S5, E1: Disability Justice, Inclusion and Anti-Oppressive Compensation w/ C.A. Deane

Episode 1

In the first episode of this two-part interview, we chat with C.A. "Dean" Deane, a law librarian moving between academic law libraries and law firms with the skill to think in big picture about what is fair and reasonable using a global perspective and an anthropological lens. With their ability to synthesize information from many different places, Deane brings knowledge and information together for us to see the landscape of disability justice in (law) libraries.

Applying their academic background to find solutions, learn from Deane about the Ten Principles of Disability Justice, the importance of intersectionality, anti-oppressive compensation (not just equitable and not just wages…and WHY that is an important distinction), personal problems that are really systemic problems, and why libraries that create environments in which employees can engage with their whole selves cultivate happy patrons and the community.

Check out the MANY resources that Deane spoke about in the episode notes! 

Episode 2 will be released in May

In the second episode of this two-part interview, we are chatting with C.A. "Dean" Deane, a law librarian moving between academic law libraries and law firms with the skill to think in big picture about what is fair and reasonable using a global perspective and an anthropological lens. With their ability to synthesize information from many different places, Deane brings knowledge and information together for us to see the landscape of disability justice in (law) libraries.

In this half, Deane will share thoughts, wisdom and stories about salary surveys, advanced degree requirements (should we or shouldn't we!? That is the question!), mutual aid, and hot tips for engaging conference experiences and sessions.

Guest: C.A. "Dean" Deane

Hosts: Roxanne M. Renteria & Brittany Young

Tech/Producer: LaRee Dominguez

Date of recording:  January 11, 2026

Mentioned in this episode:

The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits by Zeynep Ton and Tanya Eby

Qualified by Shari Dunn

Rashmi Dixit Coaching (website)

Dixon Consulting (Anti-Oppressive Pay: Beyond Pay Equity) (website)

MIT Living Wage Calculator (website)

10 Principles of Disability Justice | Sins Invalid (website)

Disability Justice Initiative - Center for American Progress (website)

Racial Battle Fatigue (article)

The Curb-Cut Effect (article)

Transcript

Roxanne Renteria (00:03):

Hello and welcome to Overdue Weeding Out Oppression in Libraries, a podcast produced by the Oregon Library Association's Equity, diversity, inclusion, and Anti-Racism committee. My name is Roxanne M. Renteria and I'm a librarian in Oregon.

Brittany Young (00:18):

Hi, my name is Brittany Young and I am the Lane County Law librarian in Eugene, Oregon. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and in this episode, we have the pleasure of chatting with C. A. “Deane” Dean. Hi. Hello.

Roxanne Renteria (00:30):

Welcome Deane. Deane has been a law librarian for 15 years moving back and forth between academic law libraries and law firms. They have a degree in cultural anthropology from Princeton University where they focused on federal Indian law. Deane has a master's degree in anthropology and a law degree from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma where they focused on Indian law and foreign and international law. They think in the big picture about what is fair and reasonable using a global perspective and an anthropological lens. They also have a master's in library science from San Jose State University. They have been writing about injustice in the library profession since 2013. Deane lives in Oakland, California with arguably way too many plants.

Brittany Young (01:17):

That last line is what has now made this my favorite bio.

Deane (01:21):

Well, I like to win at everything, so I'm glad I got an eight plus in my bio

Roxanne Renteria (01:25):

As a plant hoarder myself, I'm very curious to know what plants you have. Oh, what's your favorite plant?

Deane (01:32):

I think my favorite plant is my purple inch plant because it is so forgiving if I forget it for several months, which sometimes happens and I think it just sort of demonstrates the kind of resilience that we all need in this world because nothing is perfect.

Brittany Young (01:55):

I am not a plant person because I inevitably kill my plants because I forget about them for months, but now I'm thinking that I need this plant. I might actually, I might have a plant friend then this

Roxanne Renteria (02:06):

Might be where you start, Brittany. Yeah.

Brittany Young (02:09):

Okay. What drew you to get involved with this specific field Deane, and how did disability justice become a focus of your work?

Deane (02:18):

By specific field, you mean law librarianship?

Brittany Young (02:21):

Yes.

Deane (02:22):

Yes.

Brittany Young (02:22):

Okay. Good question.

