The study, conducted by Thomas A. Mattappallil of Rajagiri College of Social Sciences in Cochin, Saji Varghese of CHRIST University in Bangalore, and Jasmine Mathew of Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, draws on three semi-structured oral history interviews carried out in early 2022 with migrant workers who lived through the lockdown. Rather than treating these testimonies as raw data to be coded, the researchers read them as narrative performances: deliberate acts of self-making in which speakers negotiate dignity and identity within circumstances they did not choose. The authors argue that this approach reveals dimensions of freedom that conventional legal or policy analyses tend to miss.

At the theoretical heart of the paper lies a distinction borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who in his 1969 essays separated liberty into two strands. Negative liberty refers to freedom from external interference, the absence of obstacles placed by other people or by the state. Positive liberty, by contrast, concerns self-mastery: the capacity to be the author of one’s own life, to act according to one’s own purposes and values. The researchers’ central claim is that pandemic governance in India produced a paradox by operating on both registers at once. The state withdrew negative liberty through enforced immobility and confinement, while simultaneously compelling migrant workers to reconstruct positive liberty through their own moral and practical resources.

This paradox, the authors contend, exposes a structural weakness in liberal conceptions of freedom. Formal rights and juridical status mean little when material security collapses. Migrant workers in India, most of whom labour in the informal economy without contracts, social protection, or savings buffers, experienced the lockdown not as a temporary suspension of ordinary life but as an existential rupture. The loss of wages, housing precarity, and social exclusion combined to make the deprivation of negative liberty inseparable from the deprivation of the material conditions that any meaningful freedom presupposes. The study situates this finding within a broader body of scholarship on India’s informal labour, including work by Jan Breman on footloose labour and by researchers documenting the ‘crisis of mobility’ that saw workers walking hundreds of kilometres toward their home villages after transport systems shut down.

The analytical framework also draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which describes how modern states govern not only through coercion but by shaping conduct, expectations, and self-understanding. Pandemic measures in India, the paper suggests, functioned as techniques of security governance: containment zones, quarantine rules, and mobility restrictions that classified and managed populations in the name of collective health. Scholars of critical security studies, including Didier Bigo’s work on the securitization of migration and Ken Booth’s arguments about security as emancipation, provide the second theoretical pillar. From this perspective, the migrant testimonies become a lens for interrogating who gets protected by crisis governance and who bears its costs.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that freedom under lockdown was neither simply suppressed nor simply endured. Through close analysis of the interviews, the researchers show that workers articulated liberty in three interlocking ways. The first was ethical self-discipline: adopting routines, restraint, and self-regulation as a way of retaining agency when external choices had vanished. The second was relational care: sustaining obligations to family members, co-workers, and neighbours, which the authors interpret through feminist care ethics, notably Joan Tronto’s idea of caring democracy and Judith Jordan’s concept of relational resilience. In these accounts, freedom was not an individual possession but a practice sustained through connection to others.

The third mode was narrative self-making. Drawing on narrative theory, including Arthur Frank’s account of the wounded storyteller and Paul Ricoeur’s work on identity, the authors treat the interview itself as a site where freedom is enacted. Speaking about one’s suffering, ordering memory into a coherent account, and addressing an audience that acknowledges one’s experience are, in this reading, exercises of moral agency. The testimony does not merely describe a loss of liberty; it performs a claim to selfhood that coercion could not extinguish. Oral history scholarship, particularly Alessandro Portelli’s work on the form and meaning of personal stories, underpins this methodological stance.

The phenomenological dimension of the analysis adds a further layer. The authors engage with philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Havi Carel, whose work on illness as a phenomenological tool explores how embodied experience reshapes one’s sense of possibility. Related empirical research on the pandemic, including studies documenting slowed and disoriented time perception during COVID-19, suggests that confinement altered not only what people could do but how they experienced temporality itself. The migrant testimonies in this study are read against that backdrop: as accounts of people whose horizon of possible futures contracted dramatically, and who nonetheless found ways to reorient themselves within it.

The paper also contributes to debates on dignity under crisis conditions. Previous research on migrant labourers in India during the pandemic has documented profound human rights concerns, including the exclusion of informal workers from relief mechanisms and the mental health toll of sudden displacement. By foregrounding how workers themselves speak about dignity and selfhood, the new study shifts attention from policy failure alone to the moral lives of those affected. The authors note that particular care was taken during the interviews to avoid retraumatising participants, who provided informed verbal consent and are identified in the article only through pseudonyms, with identifying details altered to protect their identities.

