Precarity and the Social Organization of Affect in Public Libraries

Authors

• Naomi E. Nichols Dr., Trent UniversityFollow
• Phil Canuel, Research for Social Change Lab, Trent UniversityFollow
• Maggie Pearson, Douro-Dummer Public Library and Research for Social Change Lab, Trent UniversityFollow
• Kathrine Williams, Research for Social Change Lab, Trent UniversityFollow

Author Affiliations and Contact

Corresponding Author: Naomi Nichols, Associate Professor of Sociology, Canada Research Chair in Community-partnered Social Justice, and Director of the Research for Social Change Lab at Trent University, [email protected] Phil Canuel, Research Assistant, Research for Social Change Lab at Trent University Maggie Pearson, Chief Executive Officer of the Douro-Dummer Public Library and Research for Social Change Lab at Trent University Kathrine Williams, Research for Social Change Lab at Trent University

Abstract

Material and felt precarity are increasing in Ontario cities, impacted by housing and food unaffordability, an unpredictable drug supply, rising homelessness, and unmet social and health needs. The social relations of precarity play out in public spaces like libraries, changing how people’s work in, and experiences of, public space are organized. In this institutional ethnography (IE), we draw on 38 interviews with library staff and visitors to describe how shifts in the activities undertaken by library visitors (i.e., an increase in survival-related work) is co-ordered with, and re-shaping the work of library staff. Beginning with the standpoint of library staff, we utilize the concepts of affect and atmosphere to bring explicit attention to the ways that the lived and felt space of a public library changes because of shifts in the work people seek to do in the space. Finally, we explicate how these shifting complexes of social activity reflect a disjuncture between the municipal governance and institutional organization of public libraries and the actualities of library visitors and staff. IE’s dynamic materialist ontology affords us new ways of conceptualizing known challenges facing libraries and library staff (e.g., role ambiguity and mission-drift with respect to homelessness). The conceptual resources associated with the scholarship on affect and atmospheres offer institutional ethnographers an opportunity to conceive embodied emotive expressions as integral to the concerting and coordination of people’s activities.

Recommended Citation

Nichols, Naomi E. Dr.; Canuel, Phil; Pearson, Maggie; and Williams, Kathrine (2026) "Precarity and the Social Organization of Affect in Public Libraries," Journal of Institutional Ethnography: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.ndsu.edu/journalofinstitutionalethnography/vol1/iss1/1