Deane (02:24):

Okay, so I have always been very emotional and intense about everything that I do. In 2005, I was very intensely focused on trying to become a professor of the anthropology of law, but things didn't work out with my PhD program and I was sort of floundering for a minute. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to stay in academia. I knew that I wanted to be able to teach. I had this law degree and my best friend from law school was a law librarian and she thought I would be a really good fit for academic, foreign, international law librarianship, and when I looked into it, I agreed with her and so I looked into getting that master's in librarianship and at the time I was so burnt out. I had been sort of going full tilt studying for so long because I had gone from what was a very intense high school experience.

(03:26):

We did the British School system in Trinidad and Tobago, and so I had been studying math for the math physics for my last two years of high school and I went straight from that into Princeton and straight from that I went into this three years all year around including the summers program at the University of Tulsa so that I could get my law degree and my master's in anthropology at the same time. And then I started that PhD program right away and by which time I had already developed, I developed a lot of physical ailment, irritable bowel syndrome, and I had really bad acid reflux. I was in pain pretty much 24/7 internally at that point in time, and that was one of the reasons why I ultimately withdrew from that PhD program. I was so burnt out that I just couldn't see myself going into another physical classroom, but San Jose State had just started their program in library science, and that program was not only my way of being able to get this degree without the necessity to be physically in person, which was sort of beyond me at the time, particularly since I'd also have to work.

(04:47):

At the same time, I didn't have any sort of scholarship. I was using student loans. What I later found out is that the program also kind of transformed the field of librarianship in general because now it was accessible not just to me but to many other students all across the US and potentially across the world. I was actually still in Trinidad when I was spending several months with my parents when I first started that online program at SJSU. And so I bring that up because that sort of created a new world where there are so many new librarians and not necessarily that many more jobs for librarians. So that's how I got involved with the field. Then initially my work was not focused on disability justice. It was on how we can create materials online that are following principles of universal design and best practices and so on.

(05:55):

I was very focused on ours, but in 2013 when I moved to Tennessee, that was the first time I experienced what I think of as real American racism. One thinks of places like Vanderbilt University as sort of a liberal on clave with Nashville within the south. People even think of Nashville as more liberals compared to the outskirts, but in reality that city and this university are merely a microcosm of the larger community. And I discovered this one day when I walked into my office to find that somebody had written a racist slur on my whiteboard, and this resulted in my experiencing pretty severe race-based traumatic stress. Sometimes in the literature it's called racial battle fatigue, and my way of responding to things like this is besides getting a therapist, which I definitely did. What is also to apply my academic background to try and understand what's going on and to try and figure out solutions and solutions that I can do personally and also systemic solutions.

(07:10):

And what I figured out is when I started submitting my ideas for programming based off the research that I was doing, there was no traction. And when I finally was able to speak out in other people's programs where I was invited to speak, I would get pretty severe backlash in terms of mean-spirited comments that were submitted as feedback to the program and then passed along to me without any filtration system by the program creators because not through any fault of theirs, but merely because they didn't have the lens to understand what these comments were after and where these comments were coming from. For instance, in one program where I was talking about what was pretty fresh, deep trauma that I had experienced my voice deepened, I was very slow and methodical in the way that I spoke and the feedback that I got from some audience member was that I should go and get some training from Toast Masters in how to speak publicly.

(08:21):

Meanwhile, there I was on stage just sort of fighting for my life to try and get the words out at all, and there was no compassion or appreciation of what I was really pushing against to try and make known in the community what it was like to be a black immigrant law librarian working in the south. So when I realized that I wasn't getting any traction, again, I do another round, another round of research and trying to understand, and I realized that I needed to make my message more universal because although I might be experiencing things very specifically because of my specific ways that I show up in the world, that the things that I was experiencing and other people who looked like me were experiencing were also also negatively impacting other people in the profession. These negative aspects of our job, they also negatively impact people who are physically disabled, people who are atypical, people who are single parents, even older people who are arguably merely a subset of disabled people, even people who aren't conventionally attractive also experience these kinds of things.

(09:42):

And so I started talking more about culture and how we can now develop a culture in our law libraries that supports the success of a broad variety of people, not just the most privileged people in our communities. And fast forward to the pandemic and I was began reading about the disability justice movement, which began right here in the Bay Area, and I started to see how these 10 principles of disability justice can really be applied to create this sort of way of looking at our profession and looking at the jobs of everyone in our libraries, not just the quote librarians and how can we maybe even connect that to the things that our managers and the people that run these institutions that our libraries sit within, how can we connect this sort of disability justice concepts back to management principles? And that's when I found Zainab Ton and their good job strategy.

