'theory' as broadly as possible [to] capture its widest range of use" by including articles in which a insights are adapted in various works that focus on LIS forms of power, discourse, archaeology, silences, exclusion, defining the "other," domination, and micropractices in the last fifteen years of critical-theoretical LIS scholarship (see, e.g., [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]). For instance, this journal, in issuing a call for papers (CFP) on "discursive approaches to information seeking in context" for a future issue, is sponsoring a line of analysis heavily influenced by Foucault Primary Foucauldian ideas such as discourse, socially constructed knowledge, and artifacts are embedded in that CFP.…”

Social Justice Research in Library and Information Sciences: A Case for Discourse Analysis

“…While information and knowledge are societal resources, critical discourse analysis allows us to problematize the concepts of information, knowledge, and belief systems, as previously discussed (see Frohmann, 1994;Budd, 2006;and Radford, 2003). Critical discourse analysis studies both power in discourse and power over discourse, providing a means for LIS researchers to examine the underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions of information, knowledge, knowledge production, and knowledge sharing as well as belief systems and analyses of power and social relations.…”