Methodologically, the study is deliberately small in scale, resting on three interviews, and the authors are transparent that no datasets were generated or analysed beyond the qualitative material. Its contribution lies less in statistical generalisation than in theoretical refinement: demonstrating, through close reading, that liberty becomes a lived and contested practice rather than a purely juridical status. For scholars of mobility, governance, and crisis, the findings suggest that pandemic governance should be evaluated not only by epidemiological outcomes or economic costs, but by how it reshapes the conditions under which vulnerable populations can author their own lives. For a wider audience, the study offers a sobering insight: freedom, even in its most intimate forms, depends on the material and social scaffolding that crisis can strip away, and on the remarkable human capacity to rebuild meaning from within confinement.

Subject of Research: Migrant workers' lived experiences of liberty and freedom during India's COVID-19 lockdown

Article Title: Re-reading liberty: migrant testimonies and the paradox of freedom in pandemic India

Article References: Mattappallil, T. A., Varghese, S., & Mathew, J. (2026). Re-reading liberty: migrant testimonies and the paradox of freedom in pandemic India. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01721-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01721-0

Keywords: migrant labour, liberty, COVID-19 lockdown, India, oral history, narrative testimony, Isaiah Berlin, governmentality, critical security studies, human dignity, positive liberty, pandemic governance

The largest of the new awards, valued at $620,095, places Chen in the principal investigator’s seat for a project titled “Public Library Services for Older Adults in the AI Era: Status, Gaps, Solutions, and Recommendations.” Chen will collaborate with Ping Li of the City University of New York’s Queens College on an effort to strengthen public library services for older adults, a population that often faces the steepest barriers when new technologies arrive. The project will work directly with four public library systems in Illinois, New York, and Washington, DC, grounding its findings in the operational realities of institutions that serve millions of patrons. Rather than treating older adults as an afterthought in technology adoption, the research aims to develop new service models designed explicitly for this group in an era when artificial intelligence increasingly mediates access to information.

The deliverables planned for the project read like a practical roadmap for library systems nationwide. The team intends to produce practical guidelines for developing programs and services focused on older adults, training materials for librarians who must now field questions about AI tools they may never have used themselves, and literacy courses that teach older adults how to navigate AI-mediated information environments. The project will also generate evidence-based recommendations intended to inform library policy and practice, closing the loop between research findings and the institutional decisions that determine whether older patrons benefit from or are excluded by technological change. Both of Chen’s funded projects begin in September 2026 and are expected to run through August 2029, a three-year horizon that allows for iterative design, testing, and refinement across the partner library systems.

Chen’s second award, on which she serves as co-principal investigator, tackles a different frontier of the same technological shift. “ORAL-AI: High Efficacy Content Representation and User Engagement of Oral Digital Collections with Multimodal LLMs” is led by Haihua Chen of the University of North Texas and received $490,396. The project confronts a genuine technical problem: multimodal large language models—systems that can process combinations of text, audio, and images—are being promoted as tools for searching and summarizing archival collections, yet their limitations in the delicate context of oral history remain poorly understood. Oral histories are not ordinary documents. They carry the voices, cadences, and memories of individual narrators, often recounting events of profound historical significance, and errors introduced by an AI system can distort testimony in ways that violate archival integrity.

The ORAL-AI team plans to evaluate those limitations systematically and then build the infrastructure that responsible AI-assisted access requires. Central to the effort is a structured benchmark dataset, which will allow researchers to measure how well multimodal models actually perform on oral history materials rather than relying on anecdotal impressions. The project will also develop a modular, open-source framework supporting three capabilities: cross-modal retrieval, which lets users find relevant passages across different media types; evidence-grounded question answering, which ties the system’s answers back to specific source material instead of allowing free-form generation; and narrative summarization, which condenses long testimonies while preserving their meaning. The research team will collaborate with the Densho Digital Repository and other nationally significant oral collections, ensuring that the framework is tested against real archives with real stakes rather than synthetic test data.

While Chen’s projects probe the intersection of AI and adult services, Sara Schwebel is directing a grant that reaches younger audiences through the material culture of the book itself. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books, is principal investigator for “Reading the Revolution: Telling the Story of the Nation’s Founding to America’s Youth,” a one-year project valued at nearly $100,000. The project takes an exhibit-and-field-trip model as its organizing structure and brings together an unusually rich set of campus and community partners: the University of Illinois Library, Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, and the Champaign County Forest Preserve. At a moment when public understanding of American history is intensely contested, the project bets on a time-tested method—putting young people in direct contact with historical artifacts and the books that have carried the founding story to each new generation.

