"All Are Welcome"? Unpacking Struggles for Hegemony in Urban Public Libraries

Despite their role as anchor institutions with service-related objectives, public libraries in the United States frequently have complex and contradictory relationships with the communities they are intended to serve. Simultaneously democratic institutions and sites of social reproduction, U.S. public libraries have been—and often continue to be—spaces in which white middle-class values are supported and normalized and any divergence from those values is denigrated or excluded. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between public libraries and the communities they serve, with particular attention to the ways that libraries function both as sites of resistance to racial capitalism and sites of the reproduction of dominant cultural values. In order to investigate the intricate ties between urban public libraries and the communities they serve, I conducted an interpretive qualitative study that included oral history interviews with 13 librarians and archivists from urban U.S. locations and a deep and iterative investigation of digital and print archival material related to the history of the Chicago Public Library in the Near North Side Community Area. In this dissertation, I present a deep consideration of the ties between urban public libraries and urban communities. I explore cultural, social, spatial, and economic struggles occurring in and over the urban public library and uncover multifaceted struggles related to (a) access in and of the public library, (b) professional neutrality and its relationship to culturally relevant practice, and (c) safety and security in library spaces. By bringing attention not only to the culturally responsive work being done in urban public libraries but also to ways in which the librarians doing this work must struggle with the ongoing legacy of white supremacy in U.S. public library practices (and sometimes within themselves), the results of this research have the potential to influence public library policy. This project, while acknowledging the complexities and contradictions in the work done by anchor institutions like the public library, has the additional potential to add a fresh perspective to the body of research demonstrating the crucial roles 21st-century U.S. public libraries play in their communities.