Brittany Young (11:07):

That was amazing. I was like anthropology of law, what? I have so many questions and the way that I appreciate you walking us through how you got there because I think that other people can either relate to it or it kind of gives them a guide of places to look that might further their knowledge. Yeah,

Deane (11:26):

We've got to give them some keywords.

Brittany Young (11:28):

Yes, exactly.

Roxanne Renteria (11:29):

To springboard off of Brittany, thank you for sharing your personal journey and lot librarianship and some of the health related issues you were experiencing. Health and wellness as well as disability justice as it relates to library workers and the community members we serve is something that we cannot continue to shy away from. We cannot begin to fix or even to destigmatize what we fail to acknowledge. So toward that end, does disability justice mean to you specifically in the context of law librarianship?

Deane (12:01):

As I mentioned, there are these sort of 10 principles of disability justice, but what I want to talk about first is the curb cut effect. So today we take for granted that when we're walking somewhere in a major city that the corner of the curb is going to slope down. If you've ever been anywhere with your luggage and you try to cross the street, chances are you have made use of this downward slope from the sidewalk to the road to get your luggage across the street, and this slope is what's called a curb cut, and we get to have them all around the world. We get to have them because in 1972 disabled activists in Berkeley, California, which is just a few miles away from where I am, they pushed the city to install its first of many curb cuts so that people who use wheelchairs can easily move across the city.

(13:03):

By 1990 under George Bush, Americans got curb cuts in cities coast to coast. Because of that, Americans with Disabilities Act and this accessibility feature not only supports ease of movement for people who use wheelchairs, but also a lot of other people and robots who can easily traverse cities because of these curb cuts. So the curb cut effect describes how an accommodation created with one group in mind can also unintentionally support the needs of other groups. Then if you turn this on its head and you think of designing not just a physical environment but also systems, right? Then you get this concept of universal design principles. So when I think about disability justice in the context of law librarianship, I think of how can we use these concepts of disability justice to design law library jobs as well as operational systems so that we can all thrive in these jobs.

(14:19):

I don't want to go through all 10 of the principles, but I want to talk about just a few of them. One principle of disability justice tells us to examine the problems in the profession of law librarianship through an intersectional lens. Even the most privileged among law librarians, let's say a dual degreed white man in his prime American citizen born in America with a well paid management position at an elite institution, he comes from a wealthy family, married to someone who makes more money than him. Let's call him Tom. All it takes is an unanticipated severe temporary injury for Tom to experience what it's like to operate within the profession as a newly disabled person in a system that's not designed to accommodate him. He may be less impacted than a less privileged person, but he will be negatively impacted nevertheless. But even assuming that Tom never has such an injury, he will inevitably age and with age comes this diminishment of your capacity to do without consequence.

(15:35):

The things that you did in your youth, I just turned 50 this year and let me tell you on the outside, I might look like I'm still in my thirties, but I cannot do the same kind of going out late at night dancing without paying the price by being exhausted and in pain for the next several days. And so what is disability but a temporary or permanent limitation on your abilities as compared to this fictional normative human for whom the system is designed? So applying this first principle to law librarianship, given the pool of law librarians who have the appropriate academic qualifications for this job, that pool is an increasingly diverse pool of applicants. Shouldn't we design these jobs not with this fictional normative human in mind, but with the intention to support the success of candidates with intersectional identities. Another principle of disability justice is leadership by those who are most impacted by the systems.

(16:54):

And so Deane, you might say we have had as the leaders of double a LL, we have had a black immigrant woman. We have had an openly gay black man, and we have had a black man who has neither a law degree nor a library degree, and so are we not following this principle of leadership by the most impacted. And I would argue that unless and until we create safe spaces for those who are most impacted by these negative aspects of our jobs, to be able to share how these standard elements of law library jobs negatively impact not only their personal lives but also their ability to do their best work, then we are not fully taking advantage of this leadership by the most impacted. If we only allow them to be leaders to the extent that they continue to heavily mask, to the extent that they continue to heavily assimilate, to the extent that they continue to treat and describe the problems that they experience within the system as personal problems instead of as systemic problems, then we are not making the most of these opportunities to be led by those who are most impacted.

(18:19):

So we need to stop treating feedback from law library workers who are most impacted as complaints about personal problems and instead see them as canaries in the coal mine. Identifying systemic problems that firstly and most importantly, impact the least privileged among us. Ultimately, if we do not handle these problems, they're just going to become worse and by the time it impacts the individuals whose privilege currently protects them, I'm talking about people who have wealthy partners and so they can afford to take jobs that are severely underpaid because the lack of salary doesn't impact them. I'm talking about people who don't have children, and so the fact that these salaries don't allow you to live a life where you can afford to have children, I'm talking about the fact that in these jobs, if you don't have position that allows you to have enough flexibility in your time so that when you are not well, you can actually take the time to recover.