The interpretive and digital exhibit at the heart of the project will draw on the University of Illinois library’s remarkable collections, including the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, and the Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library’s School Collection. That last holding is particularly significant for the project’s aims, since the School Collection documents how children’s literature has transmitted national history to young readers across decades of changing pedagogy and politics. To complement the physical and digital exhibit, the project will create a digital collection and a readers’ advisory guide prepared by the editorial board of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, one of the field’s most respected review journals. Supplemental materials will be developed by Center for Children’s Books staff together with a “Reading the Revolution” Scholars Council drawn from other colleges and universities, giving the project scholarly depth beyond a single campus.

The programming built around the exhibit is designed to reach multiple audiences simultaneously. Plans include American history-themed storytimes for young children, school-aged library programming, field trips for middle school students throughout the region, and professional development workshops for area librarians and teachers—the adults who will carry the project’s resources into classrooms and libraries long after the grant period ends. Coordination of this ambitious slate falls to Center for Children’s Books Assistant Director Suzan Alteri, Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, doctoral student Owen Monroe, and additional graduate students, a staffing model that doubles as training for the next generation of youth services and digital humanities professionals.

The fourth grant shifts the focus to the librarians themselves. Kahyun Choi serves as a consultant on “Asset-Based AI Toolkit: Leveraging Librarian Cultural Wealth for AI Literacy,” a three-year, $455,066 project led by Hee Rin Lee of Michigan State University. The project’s premise is a deliberate inversion of the deficit framing that often surrounds professional development: instead of asking what librarians lack in their understanding of artificial intelligence, it asks what assets they already possess—what the project calls librarian cultural wealth—and how those strengths can be recognized and leveraged to build and sustain AI literacy programs. The concrete output is a web-based interactive toolkit that librarians can use to identify their own capabilities and translate them into programming for their communities.

Choi’s role in the project draws directly on her distinctive research profile. As an expert in AI for music and poetry within the field of library science, she will provide subject-matter expertise, curate supplementary resources, and offer iterative feedback as the toolkit is developed. Her involvement is not new to this line of inquiry: the toolkit project builds on the team’s earlier IMLS-funded AI literacy work, which produced a program for public libraries with Choi as co-principal investigator. That continuity matters, because AI literacy is not a one-time curriculum but a moving target—each new generation of models changes what patrons need to know and what librarians need to teach.

Taken together, the four National Leadership Grants sketch a portrait of where library and information science research is heading. The projects share a conviction that intelligent technologies will not simply be absorbed by libraries and archives on their own terms; they must be studied, benchmarked, and shaped by the professionals who steward the nation’s information resources. They also share a methodological commitment to partnership—with public library systems in three jurisdictions, with a nationally significant oral history repository, with campus special collections and a community forest preserve, and with peer institutions across the country. Whether the subject is an older adult learning to question an AI chatbot, a researcher probing whether a language model can faithfully summarize a survivor’s testimony, a middle schooler encountering the Revolution through a rare book, or a librarian discovering that her existing expertise is the foundation for teaching AI literacy, the Illinois-led projects treat information institutions not as casualties of technological change but as the places where that change can be made humane, accurate, and broadly accessible.

Subject of Research: IMLS-funded information science research on AI in libraries, oral history archives, children's literature, and librarian AI literacy

Article Title: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers

Article References: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: IMLS, information science, artificial intelligence, public libraries, older adults, oral history, multimodal large language models, children's literature, AI literacy, digital exhibits, University of Illinois, library services

Sutoris defines social inertia as the patterned continuation of social trajectories shaped by historical pathways, embodied routines, institutional arrangements and cultural attachments. These trajectories can stabilise what communities value, including rhythms of work and learning, informal reciprocity, trusted routes and narrative attachments to place. But they can also carry exclusion, exploitation and violence. Reading persistence seriously, he argues, therefore forces an ethical question onto the research agenda: what is worth sustaining, and what would justify intervening? That question, he suggests, has been largely invisible in a field that treats continuity as a barrier to be dismantled.

The critique lands on an established vocabulary. Concepts such as carbon lock-in, path dependence, regime stability, behavioural inertia and institutional inertia all frame persistence as standing in the way of more sustainable futures. Carbon lock-in, for instance, explains how initial infrastructure choices generate increasing returns that foreclose alternatives. Regime stability describes the structural reproduction of socio-technical systems. Behavioural habit captures automatic individual responses to stable cues. Each is useful, Sutoris acknowledges, but each is mechanistic, and together they leave the cultural, embodied, narrative and political layers of persistence largely unexamined. Inertia has entered the literature as a black box: invoked to explain failure but rarely opened up.

