About me

I completed my Ph.D. program with the University of Arizona College of Information Science, and have an interdisciplinary minor in Social, Cultural, & Critical Theory (SCCT). Being an academic librarian for over 15 years, and continuing to work full-time while completing my PhD work, I am interested in studying perceptions, impact, and valuation of academic library labor through various critical and interdisciplinary lenses. From my specialization as a library educator, I examine material impacts on the doubly feminized and devalued labor of library instruction.

My dissertation should be available for access in May 2026.

Dissertation research

Title: Materializations of the value gaze: A poststructural analysis of academic library instruction value discourse in policy and practice

Abstract: In this dissertation research, I problematize academic library value dominant discourse–or, the advised obligation toward demonstrating the library’s impact to campus using audit practices. Calls to demonstrate library value intensified with the commissioned 2010 Value of Academic Libraries (VAL) Report published by the Association of College & Research Libraries. Using a Foucauldian-influenced poststructural discourse analysis, I examine audit as installed in higher education to operationalize divestment from public goods, reinforced by discourses of responsibilization and deficit. As a manifestation of audit culture, I position Kraus’ (2023) notion of the fantasy economy as a primary theoretical framework, which can be understood as ideological reframing of the disenfranchised labor market being the fault and responsibility of the education system. In alignment with neoliberal reform projects, VAL’s rationalizing practices naturalize audit’s inevitability and urgency, making critique virtually unsayable and imagining otherwise consequently unrealized, which calls for the problematization I undertake in this research. 

The following research questions guide this inquiry: (1) How does library value discourse materialize in the field through policies and practices? (2) Do value policy artifacts produce disciplining effects on the design and implementation of library instruction programs? and (3) What is the network(s) of institutions, individuals, practices, and policies that govern library valuation projects? Applying Bacchi’s “What is the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) policy discourse analysis framework for my empirical analysis of a 21-document corpus and nine practitioner interviews demonstrates how VAL’s purported advocacy remains in the potential rather than the actual, and runs counter to practitioner experiences of material outcomes.

Within the doubly-feminized subfield of academic library instruction, value discourse materializes in policy and practice through what I term the “value gaze”–a panoptic enterprise of seeking substantiations of value for audit, while also perpetually self-surveilling as anticipatory monitoring. Constructed from deficit, VAL exhorts librarians toward the ethical professional subject position. VAL intertwines the fantasy economy into its rationalizing discourse; and rather than problematizing this power/knowledge configuration, the library/librarians are identified as the problem for not aligning to VAL’s moral imperatives. Beyond approaches to assessment, this is a study on how calls for demonstrating value that uncritically reproduce reform in fact reinforce the very sociopolitical structures that work against advocacy. Problematization of the dominant discourse and its disarmament of critique can offer the field an opportunity to engage in self-study on how these projects can better materially advocate for workers.