(19:36):

If you have so much privilege that you are sheltered from the worst aspects of our jobs, then you don't see the need to solve the problems with a systemic solution. In relation to this, I propose that instead of having the eight blade WL salary survey, what we need is a survey of culturally acceptable elements of law library jobs that disparately impact the least privileged among us, and proposals for designing jobs and library systems in ways that would support the personal and professional success of those most impacted. This is not a novel idea. In 1993, Roy Murky recommended that we improve law library jobs so that they'll be more appealing to everyone, including minorities. This is the same kind of changes that are also called for in zep tan's good job strategy. And that brings me to the third and last element of disability justice that I'll talk about today, which is the principle of recognizing wholeness and how this is reflected in the good job strategy.

(20:55):

So you hear a lot today about people being invited to bring their whole selves to the workplace in disability justice. This principle of wholeness is that people have inherent worth outside of the commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience. That's an exact quote. For years we've heard and read about this cognitive diversity that's valued. We've heard this line that diverse teams are proven to be better at complex problem solving than homogeneous teams. This notion is supported by research such as the 2015 McKinsey report. Diversity matters, but diversity justice goes beyond this to say that whether or not having these diverse team members has a positive financial impact on the institution, people deserve to have jobs designed with their capacity to thrive in mind. Which brings me back to that double A, double L salary survey. The white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal system within which law librarianship exists loves to rely on numerical metrics like market pay.

(22:13):

The way this information is collected relies on the judgment of law library managers, some of whom anecdotally avoid submitting the salaries for their organization because they know that the pay is significantly higher or lower than the norm and they don't want to skew the results. In a field like ours where every employee of every law library in the United States could fit in one football stadium using this information that gives the appearance of being scientific and therefore accurate and reliable has a direct and frequently negative impact on the lives of ourselves and our colleagues. Not all information that can be collected is useful for making every type of decision if we're going to design good jobs for all people who work in law libraries. Maybe we should listen to the wisdom of Epton who says that paying market rate might be great for soybeans, but maybe not for people. Poverty level pay reduces their mental health, physical health and cognitive functioning.

Brittany Young (23:26):

Thank you for that. I have 5 million notes you can't see, but I'm typing away all of these notes of things to bring up later. But the thing that I really appreciated was that you brought up the American Association Law Libraries, how yes, there have been diverse people in leadership with double A, double L, however, the way that I've seen them be treated is appalling and absolutely not safe. And to somebody paying attention and being aware of some of the things that you talked about, it's pretty obvious to see that. And when you see your leaders be treated like that, that's not going to make people feel safe. That's not creating that environment. You can't just have somebody there that fits that diversity quota. It doesn't work like that. So thank you for bringing that up. I know you've seen me bring it up at least once or twice in some of the meetings. It's something that I worry about and I think needs to be pointed out and you say it much more. I think earlier Roxanne said elegantly. I was going to say it eloquently, but I like it more elegantly than I do. So thank you.

Roxanne Renteria (24:51):

Well said, Deane. I really appreciate the analogy to canaries in the coal mine. My hope in a perfect world would be that folks listening support disability justice because they believe in human dignity. And as you said, they understand that each of us has value outside of our financial earning capacity under capitalism. For those who aren't convinced, I want them to know that while positional privilege may condition them to believe in the fallacy that it cannot happen to them, do know that in reality like the flip of a switch, it's a group that anyone can join at any time from birth until death. It's something that could come for us all

Deane (25:34):

Unless death comes for us first, literally every single day and especially now that I have turned the page on my youth, I guess now that I'm 50, when I was younger, I was fighting to, I would work out to build muscle to be stronger or to fit into my dress or whatever it was I was doing. But now I'm working out to try and retain what bone density and strength I currently have and if I'm actually able to build strength now, I'm grateful for that. But I can't just expect I can when I was younger that I can just run around doing my regular daily routine and expect to be able to still do two years from now much less 10 years from now if I'm lucky enough to live that long. The same things that I can easily do today. Well

Roxanne Renteria (26:30):

Said. Thank you.

