After Disruption

Reviews / Votes

"After Disruption provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by cultural memory institutions today and suggests how we might get out of the mess we're in. It critiques modern management theory as applied to libraries to explain how we got ourselves into the mess. And it offers a thoughtful explanation and expansion of the radical futurity/possibility literature on cultural memory to propose ways we might get out of it. This book will be of value to workers in memory institutions, especially libraries and archives, and students interested in working in them." -- Steven Lubar, Brown University "Trevor Owens' After Disruption is a highly compelling look into the rhetorical, educational, managerial, and economic histories of the Silicon Valley ideologies that have come to dominate US organizational life and-in particular-the ways those ideologies about the future imperil cultural memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums and render the lives of those who work for them precarious." -- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University "Who gets to imagine the future and map our pathways there? Integrating a broadly interdisciplinary web of critical and cultural theory and activism with library and archival practice, Trevor Owens offers a compelling case for memory workers to look beyond the impoverished and risky speculations conjured up by commercial technologists and management consultants, and to instead imagine a future rooted in human and ecological flourishing." -- Shannon Mattern, University of Pennsylvania "The great value of this passionately argued book lies not just in its keen diagnosis of the dominant and problematic frameworks that have engulfed cultural heritage institutions and other sites dedicated to the preservation of our shared memory, but in Owens' strategies for regaining agency-finding ways that memory workers and organizations can shape their own future, a more just future that reflects and supports the needs of the diverse communities they serve." -- Dan Cohen, Northeastern University "This is a hopeful and generative book, synthesizing insights from fields that see maintenance, care, and repair as central to memory work and the creation of better worlds. Owens teaches us to think, feel, labor, and trust our collective way past "bankrupt ideologies," to a living and sustainable future for cultural memory and those who build it." -- Bethany Nowviskie, James Madison University Libraries "Employing a semi-autobiograhical narrative interwoven with data, secondary research, and analysis, this book will interest scholars and practitioners of the digital humanities, library and information science, museum studies, public history, data science, and technology studies. Rated: recommended." -- CHOICE "As an information and digital history leader, Trevor Owens invites fellow decision-makers to reassess the expectations and potential of their organizations in the digital present...Owens's approach to cultural memory workplace and institutional mindset makes After Disruption distinct from [other] texts." -- Public Historian