About Rebecca Tolley
Rebecca Tolley is an artist, educator, and systems thinker interested in what happens when institutions designed for imagined people encounter actual human beings.
For three decades I’ve worked in and around libraries and higher education as a librarian, professor, adjunct, teacher, writer, and facilitator. Much of my work begins with something that doesn’t quite fit, like the invisible labor holding a system together, or the workaround everyone relies on but nobody has documented, or the policy assuming everyone experiences an institution the same way, and even the person being treated as the problem when the system itself deserves another look.
I am especially interested in the distance between how institutions imagine the work and how people actually experience them.
Trauma-informed practice gave me an important framework for investigating that distance. My earlier work focused particularly on trauma-informed librarianship and the ways libraries might better understand trauma among both employees and the communities they serve. That work remains foundational to what I do, but led me toward larger questions about accessibility, organizational culture, labor, power, care, agency, preparedness, and institutional responsibility.
Increasingly, I find myself asking:
Who is the imagined person at the center of this system?
What are they assumed to know? What can their body supposedly do? How quickly can they process information? How much uncertainty, emotional labor, sensory input, or institutional dysfunction are they expected to absorb? Who thrives under those assumptions, and who is asked to compensate when they don’t fit?
Those questions travel surprisingly well.
They shape my work on trauma-informed libraries and organizational culture. They inform my teaching about gender, power, care, and knowledge. They appear in my work around emergency preparedness and accessibility. And they follow me into my textile practice and my interest in making, material knowledge, and questions about whose form of experience institutions recognize.
Libraries are where much of this began
I am Professor and Director of Academic Research Services at East Tennessee State University’s Sherrod Library where my work encompasses research services, instruction, leadership, and the complicated everyday business of helping human being navigate institutions and information.
My scholarship and professional education have explored trauma-informed librarianship, organizational culture, library service, leadership, and systems surrounding library work. I have taught and spoken for libraries, professional associations and higher-education organizations nationally.
But I am less interested in offering organizations a collection of best practices than in helping people see what has become ordinary.
Once an assumption becomes visible, we can ask better question about it:
What should we preserve?
What should we question?
What could we redesign?
And what have we asked individuals to carry that properly belongs to the system?
I also make things
My studio practice in textiles and fiber is not separate from these questions.
Making taught me to value embodied and material knowledge, improvisation, repair, irregularity, inherited practice, and forms of expertise that institutions don’t always know how to recognize. I’m interested in what happens when we take those ways of knowing as seriously as the knowledge populating policies, databases, classrooms, and professional credentials.
Sometimes my research looks like an article.
Sometimes it looks like a workshop.
Sometimes it looks like a classroom full of students trying to figure out who gets to produce knowledge.
And sometimes it looks like fabric spread across a table.
I increasingly think these are versions of the same work.
What I’m working on now
My current work explores humane institutional systems, invisible labor, accessibility, organizational responsibility, making and material knowledge, and the design of emergency preparedness education.
My developing project, Prepared, Not Traumatized asks how libraries can examine preparedness education through effectiveness, agency, accessibility, and psychological safety while preserving useful safety information but also questioning unnecessary assumptions about the bodies and nervous systems expected to act upon it.
Across all of this work, the question underneath is simple:
What happens when we design institutions around the people who are actually here?