Deane (26:31):

And these things have a ripple effect, right? It's not just your own health that impacts whether or not the culturally acceptable job design impacts you. It's also the health of your family members. The birth of a child is a joyful moment. But what if your child is born and has health problems? What if you are parent has health problems? What if your partner who is the stronger earner develops health problems and now all of a sudden your second income is completely gone? I've seen these things happen to people in law librarianship, and it turns a job that was sort of okay enough before into something that can be very burdensome. And then it has a cyclical impact, right? Your partner gets sick, he loses his job, and then you have to take on the stress of being the sole income earner for the family. You also now have to help that person get to their medical appointments, which leaves you less time in your schedule at work to go and pursue your own medical appointments.

(27:50):

It has an impact on your own health. It just has this way of compounding. One thing has a way of compounding, and then this job that when you signed up for it, it was totally fine. Now, the limitations of the job deeply impact your life. In librarianship, we often don't have good contracts, right? And if you're people like to think that yes, if you're not making enough money in academia, well just go to the law firms, but just go to law firms isn't just go to law firms. Law firm jobs are way more intense in certain ways than these academic jobs. And so when you move over to the law firms, it can be a much more intense drain on your energy. And yes, it might pay better, but when you have an academic job that has a contract and you know what you are required to do, you know that you're going to be required to come in three days a week and you have your contract, maybe your contract is for five years, you might even be in the union.

(28:57):

And so you know that for the next five years you can rely on having to only come into work three times a week. In the law firms, you are an at-will employee and the employers have a lot more power to change the conditions of your work. So a lot of big law firms made money hand over fist during the pandemic, so it's not like they were losing any money from law librarians working from home. So when these law firms now decide that for no real business purpose because whether they claim that is so or not, we know that it's just not true for no real business purpose. When they decide that law librarians have to come back and work in the office, that creates this very extreme additional requirement of energy expenditure and finances to pay for commuting in and out of work to pay for the appropriate law firm attire to wear while you're in and out of work.

(30:05):

The energy drain, particularly for atypical people or people of color, and according to the literature for black women predominantly the emotional impact of being perceived in the workplace is extreme and negative. And when you have to do this for no apparent reason, that also decreases morale. And if we go back to zaine to and this concept of treating people as whole people, which is both ept tan's concept and this disability justice concept, when you go back to that, have this idea that Zep Ptan has of the virtuous cycle, which is that which basically says that when you start investing in your employees, when you start listening to the employees who are in the front lines and giving them that safe space to give you feedback so that you can design better system operations, what results is that you have employees who decide to stay, employees who are more engaged with their work, and you can't use money and mandatory requirements to force people to engage deeply with their work in this way that results in better gains for the company overall.

Brittany Young (31:38):

Thank you for that, Deane. And okay, Brittany speaking of myself and third person has to stop responding to with all of the thoughts that you're inspiring in my brain, but for the listeners, y'all are getting a glimpse of what it's like of the convos that we have after recording that we always wish that we would have recorded, so I'm just going to put that out there. Okay. I believe it's the third question, which you went over some of this already, so I know you'll have more information to give us because you remind me of Roxanne and your brains are amazing. So what lessons does the disability justice movement have for librarians?

Deane (32:19):

We don't have to do things the way that we have always done them. Things can change and small actions can have a ripple effect, and so I think we feel like we're all helpless, but if we all agree to take small actions to improve things, then we collectively can dream of and then create a better future. I don't expect that in my lifetime that I will be able to manifest for myself a job that reflects all of the elements of Zainab TA's good jobs. But I do think that by speaking out and leveraging what I have to bring to the table, which is this brain that is capable of synthesizing ideas from a lot of different places, that I'm doing my part to push on the edges of our law librarianship culture, and that goes for librarianship in general as well. Although I do think that librarianship in general tends to be a little bit more progressive than law librarianship.

Roxanne Renteria (33:24):

Librarianship scholarship primarily focuses on patron services as it should, but what duty do librarians owe to each other?

Deane (33:33):

I think that early on in the field of librarianship when it was in its nascent stage, librarians were much more aware of the need for activism within the field. You saw librarians collectively trying to lobby for equal wages in the field, and unfortunately, I think that the result of this effort to get equal pay to men merely meant that men now got the same low salaries as women in what became sort of limited by this pink collar profession stigma. And so I think that librarians, we need to be aware that yes, our patrons are our primary focus, but ensuring that every worker within the library has the support that they need to be able to thrive in their lives, engage deeply with their work. That is the way to also support our patrons. Just as an example, I've also done a lot of research on domestic violence, and one of the reasons that women in particular will remain is because of financial considerations.

