Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper asks how libraries have rhythmed women’s education and everyday lives. It draws on women’s narratives of library use in a multicultural suburb of Birmingham, UK. It shows that women’s use of libraries exists in rhythmic relations with other times and places, both public and private. The narratives reveal the value of the library in offering space for women to claim time for themselves in the Lefebvrian “weak time, the stops, silences, blanks”. Routines, cycles and continuity of use over various scales are important in women’s engagements with libraries. Memorable too are particular moments. Punctuating the quotidian rhythms of library use, these moments are individual stories of rupture; times of great significance in women’s lives. Changes to library provision have, therefore, rhythmic consequences, with reduced opening hours and library closure bringing arrhythmia. Through the library, women are linked to particular histories and they enter into shared rhythms, within both the present and the past. Libraries, this paper argues, offer not only an important public space but also public time. 1
Highlights
“The library”, wrote Jorge Luis Borges (2000, p. 85), “is unlimited and cyclical”
Women are linked to particular histories and they enter into shared rhythms, within both the present and the past
I present a rhythmanalytical investigation of narratives collected in conversation with twenty-five women in Hall Green, a multicultural suburb of Birmingham in the United Kingdom
Summary
“The library”, wrote Jorge Luis Borges (2000, p. 85), “is unlimited and cyclical”. Borges here captures concerns with space and with time. Like Borges’ conception of the library, and drawing especially on Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (2004), this paper unites the spatial and the temporal to ask how libraries have rhythmed women’s education and everyday lives. This focus on women’s experiences of libraries is not accidental. This paper argues that temporal concerns are often overlooked and that libraries offer important public space but public time. The final section considers how certain experiences might puncture the everyday and how these memorable experiences or “moments” find the library acting as a site for women to enter into shared rhythms on a different scale and for personal histories to be linked to social histories
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
