From Burnout to Bloom Room: Immediate Sites for Change: Transforming Librarian Burnout into Hope and Finding Liberation
Event Type
Lightning Talk
Start Date
25-7-2025 1:15 PM
End Date
25-7-2025 2:00 PM
Description
As a tenure-track librarian specializing in user experience, I have faced significant barriers contributing to burnout and mental health challenges. Placing hope in library-wide or systemic level changes often left me feeling powerless and hopeless. However, exploring and focusing my attention to the “immediate sites” where I do have agency (the spaces, relationships, and practices within reach) opened pathways to possibility and hope.
In this presentation, I will share how identifying and working within these immediate sites and pairing them with radical imagination, creative practice, joy, curiosity, and the support of collaborative allies allowed me to begin reclaiming a sense of autonomy, agency, and liberation. Through these strategies, I’m discovering meaningful and small intentional shifts are helping me get closer to creating the change I and others want to see.
Together, we’ll reimagine what it means to move through barriers and reshape our relationship to our work and each other in immediate sites in the library.
As part of this presentation, a printable zine version with resources and space to reflect and create will be included.
Outcomes
- Attendees will be invited to engage with reflective questions designed to help them identify their own immediate sites for change and envision actions that align with their values and goals.
- Attendees will be invited to explore their own immediate sites for change, reflect on the conditions they need to thrive, and consider how joy, creativity, and solidarity might support new ways of working.
- Attendees will co-create practical tools and renewed inspiration to effect change within their library spheres of influence.
From Burnout to Bloom Room: Immediate Sites for Change: Transforming Librarian Burnout into Hope and Finding Liberation
As a tenure-track librarian specializing in user experience, I have faced significant barriers contributing to burnout and mental health challenges. Placing hope in library-wide or systemic level changes often left me feeling powerless and hopeless. However, exploring and focusing my attention to the “immediate sites” where I do have agency (the spaces, relationships, and practices within reach) opened pathways to possibility and hope.
In this presentation, I will share how identifying and working within these immediate sites and pairing them with radical imagination, creative practice, joy, curiosity, and the support of collaborative allies allowed me to begin reclaiming a sense of autonomy, agency, and liberation. Through these strategies, I’m discovering meaningful and small intentional shifts are helping me get closer to creating the change I and others want to see.
Together, we’ll reimagine what it means to move through barriers and reshape our relationship to our work and each other in immediate sites in the library.
As part of this presentation, a printable zine version with resources and space to reflect and create will be included.
Outcomes
- Attendees will be invited to engage with reflective questions designed to help them identify their own immediate sites for change and envision actions that align with their values and goals.
- Attendees will be invited to explore their own immediate sites for change, reflect on the conditions they need to thrive, and consider how joy, creativity, and solidarity might support new ways of working.
- Attendees will co-create practical tools and renewed inspiration to effect change within their library spheres of influence.