(34:56):

And so ensuring that the jobs of not just the librarians but every worker in a library ensuring that every worker in a library has sufficient compensation so that they can have agency in their lives, that is key to having a library where people can be engaged with their work and don't have to be distracted by systemic problems that have traditionally even contemporaneously been and are perceived as personal problems, which I know I've brought up this concept of the systemic problem versus personal problem before, but it bears repeating because I think that we are all so conditioned to see even our own problems as personal problems rather than systemic problems that we don't even realize when it's the poor design of the job that is creating the problem.

Roxanne Renteria (35:58):

I wonder too, to what extent some of our, I don't want to say desire, but our practice of looking at it or defining it as a personal problem is tied up in prosperity gospel.

Deane (36:12):

That is such a good one, and you're totally right. I think that part of professionalism is this, I put professionalism in quotes, is this need to project middle classness with our clothing, with our language. And if you are not able to afford your life, seen as you say, as not just being a personal problem, it's also seen as a personal failure on your part that you are not virtuous enough to be able to exist on whatever minuscule compensation you agreed to accept for the position. And I think beyond that, it's very difficult to, especially when you are, as we often are as law librarians when they're often moving quite great distances for our next job, you might move to a city that you had never been to before. You went there for the interview and all of a sudden now you have to visualize your new life there and try to understand how far your salary is going to go when you don't even know when you accept that job exactly how much you're going to be paying in health insurance premiums.

(37:38):

You don't know how much your heating bill is going to be. One year I had an apartment where there was a gas heater, and this was totally fine. The first year that I lived there, I was able to use this gas heater. My apartment was nice and warm. I was able to do my work, and then the following year during the winter months, the person who lived in the apartment beneath me moved out. So that entire winter, that apartment below me was just sucking the heat right out of my apartment. I couldn't keep my apartment warm enough with just the gas heater, so I had to supplement it with an electrical heater and my heating bills. I think for one month it was 400. It's impossible to anticipate those kinds of things. And I think I also read somewhere that it might've been a study saying that most Americans couldn't come up with $400 for an emergency.

(38:42):

I don't remember if that was the exact amount, but something like that. These librarian jobs encourage us to embrace what has been described as vocational awe to our own detriment. None of us expects to become a millionaire being a librarian, but I'm sure that nobody went into library school and took out all those loans thinking number one, that you were going to be paying off those loans for the rest of your life, or number two, that you would have to essentially be an indentured laborer working at some sort of nonprofit institution so that you could try and get that public loan service forgiveness and at some point in time the amount of money that you would be saving by getting those loans forgiven. Because remember, you still have to pay the loans while you are waiting for this 10 years to go by at some point in time.

(39:42):

Money that you are saving is not equal to the money that you would've made if you had just gone to the private sector and paid off those loans out of pocket. So all this to say that we're treated as though it is a sin to complain about, or it can be career suicide for a young librarian to complain about their salary because we're judged very harshly, particularly by people who have already gone through the experience of spending their majority of their career in these low paying positions. And we're also not encouraged to dream. I once spoke to someone and I asked them about their career and if they felt like they had a successful career and they agreed in the affirmative, and then I asked them where they lived, and it turned out that they had spent their entire career living with their parent

Roxanne Renteria (40:42):

Or if not their parent roommates or a spouse whose income earnings are subsidizing low payment

Deane (40:49):

Or in a house purchased for them by an inheritance from their wealthy family.

Roxanne Renteria (40:55):

Exactly.

Brittany Young (40:55):

This is obviously a conversation that we have often with all of Roxanne's. Examples are not factored into the equation. People are not looking at the whole picture, but that'll get me on a whole discussion about how we create laws and who creates the laws and how little they don't think about for the people that it will affect as a whole. That's a whole other discussion we have some other time.

Roxanne Renteria (41:20):

Well, and it does reference back to what Deane was talking about in terms of the increase in our salaries over time has not kept up with the cost of living. And by that I mean the cost of right, the cost of rent. For many librarians, given their age and generation, they may not be homeowners because of the cost of food in the wake of COVID and the rising cost of healthcare, but there are other costs that we're eating too as consumers under late stage capitalism. So you talk about vet services for pets, and with private equity coming in and purchasing up all of the vets, that's leading to an increase in fees. And so everything is connected as if it was a spiderweb or as Deane talks about the butterfly effect, something or a ripple effect happening in one sector is having catastrophic impact across the board or in another sector. Everything is connected.

