The Slow Professor

Hope and hopelessness

Feeling Revolutionary is feeling that our current situation is not enough [...]. Feeling revolutionary opens up the space to imagine a collective escape [...]. Practicing educated hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, [...] is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be.

Duggan, L., & Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Hope and hopelessness: A dialogue. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19(2), 275–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407700903064946

Consensus and Privilege

Consensus is produced by privileging particular perspectives.

Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, 35(3), 101770. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101770

Fuzzy's January 2025

I listened to three audiobooks this month, which is two more than I usually do. I also read academic books, articles and more, as well as blogs, stories and news online. This has brought a lot of amazing ideas and concepts to my mind and inspired me to write and blog more. It has also made me feel anxious, but the latter is more due to the current state of the world. It's been a January, you know.

I cannot begin to explain to you the disappointment I felt on finding out that “match my freak” was a sexual thing and not a level of how insane you are with your friends

life's too short to write for an imaginary critic that you fear will hate what you wrote

Researching the Code of Laws in Civ7 feels so ironic at the moment.

My name is Fuzzy

Hearing someone say my Twitter and Tumblr username out loud is pretty much a spiritual experience.

Oseman, A. (2018). I was born for this. HarperCollins Children’s Books.

I can't overstate how much this quote means to me. So many years ago I came up with the username Leapfrog for a wiki page. It's based on a method used in numerical analysis and it is used in numerical weather prediction models, which is what I was working on at the time. Not much later, I started my first public social media profile, but Leapfrog was already taken. So I added Fuzzy. It's based on fuzzy logic, so again something I was just learning about. Whereas Boolean logic is based on only two truth values,

Fuzzy logic [...] is a special many-valued logic which aims at providing formal background for the graded approach to vagueness.

Novák, V., Perfilieva, I., & Močkoř, J. (1999). Mathematical Principles of Fuzzy Logic. Springer.

That is how I became FuzzyLeapfrog, or simply Fuzzy.

Both words capture my nature and soul very well. I always try to find a numerical solution, while acknowledging that the world is more complex and vague than that.

So I've been called Fuzzy online for over a decade now, but gradually Fuzzy has also found its way into offline interactions. It's not just about me though. So many people I meet offline are people I met online and we very often address each other with our online names anyway. This has brought me so much joy and probably caused a lot of confusion for people who are unfamiliar with our online names or even the concept of online names.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how often I hear it, having someone acknowledge our online connection by calling my Fuzzy loudly offline is an endless source of inner joy. I am Fuzzy.

Queering Libraries

While libraries have always been queer, libraries have not always been openly queer. And they still aren’t, although we’ve made some small strides.

What do you think it is that makes libraries (openly) queer?

[...] the white cishetallopatriarchy that continues to be the accepted norm in libraries, despite the harm it causes.

What are your thoughts on how we can change this?

Smith-Cruz, S., & Howard, S. A. (Hrsg.). (2024). Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Identity and Libraries. Volume One. Library Juice Press.

My thoughts

What is it that makes libraries (openly) queer?

It's the diversity of collections, the tags and classifications used to make collections accessible, the way collections are presented, the way libraries present themselves, the way libraries and librarians engage in reflection on societal norms as well as their own, and the way they speak out to support and care for the most vulnerable communities they serve. The line between being queer and being openly queer seems to be blurred. For some it's already being open to actively use queer tags. For others, it starts with reflection and open engagement. I certainly lean towards the latter. It's about self-reflection, engagement and using their institutional voices.

How can we change this?

Firstly, you cannot do it alone. Not as a single library, not as a single person. You need a community. You need communities. Not just to make change happen, but to understand what needs to change and how. Secondly, you need to listen to those who raise their voices on issues and aspects where your first reflex is to say that cannot be considered at the moment, or not until other issues or aspects have been addressed. It's not about doing everything at once, it's about adjusting plans, taking into account multi-faceted and multi-layered perspectives, planning ahead together and giving everyone a say. Third, don't let differences of opinion divide your community. Don't let differences of opinion divide your communities. Look at the bigger picture together. Care for all vulnerable communities. We are all human beings.

Teaching to transgress

Again and again, it was necessary to remind everyone that no education is politically neutral.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

This book has so many great quotes that made me think, reflect, scream and cry. Here are some of them in the order I read them, rather than in an organised way alongside my thoughts.

Sáenz, B. A. (2021). Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World. Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers.

They want us to read, but they do not want us to write.

This applies to so many different areas and aspects that it is almost universal. It is even more relevant in the current political climate in far too many countries. It's frightening and it all starts with banning books, restricting access to information and preventing people from gaining knowledge.

I don’t want you to live in the prison of my thoughts. I’m the only one who should be living there.

Ouch. That one hurt.

Happiness. What the hell did that mean? It had to be more than the absence of sadness.

I'd argue that happiness can't exist without sadness being around as well.

A lot of things happened outside the world of words.

Communicating without words is as much an art as communicating with words.

But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room.

Some people want queer people to disappear, but we're born this way, so there will always be queer people because people are born every day. You cannot make us disappear.

I wonder if people like me ever get to know what peace is like.

Not long ago I was full of hope that we could. I'm not as hopeful anymore.

[...] we will always live between exile and belonging.

Rarely have I read a better depiction of the range of emotions described by many members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The sense of exclusion versus the sense of belonging to a community. And the state of floating between the two.

Sometimes we have to be able to speak for those who can’t. That takes a lot of courage.

I always felt that it was much easier for me to stand up and speak for others than for myself. But it takes courage to do both.

We were both learning words and their meanings, and we were learning that the word 'friendship' wasn’t completely separate from the word 'love.'

Of course it isn't. Platonic love is just as strong and important and meaningful as romantic love.

It’s a beautiful thing to let the people you love see your pain.

It's just so damn hard.

How can we make them change if we’re not allowed to talk?

It's not just about banning books, restricting access to information and preventing people from gaining knowledge. It's also about banning people from expressing themselves, preventing them from telling their stories, and preventing people from passing on empathy and knowledge, because love and empathy are contageous.

Maybe we think that the value of our own freedom is worth less if everybody else has it. And we’re afraid. We’re afraid that, if someone wants what we have, they’re taking something away that belongs to us — and only to us.

Some people certainly think so.

But not everything we need to learn can be found in a book. Or rather, I’ve learned that people are books too.

Have you ever heard of living libraries? This is an amazing description of the idea behind them.

We were in this world, and we were going to fight to stay in it. Because it was ours. And one day the word “exile” would be no more.

Hope.

Hate is an emotional pandemic we have never found a cure for.

Hopelessness.