We’ve been there before, or we’ve known students who have been there: the student that arrives on campus, looks at the library, and isn’t sure where to begin or whether they belong. The building itself is imposing. The volume of materials is vast to sort through. I remember being so intimidated by the reference librarians that I went to the reference department to use chat instead of talking to a person face to face. (Thank goodness the NCSU Libraries were early chat adopters!)
When a student finally makes their way to the library, it’s more than a service transaction. We all know that a sense of belonging helps people feel comfortable using the library. Belonging as a student, a scholar, a researcher enables a person to produce, evaluate, and build on knowledge. The library doesn’t merely deliver information, but creates the conditions under which a person can become a knower.
Harding’s standpoint theory holds that where you stand shapes what you can know. Exclusion from epistemic communities isn’t just unfair, it’s a structural constraint on inquiry itself. A new student’s moment of recognition, feeling seen, that they belong here, is the moment that student gains a foothold in the epistemic community of the university. That’s not merely affective but rather it’s a structural shift. This is why Shera and Egan’s social epistemology has been so central to my thinking. It’s the social in social epistemology, and the architecture of belonging is part of the architecture of knowledge.
Epistemic belonging is not evenly distributed, and the uneven distribution is the structural consequence of what standpoint theory describes. First-generation students, students from under-resourced schools, students navigating institutional culture for the first time are precisely the people for whom the conditions of knowing are least present before they arrive. Libraries are one of the few institutions structurally positioned to address this, not by delivering more information, but by extending the conditions of inquiry to people who haven’t yet had access to them. This is what “epistemic infrastructure” means at the human scale.
The people doing this work are often public services colleagues. A lot of our profession’s training in this area is focused on customer service and user experience. And this is certainly part of the tool kit and expertise that access and public services staff provide! But I also think that on a more foundational level these colleagues are doing epistemic labor: creating, moment by moment and person by person, the conditions under which a broader range of people can become knowers. That labor takes the form of precision, presence, partnership. My library recently read Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job which has led to a number of thoughtful discussions about the importance of Connective Labor and the work that we do, especially in the context of AI. (More on that in the next post.)
AI can deliver information. But AI cannot see the student at the door, extend belonging, or create the felt sense of “I am someone who is allowed to ask questions here.” The epistemic function that most urgently needs doing right now is not synthesis or retrieval. It is the creation of knowers, and that requires a human who is paying attention.
When I used the new chat feature to connect with that reference librarian in college, she ended up being so friendly and helpful that I revealed that I was actually in the same room and could come over to talk in more detail. She didn’t shame me for that; she welcomed me. She made me feel like my question was interesting and welcomed me into a community of people interested in learning. And I returned again and again. All aspects of library work contribute to the learning and research mission of our institutions, but none of that will matter if people don’t feel that they are members of our epistemic communities.
This is a post in an ongoing project exploring libraries, knowledge, and the epistemic stakes of artificial intelligence. I’m drawing on social epistemology, feminist theory, and two decades of practice in academic libraries.