Introduction

Despite libraries often being termed the ‘heart’ or the ‘laboratory’ of the university campus, and featuring heavily in literature, publicity and shared memories of academic life, they are frequently overlooked as institutions of political and pedagogical influence. Not only acting as something of a weathervane of broader social processes such as neoliberalisation, libraries also engender, reproduce and extend these processes in the lives of those who use them. Even with the transformation of libraries by the advent of the Internet and the increasing use of digital technologies (Goodfellow and Lea, 2013), library work is still a central intermediary in the teaching, research and everyday practices of the university. Although unassuming, libraries are neither silent nor neutral, and they have both radical and reactionary potential. As agencies within the institution of education (Hansson, 2006), libraries are affected by their context, and as sites where information is acquired, stored and communicated, the nature of this context has significant influence on the metrics of expertise used and the nature of knowledge made available.

As will be argued, processes of neoliberalisation are damaging to the pedagogic possibility of libraries. However, equally as damaging as denying the permeability of neoliberalisation would be to naively hark back to some imagined golden age of education where access and information was freely given to all, and it is for this reason that we focus on the idea of radical possibility. In resisting neoliberalisation in libraries, we should remember the innately conservative tendencies within librarianship, which have been well researched over several decades within Library and Information Studies (LIS) (Radford, 1992; Budd, 1995; Hjørland, 2005). As Drabinski (2018) argues, libraries have finite, material boundaries, and selection is an inescapably subjective component of what library work is. Despite the rise of automated acquisitions, expertise in libraries is only held in a relatively small number of hands and can only ever represent ‘one kind of world, one that can never encompass all the possibilities of how we might organise ourselves’ (Drabinski, 2018). As such, our hope is not for libraries to be restored to how they might have been prior to neoliberalisation, but rather for them to be critiqued and extended.