Decolonizing the Community-Centered Library

This post is part of a series that reclaims community-centered librarianship from its institutional distortions, returning it to its roots in struggle, mutual aid, and collective survival. It treats libraries not as neutral services but as contested infrastructures shaped by power, resistance, and memory, and explores librarianship as solidarity work grounded in real communities, real conflicts, and the ongoing tension between institutional control and collective autonomy. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor

Within contemporary professional discourse, the term "decolonization" circulates widely. It appears in strategic plans, conference themes, policy documents, and institutional statements, often associated with commitments to diversity, inclusion, and representation. In many cases, it functions as an aspirational horizon: a signal that libraries are willing to address historical inequalities and broaden their scope.

However, this usage tends to dilute the term's analytical and political force. Decolonization, in its historical and material sense, does not refer to a general process of improvement or diversification. It refers to the dismantling of structures that have organized knowledge, territory, and authority along colonial lines. It involves confronting the systems through which certain forms of knowledge have been legitimized, while others have been excluded, subordinated, or rendered unintelligible.

When applied to community-centered librarianship, decolonization cannot be reduced to the inclusion of previously marginalized voices within existing frameworks. It requires examining the frameworks themselves: the classificatory systems, descriptive standards, and institutional logics that define what counts as knowledge, how it is organized, and who is authorized to produce and interpret it.

Without that level of intervention, the language of decolonization risks functioning as a surface adjustment. It expands the range of visible content without altering the structures that govern its meaning.

Classification as Epistemic Order

Modern library classification systems are often presented as neutral tools designed to facilitate access. Their categories, hierarchies, and terminologies are treated as technical solutions to the problem of organizing large bodies of information. In practice, however, these systems encode specific historical and epistemological assumptions.

They emerge from particular intellectual traditions, primarily European and North American, and reflect the ways in which those traditions have divided, prioritized, and related different domains of knowledge. Disciplines are separated or grouped according to conceptual frameworks that are not universal, but situated. Certain areas are granted extensive internal differentiation, while others are compressed, generalized, or relegated to residual categories.

This has direct consequences for how knowledge is represented and accessed. Materials that do not align with dominant epistemologies are often forced into ill-fitting categories, described through external vocabularies, or dispersed across multiple locations in ways that obscure their coherence. In some cases, they are not incorporated at all.

The issue is not only that classification systems contain biases. It is that they operate as epistemic orders: they define the structure within which knowledge becomes legible. To work within them without questioning their underlying assumptions is to reproduce those assumptions, even when attempting to expand or correct their content.

Authority and the Regulation of Language

A similar dynamic can be observed in the use of authority control and standardized vocabularies. These systems are designed to ensure consistency in naming, facilitate retrieval, and connect related materials across collections. They rely on controlled terms, established forms of names, and hierarchical relationships between concepts.

While these mechanisms support interoperability and coherence, they also regulate how entities and subjects can be described. They privilege certain languages, naming conventions, and conceptual distinctions, often derived from dominant cultural and institutional contexts. Alternative forms of naming, local terminologies, and community-specific categories may be excluded, normalized, or translated into standardized equivalents that alter their meaning.

This process is not neutral. Naming is a form of power. It determines how people, practices, and histories are recognized within a system. When authority is centralized and standardized, it can override the ways in which communities define themselves and their experiences.

In community-centered contexts, this creates a tension between the need for shared structures and the need to preserve linguistic and conceptual autonomy. Incorporating community terms into existing authority systems does not necessarily resolve that tension. It may require rethinking the role of authority itself, and considering forms of description that allow for plurality, coexistence, and even contradiction.

Documentary Practices and the Production of Evidence

Beyond classification and naming, documentary practices also play a central role in shaping what can be known. Libraries and related institutions operate through procedures that define what qualifies as a document, how it is collected, how it is described, and how it is preserved.

These procedures tend to privilege certain formats and modes of expression: written texts, stable objects, and materials that can be cataloged, stored, and circulated within institutional infrastructures. Other forms of knowledge — oral traditions, embodied practices, ephemeral events, relational processes — are more difficult to integrate. When they are incorporated, they are often transformed to fit documentary expectations.

This transformation can involve extraction, fragmentation, or recontextualization. A story becomes a transcript; a performance becomes a recording; a practice becomes a description. In each case, the conditions under which knowledge is produced and transmitted are altered, sometimes significantly.

The problem is not simply one of inclusion. It is one of translation and transformation. Documentary systems do not only capture knowledge; they reshape it. Decolonizing community-centered librarianship requires attention to these processes, and to the limits of what can be documented without loss.

The Grammar of "Empowerment"

In parallel with these technical structures, a specific institutional language has developed around community work. Terms such as "empowerment," "capacity building," and "participation" are widely used to describe initiatives aimed at engaging communities and addressing inequality.

While these terms signal an intention to redistribute resources and opportunities, they often carry implicit assumptions about the position of institutions in relation to communities. "Empowerment," in particular, suggests that power originates within the institution and is transferred outward. It frames communities as recipients of support, rather than as agents with existing capacities, knowledge systems, and forms of organization.

This framing can obscure the extent to which communities have historically developed their own infrastructures for knowledge production and circulation, often in the absence of, or in opposition to, formal institutions. It can also reinforce hierarchical relationships, even when participatory methods are employed.

In this sense, the language of empowerment functions as a grammar that structures how community engagement is understood and practiced. It shapes expectations, defines roles, and limits the range of possible interactions. Decolonial approaches to community-centered librarianship require moving beyond this grammar, and recognizing communities not as beneficiaries, but as producers of knowledge and organizers of their own informational environments.

Working Within and Against the System

The structures described here are not easily abandoned. They are embedded in infrastructures, standards, and professional training. They enable certain forms of coordination and access that are difficult to replicate outside them.

At the same time, they impose constraints that limit how knowledge can be represented and how communities can engage with it. This creates a condition of tension for community-centered librarianship practiced within institutional settings.

Decolonizing practice, under these conditions, does not follow a single path. It may involve modifying existing systems, creating parallel structures, or selectively refusing certain procedures. It may require negotiating between interoperability and specificity, between standardization and autonomy, and between institutional requirements and community-defined priorities.

These are not abstract dilemmas, but operational decisions that shape daily practice: how materials are described, how categories are defined, how access is structured, and how communities participate in these processes.

What distinguishes a decolonial approach is not the complete resolution of these tensions; it's the recognition of their existence and the willingness to work within them consciously, rather than reproducing inherited structures by default.

Beyond Inclusion

If community-centered librarianship is to move beyond its institutional reinterpretation, it must address not only who is included, but how inclusion is structured as well.

Adding new materials to existing collections, incorporating diverse perspectives, or expanding outreach programs may alter the visible composition of library services. But these measures do not necessarily affect the underlying systems that organize knowledge and define its legitimacy.

A decolonial turn requires shifting the focus from content to structure. It involves examining the conditions under which knowledge is classified, named, documented, and circulated, and identifying where those conditions reproduce colonial patterns.

This does not produce a stable model or a definitive solution. It produces a field of work: a set of ongoing interventions, adjustments, and refusals that reshape how libraries operate in relation to the communities they engage.

In that sense, decolonizing the community-centered library is not a program to be implemented. It is a process that unfolds within the constraints of existing systems, while questioning the assumptions that sustain them.