Brittany Young (42:11):

Thank you, Roxanne. You explain things a lot more eloquently than me, and thank you for connecting as my ADHD brain. Okay. I think we've made it to question number five, which is if you could change one thing about law library culture, what would it be?

Deane (42:30):

I think that law library culture, if we're talking not just within the libraries but also across the nation, tends to be very c clickish. So the one thing that I would change is that I think that the antidote to that is developing deep connections within libraries and also across libraries. And what does this look like? I'll tell you what it looks like. For me, the way that I'm trying to push back against and cultivate a culture of connection is that I don't just go to the conferences and meet my same friends every year and then go back to where I came from and then just talk to the people in my workplace who I have active projects with. I constantly seek out opportunities to meet and talk to new people, which I think is a bit easier for me because I am an extrovert, but even introverts are good at talking to people.

(43:37):

And I think that over time we also have to do something that I actually didn't know how to do when I was younger, and it might surprise some of our listeners to know that it was actually Burning man culture that allowed me to develop this skill while I was still relatively young. And it's the skill of developing friendships with people who are different ages without an agenda. I think it's quite easy to, when you are young and coming into the profession, to target whichever directors you might want to get jobs from and try to make friends with them at the conference. And it's not a terrible strategy, but as with anything, any other type of connection, like interpersonal connection, the best connections, the deeper, more meaningful connections are the ones that you approach with no agenda. There was a study a few years ago showing that law libraries are a microcosm of the communities that they exist within, and I think that we would all be so much better off if there was a culture of using our time at these conferences when we are there in person to connect deeply with the people who are around us.

(45:03):

And one way that could be reflected in the programming is if we stopped having these programs where you have a giant auditorium and you have a bunch of people sitting there staring at somebody at the front of the room who's lecturing at them, we know that you can do that on Zoom. You don't need to go somewhere and then sit in a room and listen to someone do the same thing that they could do from your TV screen or computer screen or whatever. I think that when we expend all of this money and time and also thinking of the environment, all of this fossil fuels to leave where we are, to go somewhere else to gather that time should be spent deeply connecting with the people that you are only there for that brief time with, for myself, what I do is I prioritize social events at these conferences and I prioritize any event that is sort of like a workshop where I get to interact with other people.

(46:09):

I actually proposed my own program last year as a workshop, and it wasn't accepted as that. I was only allowed to do it in this sort of lecture to the room format. So that is what I think we should be doing with our time because, when I get back after the conference, then I don't mind watching all those lectures. I'm excited to hear what those lectures were about, but those lectures could also just be part of a pre-programming conference. What if we watched a bunch of lectures for the week before the program and then when we actually came together and we're physically in the room together, then we discussed what we read or what we watched, or why are we doing things exactly the same that we've always done them when there have been so many changes in technology that we don't actually need to do these things as we have done them. I feel like it's a lack of imagination and vision and a lack of dreaming that results in this kind of programming where we're wasting our time sitting in silence and staring.

Brittany Young (47:18):

Thank you for that. And I find it, it's interesting because I feel like what we're always hearing from people doing the programming for conferences in general, not just double A, double L, but just in general, is they're like, oh, we want it to be more interactive, and then you propose one that is more interactive and they're like, no, just stand up there and talk. I mean, to be fair, I would just sit there and stare at you real awkwardly and listen to you for hours, but that just gets awkward after.

Deane (47:44):

And then the type of interaction that they then propose that you do in these lecture format programs is to what? Throw a question up on the board and then you use your poll to answer the question. That is the kind of interaction that you use to make sure that your students are watching your boring lecture.

Brittany Young (48:06):

As an introvert who is always like, oh gosh, they're going to make me talk to other people for me, as long as it's an in-depth conversation that I can have with somebody, that's also how I connect with people is I need it to be personal, which is why I have a hard time talking to legislators because I'm supposed to be professional.

Deane (48:26):

To me, the ideal way of having these types of workshop programs is to give people various options for how to respond. When I to teach at Vanderbilt, I would teach these foreign students from all around the world, and over time, what I realized is that often it was like the Latin American students who really wanted to be the voice of the group. They were very, very comfortable speaking. And sometimes you might find that you have students from other countries where speaking to professors is much more anxiety provoking for them. So I gave students the option of if they had a question, they could ask someone else in their little group to ask the question to the whole group. And so I wouldn't force students to speak in class, but they had the option of speaking in class if they wanted to. And I feel like if I were translating that into a double L workshop, the way that I would design it is for people to be able to do one-on-one conversations, like talk one-on-one or in a small group.

