Teaching the Radical Catalogue – a Syllabus

Abstract

"Teaching the Radical Catalogue – a syllabus" interrogates prevailing practices of classifying and organizing knowledge in libraries of the Global North. Drawing on Emily Drabinski’s article “Teaching the Radical Catalog” (2008), the project develops a study and research program investigating the politics of naming and framing, as well as the practices of searching and finding, from an intersectional and decolonial perspective.

The program situates Western library systems within coloniality, challenging their claims of universality and neutrality, and examining the resulting biases, oppressions, and exclusions. While some information is easily retrievable, other knowledge remains hidden or inaccessible—every search is shaped by the decisions of librarians, information scientists, and developers who build the frameworks of discovery.

The program therefore asserts that information retrieval is not merely a technical act but a political project shaped by social, political, and technological forces. Drawing on Susan Leigh Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999)—which argues that infrastructures become visible only when they break—the study program explores intersectional interventions and experiments that expose and critique the hidden mechanisms of library catalogues.

Across eight sessions with librarians, activists, artists, designers, and programmers, the syllabus examines the catalogue’s technological foundations and interrogates the assumptions, authority, and privilege of those engaged in cataloguing. Through conversations, interviews, and practice-based experiments, participants explore alternative structures: opening up cataloguing protocols (Infrastructural Manoeuvres), developing intersectional search tools (Feminist Search Tools, Constant), and experimenting with the political potential of annotation and rewriting (The Rewrite, Library of Inclusions and Omissions).

Through workshops, exhibitions, publications, and collaborations, the program fosters awareness of the structural biases underpinning library systems, enabling participants to recognize and address them.