Shelves under siege: School librarians as (temporary?) risk workers

Abstract

Book-banning and censorship attempts are becoming increasingly prominent within UK school libraries. Creating legal and financial risk for school librarians, attempts to ban books also generate risks for young people by pushing reading into unregulated online spaces as well as denying access to representative reading material. This paper uses the theoretical framework of risk work, which has been used to conceptualise how health and social care professionals make decisions or act upon risk as part of their daily practice, to examine how risks related to intellectual freedom are (re)shaping the work of UK school librarians. Ten UK based school librarians who had previously faced book ban attempts were interviewed about their experiences. Analysis demonstrates that these school librarians are engaged in distinctive forms of risk work within their workplaces, including interpreting, communicating and sharing knowledge about the risks of book bans with their professional communities. Introducing and drawing attention to new relational and emotional demands upon school librarians, the identification of risk work has important implications for educational and professional support structures as heightened tensions and demands become part of everyday working practice.