(49:45):

You get to decide how you want to organize yourself, and then if you have a question for the presenters, then you can either submit it through a live poll type thing so that you don't actually have to talk to anybody or you tell the extrovert in your group what your question is and then they can ask it. We have so many different ways of communicating now, and I just feel like it's a lack of imagination. As I said, it's like this trying to use what has come before as the gold standard of what is professional.

Brittany Young (50:25):

Now that I've written that down to remember for later, Roxanne,

Roxanne Renteria (50:31):

Can I just say that I appreciate and acknowledge your point about making friends without an agenda? It could be the fact that I'm an introvert, but I find myself more interested in connecting with people in ways that allow them to talk story or share their personal experiences or wisdom and continue even at my current age to be disturbed by transactional relationships, especially under a capitalist framework. I also want to say that I agree. I don't think we can break down barriers or build community unless we actively integrate our spaces or actively try to mix with, talk with or break bread with people who are different from ourselves. And I think that's really, as you said, something to focus on when we are at conferences, when we are hiring or getting to know people in our communities as community partners or patrons of the library when it comes to hiring practices. And I think we're all the better for it too. So thank you.

Deane (51:34):

I'm glad that you brought us back to that original question, Roxanne, because I also wanted to share that when I'm not at the conference, I don't just forget all about the law librarians that I know from other parts of the country. When I get back home, I call people because they're my friends. They're not just like people who I talk to at the conference. These are people who are my friends. So once I get back here, the way that I deepen these friendships is, and again, remember I'm an extrovert and a field of introverts, so my introvert friends are sometimes not going to call me, but that's okay because I got you. So the way that I deepen these connections is that I start calling people and I'll call you on a Saturday morning and chat with you while I am making my coffee and tidying up my apartment when I call you, depends on what time zone you're in.

(52:28):

So if I need to call you on my lunch break because you're going to be in bed, by the time I get off work at six o'clock, then that's what I'm going to do. And so I maintain friendships with people who are law librarians who live all over the US and in my own city. I maintain friendships with people who I used to work with. I'm calling people up. I'm inviting them out to go to brunch with me. I'm texting first so that we can, when are we going to have our catchup call? This is my skillset, is maintaining connections with people over long distances. I have been, when I was a child, I had a ridiculous number of pen pals. I mean, upwards of 10. Pampa was when I was 12 years old. I maintained friendships with these young women for a really long time.

(53:20):

One of them I'm still friends with today. This is the skillset that I am also bringing to my life today. It used to be back in the day that you had to write a letter, go and get a stamp for it, ask your mom to take you to the post office, and then you wait a month for your pen pal to write you back. And now I can text my friends, I can email them. I can have a video call. We have the technology. What we need to do is stop creating these fake separations between our work life and our home life. This is, again, part of that for the way that the nuclear family, the idea of the nuclear family has created so many problems in America by separating us. And one of the ways that we can push back against this separation is creating this loneliness epidemic, which initially we heard that term in association with men, but now it's being associated with all of us. And I think post pandemic, we are all experiencing a lot more loneliness, and we need to stop thinking of our law library acquaintances who we meet at these conferences as in some sort of separate area, different from our real life. They're people and they're our friends. And so we need to figure out how to make time in our life to spend with our friends, whether they're here in our offices or in our cities or even in other parts of the world.

Roxanne Renteria (55:01):

I agree. And I think taking that approach circles back and improves retention as we're making people feel included and providing support.

Deane (55:10):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it also improves our mental health.

Brittany Young (55:14):

I don't remember what survey it was, but there was a survey at some point where it was saying that, so while a lot of people leave because of a bad manager, a lot of people stay because of the friends that they have at the places that they work.

Roxanne Renteria (55:31):

And on that note, we'll conclude part one. Join us next time for part two and the conclusion of our interview with C Deane.

Voiceover (55:41):

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act administered by the State Library of Oregon at the Project.

Outro (56:06):

We would like to take time to acknowledge historical injustices. We recognize the organ was established as a white sanctuary state with the intent to exclude African-American and black people on ancestral lands stolen from dispossessed indigenous peoples. We recognize and honor the members of federally recognized tribes and unrecognized tribes of Oregon. We honor Native American ancestors, past, present, and future whose land we still occupy. This acknowledgement aims to deconstruct false histories, correct the historical record, and disrupt genocidal practices by refocusing attention to the original people of the land. We inhabit the slave trade enforced labor that built this country and to the oppressive social systems interwoven into the fabric of our national and regional heritage. We ask that you take a moment to acknowledge and reflect as well.