3A - Reflections on Class #2

When I came across the Dictionary of Terrorism at one of the tables our group visited near the end of the night, I definitely paused a moment. What would a dictionary about terrorism be hoping to accomplish? How would it differ from an encyclopedia on terrorism, or a literature review of terrorism studies, or any number of other framings for this kind of work?

Over the last couple of decades, terrorism and the war against terrorist organizations has shaped so much of our society, from media coverage of government decisions to airport security to our expectations of safety and measures to protect our safety. As the cliché goes, we're living in a post-9/11 world. But I think the "knowing" of terrorism has influenced us hugely as well: the ways in which we know, or frequently don't know, about the behavior of our government; the shadow precision (and imprecision) of drone strikes; the broad interpretation of the Authorization for Use of Military Force to include "associated forces," a notoriously ambiguous category that has been used as a catch-all for all kinds of U.S. military action abroad. At the core of each of these is a tenuous balance of ambiguity and secrecy, selective enforcement, and organizations that often feel entitled to make decisions on our behalf without our knowledge.

In light of this all, I was curious whether a dictionary of terrorism would attempt to make definitive statements (as dictionaries tend to!) without regard to the politics of knowing and secrecy, or instead describe those processes and help the readers decipher and actively consider those processes, or something else entirely. Any approach such a book takes will inevitably express a political project, and I wondered whether this particular book would see its project as allied to academia, or the American public, or defense institutions, or some complicated balance of them all. I tried to scan the book quickly in the time allotted, but all I could really determine is that (1) according to the Acknowledgments, the editor was relying on a pretty wide net of information sources, from lawyers to professors to librarians to archivists, (2) the structure of the book did seem to imply that each entry included a definitive "definition" that seemed to often literally refer to the entity listed rather than the discourse surrounding that entity, and (3) at least according to the table of contents there didn't seem to be a real transparent discussion of the decisions of what to include and why. But really these are just very quick impressions and don't tell the whole story.

I think I was drawn to this strange dictionary and the questions it raises because it seems to point to this vision of librarianship as a way to deal with those murky conflicting goals and create a space for people to come up with their own answers, and also formulate their own questions without an agenda. Maybe this dictionary would spark conversations with regular patrons who are veterans with disabilities, or kids from immigrant families, or somebody working on a project for school. I've been trying to figure out what kind of role I want to play in communities and research and social justice, and this process involves a lot of flailing and false starts, but I found there to be something comforting in geeking out about a really specific reference book in this way. I'm continuing to think on it, but I'm happy I found this book.