Useful Prelude

[Audio Description]

Hello! This is Useful! As a part of the work I’m doing for my Masters in Library and Information Sciences, I want to explore ways to combine my love for oral history, archives and preservation and semiotics and cultural analysis.

Many people do these things every day without realizing it. Any “nerd” who can tell you every detail about their collection of objects that others may not care about is doing what I’m doing. At the end of the day, it’s telling stories about the histories of those objects, why they were made, why they mattered, and to a certain extent, when they stopped being useful.

I originally wanted to name this project “Obsolescence” because that is my creative engine for pursuing a lot of the artistic and intellectual and spiritual work I do. For me, obsolescence simply means “something no longer being useful.” But who determines that? What is the process of determining that? Why does it even matter?

I plan on doing lots of different types of work in this space. My first main project over the next year or so is to focus on children’s literature, because I have become very aware of how so many of the conflicts occurring in our world are shaping how children today and children in the future will think about their lives. I’m not attempting to save anyone, but I want to see how U.S. society in particular has talked about childhood through children’s literature and what our society has wanted children to believe about what it means to be alive.

In the future, I won’t just focus on “family-friendly” content like this, because I believe so many different concepts in our society have fascinating stories to tell. So if there’s a future series on say “instruments of torture,” just know I said it here first.

Currently, I’m working with an audio format with audio descriptions for accessibility, as I would prefer to speak my words aloud and have a more conversational flow. So at times, it may seem really academic or intellectual, which mean different things to me, and at times, it may seem like talking to an acquaintance that you have a passing respect for. I’m not attempting to convince anyone of anything, but my faith and religious background guides me to believe that we’re all interdependent, so regardless of how we may feel about each other’s thoughts and feelings, we’re dependent on them. So, I want to investigate what those thoughts and feelings were and are, and how they may have changed over time as our world changes.

I’d like to end with a quote from philosopher Michele Moody-Adams, a huge inspiration as to why I decided to go back to grad school because of her work on the role of collective memory for democracy and societies in general:

“[W]e have a moral interest in history and [this] interest should guide moral reflection and moral education at every stage of human development. Few would deny that we have an epistemic interest in history. But comprehensive historical understanding is also a central element of the information we need to be responsible moral agents. It is also a critical support of the morality that makes political cooperation possible, especially in any society shaped by a history of ethnic or racial injustice, colonialism, imperialism, or sectarian conflict. “