Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 6 - February 12, 2025
At the beginning of the 21st century, an incredible assortment of media including books are readily available to anyone with a computer, tablet, smartphone, and an Internet connection, so what is the point of trying to ban a book from the public library or remove it from the school curriculum? This book attempts to provide some answers to this question.
As stated throughout the book, the practices of censorship demonstrate the relationship between knowledge and power.
“As far as the parents are concerned,” she says, “this issue is not about book banning but about parents’ rights, accountability transparency, and trust in our public school system.”
She notes that, for her, Alexie’s book crosses the line into indecency and the fact that the district would require students to read such a “controversial” book means that it has lowered the bar for obscenity in school.
The Westfield case was one of 464 book challenges that, according to statistics from the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), took place across the country in 2012. Between 2000 and 2013, the OIF logged 6,544 challenges in all 50 states.[1]
Book challenges are requests by members of the public to remove, relocate, or restrict books from or within institutions.
Def
it should be noted that both relocation and restriction restrict user access to information.
practices can be either proactive or reactive. Proactive censorship focuses on the creation and production of materials.
According to Julian Petley, it is difficult to measure the efficacy of the acts but is probably that such acts encourage authors to self-censor.[5]
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Research
in the United States, censorship is often associated with a particular individual’s influence over the wider society or local community rather than the state.
Challengers wield their power using the tools of state, but their actions are often the work of either one individual or a small group of individuals.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease
It includes discourses that inform and surround such practices as book burning, state-sponsored filtering of the Internet, and technological antiprivacy measures.
As will be demonstrated in this study, challengers to materials in public institutions in the United States employ discourses that focus on the safety of public institutions, the decline of morality in society, and the nature of reading.
Robert P. Doyle’s triennial Banned Books Resource Guide (Banned Books: Challenging Our Freedom to Read), published by the ALA, is a well-known example of bibliography on censorship. It lists and describes challenge cases throughout the United States.[14]
Source
One example of this area of intellectual freedom research is an article from the 1980s in which the authors, Norman Poppel and Edwin M. Ashley, found that censors have two motivations behind their actions: first, they have a high sense of community, and second, one of their primary concerns revolves around the moral development of their children.[19]
this study. Two recent dissertations in library and information science (LIS) also provide empirical analysis of challengers’ arguments. The first, by Kelly Kingrey, explores how conservative Christian groups understand the terms “intellectual freedom” and “censorship” and how these concepts are related to their definitions of rights and responsibilities.[21]
Loretta Gaffney, uses reader-response theory to explore how conservative social groups understand the importance of public libraries in communities, the practice of reading, and the meaning of access to information.[22]
First, that individuals have the right to a belief and to express that belief. Second, that society is committed to allowing access to information by all.[27]
John Stuart Mill, whose treatise On Liberty argues that in order to know that one’s beliefs are correct, it is imperative to hear the arguments of those who disagree with
“Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause, or movement may be explored.”[30]
“freedom to think or believe what one will, freedom to express one’s thought and beliefs in unrestricted manners and means, and freedom to access information and ideas regardless of the content or viewpoints of the author(s) or the age, background, or beliefs of the receiver.”[31]
Following from their work in their native South Africa, Lor and Britz argue that knowledge societies cannot exist without freedom of access to information and that impeding the distribution
information ultimately leads to corruption of institutions, including the state.
According to Burke, different types of knowledge can be classified as dichotomous pairs: theoretical knowledge is commonly paired with and against practical knowledge while high and low, liberal and useful, as well as specialized and universal also form dichotomous pairs of knowledge.[33]
the arguments that challengers give regarding what is appropriate for children is often based on their own anxieties and concerns rather than those of children themselves.
However, since the definition of censorship is both unsettled, and calling certain individuals or groups “censors” is highly political and somewhat pejorative, the term will not be used to describe the individuals in this study.
They are constituted as an interpretive community that shares a particular symbolic universe and worldview—especially with regard to texts.
Fish argues that it is people’s experiences that give text structure and that meaning is only created through interpretation.
However, challengers’ actions raise the question of why they are concerned about some books that are required reading and not others.
In the United States many books are challenged for their sexual or political content, but this parent was concerned about the violence in the text.
“A line has been crossed.” “I needed to say something.” “The books will damage children.”
The analysis in this study is based in the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality.[3] In this classic treatise in the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann explore how reality is constructed through everyday knowledge that is transmitted and maintained through society and its institutions.
Schutz and Luckmann note that these types are abstract, incomplete, relative, and relevant to the situation at hand. That is, they do not provide a “complete picture” but are used as a heuristic device to interpret situations and objects in one’s life.
An individual’s particular understanding of “what a library should do” or “what a school should be” within
community is based on a typification of “library” and “school.”
Objective reality, that is, the reality of everyday life, is constructed through processes of institutionalization and legitimation.
First, they have a “law-giving” quality and allow for everyday life to have complete integration.
For Berger, Luckmann, and Schutz, the constitutive view of language is axiomatic.
As will be demonstrated in the analysis chapters, challengers use their symbolic power as citizens, parents, and taxpayers in challenge cases in order to shape public institutions in their communities.
According to Bourdieu, constructions within the social world have three attributes: First, they are always subject to structure. Second, cognition is socially structured. Finally, practices are both individual and
Bourdieu’s well-known concept of habitus comes out of these three points—it is what produces structure for classification within the world.
Capital refers to an individual’s “accumulated labor which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.”[9]
According to Bourdieu, there are four different types of capital that an individual possesses: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic.
That is, symbolic capital is economic capital in a different form. For example, when challengers describe themselves as “taxpayers” they are conveying the idea that they have a certain kind of fiscal authority over public institutions.
It is the combination of symbolic capital and symbolic power that delineates the knowledge classification struggles found in challenge cases.
These cases are a struggle for domination over who has the authority to determine the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge in the public sphere.
Bourdieu describes this struggle as a form of symbolic violence in which hegemonic norms and procedures are used by one group to dominate over another.[12]
In his book on understanding and managing challenges titled The New Inquisition, James LaRue, a former public library director, argues that book challenges are essentially about respect for writing: Behind the challenges of many patrons is awe of the written word. This may well be rooted in the profound respect granted to the Bible, based on several factors but not least upon its endurance. This belief, incidentally, is also shared by the secular left, which
believes education—mainly exposure to the written word—is also very powerful.[13]
