Wayward Classification
Location
This week we’ll be meeting in the Info Commons Training Lab at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Library, at Grand Army Plaza, at 4pm for a classification workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed. If there’s any chance you can come a bit early or stay a bit late, you might want to check out the Department of Transformation’s Letters to the Future exhibition in the Grand Lobby 📬🔮
Agenda
In an ideal world, we would’ve started our “semester” with this lesson about intellectual or conceptual misfits — but the stars aligned such that we began our exploration with the big and concrete: the city. Then we considered misfit spaces, misfit species, things that (mis)fit in boxes, and now, finally, here we are: examining an intellectual architecture that undergirds all of the aforementioned realms — classification. This week we examine the epistemological infrastructures — plural — into which we fit our knowledge. As always, we’re most interested in those ornery, slippery, defiant ideas that simply will not fit. We’ll discuss these themes and engage in a classification exercise with my friend, artist-learner Kameelah Janan Rasheed.
To Prepare for This Week
- Please introduce yourselves to Kameelah by reading Jazmie Hughes and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Kameelah Janan Rasheed Wants to Name Names,” Broadcast (Pioneer Works, September 10, 2025), browsing through her website, and watching this 2021 Art21 video [7:55].
- Now, let’s think about the history and politics of dominant classification systems — which make misfits of non-normative ideas and marginalized identities — by engaging with one of the BPL’s own award-winning podcasts. Listen to Adwoa Adusei, Krissa Corbett Cavouras, et. al., “Decolonizing Dewey,” Borrowed & Returned 5:3 (Brooklyn Public Library, February 2022) [24:50].
- Adusei and Cavouras discuss the work of radical reformer librarians like Dorothy Porter Wesley and Sandy Berman. Let’s explore some additional alternatives: Watch Amanda Belantara, Emily Drabinski, et al., “Equity in Action Recipient Presentation: CUNY Graduate Center & NYU Libraries,” METRO NY Library Council (October 31, 2022). [video: 33:35] and skim this “List of Alternative Classifications” from the Cataloging Lab.
- Violet Fox, creator of the Cataloging Lab, is mentioned in this article exploring the threats that AI and commercial vendors pose to classification: Mike Olson, “Beyond Classification: The Human Cost of Library and Information Labor Under Digital Capitalism,” Scholarly Kitchen (August 26, 2025).
- Let’s close by drawing inspiration from Kameelah’s work in celebrating the value of the unclassifiable, the misfit — particularly in this age of automated flattening and enforced conformity.
- Consider:Where do you see weird / delightful / frustrating “ontologies” — or ways of mapping a field of knowledge — in your everyday life? Odd shelf- or aisle-mates at the grocery store? Funny file structures? Ridiculous drop-down menus on online forms? Or, thinking back to our Storefront visit, unexpected spatial juxtapositions, like that psychic / upholstery cleaner business in Hudson, NY? 🙂
- Tour the Holotypic Occlupanic Research Group’s Database of Synthetic Taxonomy.
- Read Matt Levin, “Listening to Harold Bloom’s Laugh and DeLillo’s Bronx Accent,” The Paris Review (March 12, 2018).
- Explore Mimi Onuoha’s Library of Missing Datasets (2016).
Fieldwork Documentation
Supplemental Resources
- Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham University Press, 2017).
- Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, “Working Knowledge: Catalogers and the Stories They Tell,” KULA: Knowledge, Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6:3 (2022).
- Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Library Juice Press, 2025).
- Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press, 2000).
- Alicia Colson, Michael Makwa Auksi, and George Kenny, “On the Tracks to Translating Indigenous Knowledge,” Sapiens (June 25, 2024).
- Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject,” in On the Museum’s Ruins (MIT Press, 1993): 44-61.Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” Library Quarterly 83:2 (2013).
- Laura Helton, “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading,” PMLA 134:1 (2019): 99-120.
- Sara A. Howards and Steven A. Knowlton, “Browsing Through Bias: The Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings for African American Studies and LGBTQIA Studies,” Library Trends 67:1 (2018).
- Sasha Frizzell, “Classification from the Margins: Three Alternative Classification Systems, 1930 – 1975,” Library Scholarship 75 (2023).
- Tara Kunesh and Jude Romines, “Changing the Subject: The Homosaurus in Emory University’s Library Catalogue,” Catalogue & Index 210 (2025).
- Maria Esther Maciel, “The Unclassifiable,” in “Problematicizing Global Knowledge,” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 47-50.
- Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructures and Logics” and “Ordering Logics” in “Data, Archive, Infrastructure” Class, The New School (2018) – on Borges, Warburg, Perec, Prelinger, etc.
- Bethany McAuliffe, “Queer Identities, Queer Content and Library Classification: Is Queering the Catalogue the Answer?” Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association 70:2 (2021): 213-9.
- Matt Miller, “Nomadic Classification: Classmark History and New Browsing Tool,” NYPL Labs (January 27, 2016).
- Hope A. Olson, “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs,” Signs 26:3 (2001): 639-68.Mike Olson, “Classification as Colonization: The Hidden Politics of Library Catalogs,” Scholarly Kitchen (March 25, 2025).
- Beth Patin et al, “At the Margins of Epistemology: Amplifying Alternative Ways of Knowing in Library and Information Science,” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 58:1 (2021): 630-33.
- Katherine Quinn, “The Bookshelf’s ‘Magic Circle’: An Ethnographic Study of Classificatory Encounters in Library Spaces,” Poetics 103 (April 2024).
- Matthew Wills, “Out of the Card Catalog Closet,” JStor Daily (October 14, 2022).