A major part of the development of the Character Defining game was the curation and amassing of the books needed to run the session. Taking my initial estimate of a maximum of 15 players attending, all of whom would need to select 16 books to generate the prompts for their important characters, left me with a base number of 288 items to identify and locate – but probably more would be needed given the probability that some items would be chosen twice and require alternatives or replacements. Working from the fact that selections would be made from decks of cards and dice, I multiplied the 52 cards by 6 to arrive at a list of 312 books.
Each card suit was then allocated a theme: place (cities), people (professions), objects and events. The principle being that these areas would encourage relations to lived experiences. The thirteen sub-headings were then allocated their terms from archetype-lists; for example the cities that provided the 13 place cards were drawn from a list of the world’s most important cities. I made adjustments, adding balance; for example, moving some cities from the Global South up the list. Once the prompts were set, the task began to identify six books for each card.
As a librarian this task spoke to my profession and specifically the work I do teaching referencing practice and discussing citational justice with UAL’s research students. As I made selections, I had in mind this statement by Kieran Healy regarding citational justice: “Highly cited articles become the centres of gravity that define what a field is about… Success means you structure the substance of the field.” (Healy, 2015) In response to this, I choose six books for each prompt that would include as diverse a range of voices and practices, that would necessarily challenge a notion of a centre or singular way of approaching each theme. Another great citational justice principle I hoped would transfer over into this random/curated approach to accessing book, was the idea of open and “promiscuous reading”, of looking at things from new and inspiring angles indiscriminately across topics. (Craven, 2021) Whilst, it may not be apparent to the players as they took part in the game, every step of the way was informed by practices of citational justice, that aimed to increase and surprise by the range depth and variety of artists, writers and practices it presented.
In a manner not untypical to action research projects, this part of the process added a new space for reflection for me as a professional librarian. Our assessment of our collection has been made according to reading lists and new acquisitions, which of course bring in new ideas and studies, in line with a range of decolonising and social justice aims. However, a deeper analysis as to the shape and form of our historical holdings has not been carried out. The data I derived from making several thousand keyword searches across a range of archetypical themes was very revealing. The disparity in depth and range across geographical location being very apparent, as too was the intense focus on certain aspects of social justice themes and the minimalization of others. These observations are still very much anecdotal in tone rather than analytical. They do however suggest a future research project that takes a more systematic approach to our collection’s scope, accessed through archetypical keywords.
After a long and intensive selection and gathering process, the following bibliographical lists were gathered.
References
Craven, C. (2021) ‘Teaching Antiracist Citational Politics as a Project of Transformation: Lessons from the Cite Black Women Movement for White Feminist Anthropologists’, Feminist Anthropology, 2(1), pp. 120–129. doi: 10.1002/fea2.12036.
Healy, K. (2015) Gender and Citation in Four General-Interest Philosophy Journals, 1993-2013. Available at: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/02/25/gender-and-citation-in-four-general-interest-philosophy-journals-1993-2013/ (Accessed: Jan 8, 2025).