mass shootings — News - Ashley Maynor

The Journal of Collaborative Librarianship has just released a special issue on disaster response in Libraries. I was asked to contribute an article to close the issue and I chose to write an autoethnographic essay about how my opinions and perspective on archiving the aftermath have been both reinforced and profoundly changed by subsequent tragedies and their influence on our culture and our archival practice.

In this essay titled Libraries & Librarians in the Aftermath: Our Stories & Ourselves, I wax-poetic about the beauty and sadness of grief archives, call out issues of privilege and bias in media coverage and archival/memorial practice, challenge libraries and memory institutions to do better with inspiring examples, appeal to citizens to respond to tragedy and shootings with political engagement and action rather than stuff, and I speak to the joy to be found in forgetting rather than remembering.

I also somehow manage to tie in the work of two women I admire, Dolly Parton and Marie Kondo (inventor of the KonMari method, author of The Life-Changing Joy of Tidying Up) into an article that’s otherwise about mass shootings and libraries. I consider this feat a big win for badass scholarship and relevant librarianship and I hope you will, too.

Take a read and see what you think.

I was interviewed for two recent articles on responses to mass shootings:

Processing Grief: Archivists, Librarians, and Museum Professionals Help Communities Heal on the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History magazine, and
an AP news article published in the Tampa Bay Times Garden provides place to mourn Las Vegas shooting victims.

The continued relevance of The Story of the Stuff and interview requests sadden me deeply, and the thoughts I expressed in the Perspectives piece are so true to my sentiment:

Maynor says she’s “curious to see if we’re at a turning point” when it comes to creating new condolence collections. With each mass shooting, she says, “people are responding with either apathy or activism” (as in the case of Parkland). “There seems to be much less expression of grief because we’ve been grieving. We’ve been grieving for a decade since Virginia Tech.” She hopes that the country is at a juncture: “My personal hope would be . . . that we’re able to prevent a lot of this from happening in the first place.”