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mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social
Academic and Museum Librarian. Focus on epistemology, data librarianship, specialised libraries and archives. Bookish. Music enthusiast. LFC. African/Brazilian culture.
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The ideal librarian isn’t a gatekeeper. They’re a conversation catalyst—curious, participatory, radically open. They don’t just “give access”; they co-create knowledge with their community.

submitted 60 days ago • 2 comments

Pope Francis spoke of the poor not as objects of charity, but as bearers of divine knowledge. May he rest in peace — and may we inherit his refusal to look away.

submitted 60 days ago • 0 comments

So where do we go from here? Rebuild the mythic imagination. Teach novels like sacred texts. Let students enter the labyrinth of story. Because inside, there are mirrors. And minotaurs. And meaning.

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

There's broad agreement that students aren't reading enough literature. I wrote about Ralph Ellison's approach to teaching American fiction just after Brown v Board. Learning from him might help us think about where to go from here. libertiesjournal.com/articles/ell...

submitted 259 days ago • 13 comments

Obscurantism isn’t just about hiding facts; it’s about creating a world where questioning becomes too exhausting to bother.

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard pulls us back to earth. Her materialism is not one of cold facts, but of an engaged witness to the struggle between beauty and brutality, the sacredness in decay.

submitted 63 days ago • 1 comment

The decline of philology begins in the late 19th century, when it splintered into specialized disciplines: linguistics, literary studies, anthropology. Its holistic methodology was seen as imprecise in the emerging positivist academy.

submitted 63 days ago • 3 comments

PEN International speaks of freedom, but who will speak of slow decay? Of the forgotten scripts, the orphaned dialects?

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

When knowledge is framed as a threat, surveillance becomes pedagogy. What’s at stake isn’t one institution—it’s the soul of higher education itself.

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

Anne Carson’s Nox redefines elegy through fragmentation, lexicon, and palimpsest. It resists closure, memorializing grief as a living, destabilized archive. Few American texts articulate mourning with such epistemological finesse.

submitted 63 days ago • 3 comments

We must reject the narrative that libraries are “nice extras.” They are critical infrastructure for democracy, literacy, and justice. Framing them as social infrastructure (à la Eric Klinenberg) gives us leverage to demand proper investment.

submitted 64 days ago • 6 comments

"“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” @edrabinski.bsky.social said." 📚 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

submitted 65 days ago • 3 comments

Mbembe: “Necropolitics is the power to dictate who may live and who must die.”

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

It really is the final form of capitalism that we wake up every morning to be subjected to the innermost banalities of the world’s wealthiest-ever human being. Never before in human history have so many had to look at so little.

submitted 65 days ago • 5 comments

China rewards discipline and strategic investment. The U.S. rewards quarterly profits, dopamine hits, and clickbait.

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

As a citizen of an imperial nation, that, with Brexit, had its own unforced implosion: I think the thing that will hurt Americans most in the end isn’t the mockery, it’s the indifference as people move on from you. “We are the world’s laughing stock!” “No. They’re not even thinking about us.”

submitted 65 days ago • 12 comments

They’ve made distraction the opiate, and called it “news.” Meanwhile, they extract the marrow of the planet, quietly, efficiently. This is not incompetence. It’s choreography.

submitted 66 days ago • 0 comments