Spells and Counter-Spells of Collective Attention: Community Libraries and their Attentional Devices for the Coemergence of Worlds

Abstract

The text discusses collective attention, from the Ecology of Attention, as a dimension of production of attentional regimes that bewitch the worlds, conditioning perception, experiences and the stories we tell to inhabit them.  Following the modes of constitution of the technical activities of formation and organization of library collections, we locate spells that modulate the experience of those who frequent them around hegemonic ways of paying attention, promoting the erasure of the diversity of knowledge and of localized and embodied worlds.  We present modes of functioning of community libraries as attentional counterspells, capable of promoting the re-existence of marginalized worlds and the heterogeneity of relations between libraries and communities.