The consequences of that thin treatment are visible across the policy landscape. Failed carbon-pricing schemes, local opposition to wind power, polarised reactions to low-traffic neighbourhoods and contentious renewable-energy negotiations on communal land are routinely explained through labels such as NIMBYism, populism or protectionism. Sutoris argues that these dynamics are more accurately read as encounters between interventions and the multi-layered patterning of community life: rhythms of care and labour, attachments to place, hard-won institutional accommodations and moral economies that outside planners misrecognise as friction. What appears from above as irrational resistance may, from within a community, be protective persistence.

To give the concept analytical teeth, the Perspective proposes a five-part typology. Institutional inertia covers the administrative routines, governance structures, legal frameworks and infrastructures that privilege continuity, the best-mapped dimension in existing research. Embodied inertia refers to the habits, affective attachments, mobility patterns and bodily rhythms that organise daily life in ways that outlive policy change, a dimension grounded in practice theory and the new mobilities paradigm. Narrative inertia captures the stories societies tell about themselves, about progress, identity, place and the human relationship with nature, which condition how interventions are received and whether they endure.

The fourth and fifth dimensions are the least theorised. Ritual inertia refers to the cultural practices and temporal rhythms that anchor meaning across generations; anthropology, memory studies and performance studies have long shown that ritualised practice carries memory through the body and generates attachment and belonging. Ethnoecological research further demonstrates that ritual and ceremony are knowledge systems in their own right, organising relations to land, season and community, relations that Indigenous scholarship frames through conceptions of time and kinship that dominant transitions vocabularies cannot accommodate. Infrapolitical inertia, drawing on the political science of James C. Scott, names the dispersed, low-visibility forms of persistence by which subordinate groups protect time, dignity and reciprocity under unequal power: foot-dragging, false compliance, dissimulation, the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. What looks like passivity from above, in other words, is often a strategic achievement.

Crucially, the five dimensions interlock. A bureaucratic routine may be sustained by the embodied competence of officials, legitimised by stories of orderly governance, reproduced through the periodic ceremonies of public administration and worked around by those it fails to serve. Reading any one dimension in isolation flattens persistence into simplistic accounts. The framework also opens space for thinking about multiple inertias at once: the continuity of a technocratic transformation regime, with its standardised metrics and infrastructural dependencies, is itself an inertia, distinct from and sometimes in tension with the patterned continuities of the everyday lives it seeks to remake. Sustainability transformations, Sutoris suggests, are shaped less by a single inertia to be overcome than by the interplay of several.

If inertia is to be read rather than removed, the methods of sustainability science need to change. Quantitative behavioural studies, integrated assessment models and systems modelling, the Perspective argues, are poorly equipped to read phenomena constituted in culture, meaning and power, a critique long voiced within the field itself. Sutoris proposes a methodological orientation drawn from the humanities and interpretive social sciences, spanning past, present and imagined futures. Reading archives against the grain means treating gaps, hesitations and silences in official records as evidence rather than absence; a renewable-energy project that produced no controversy in the public record may have generated extensive quiet adjustment in the affected community. Oral history recovers the embodied, narrative and ritual dimensions of past interventions through living memory. And Future Design, a deliberative method in which participants deliberate as members of a future generation, allows researchers to read which forms of continuity carry the moral weight of the imagined good life. All such methods must be participatory, he insists, because the patterns at stake are legible only to those who live them, and comparative designs across structurally contrasting settings are essential to understanding why a pilot succeeds in one place and stalls in another.

The reframing connects with several wider currents of critique. It gives practical analytical work to the long-standing call for interpretive social sciences and humanities in sustainability research; it supplies a structured vocabulary for the cultural and place-based turn in adaptation studies; and it engages directly with decolonising scholarship that accuses the field of dismissing Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems as obstructive. An inertia lens treats those continuities as forms of knowledge to be read for their moral and ecological commitments rather than engineered away, while also sharpening the political-economic critique of technocratic blueprint thinking. It complements, too, the relational literatures that ask what must change at the level of values, by asking what is already present in communities worth engaging rather than overwriting.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Sustainability research faces a mounting ecological crisis alongside eroding public trust in the institutions of transformation, and interventions designed to address climate change and biodiversity loss are repeatedly received as impositions by the communities whose ways of life they reorganise. Part of that failure, the Perspective argues, lies in misreading patterned persistence as opposition. The conceptual move Sutoris proposes changes the field’s diagnostic starting point. Instead of asking why change fails, researchers should ask what the patterning of continuity reveals about the lives interventions seek to alter, and how that knowledge should enter conversations about transformation. Persistence, on this reading, is not the opposite of transformation but one of its conditions, and learning to read it well may prove one of the most urgent tasks facing the field.

Subject of Research: A cross-disciplinary framework reconceptualising social inertia as patterned persistence to improve sustainability transformation research.

Article Title: Reading persistence: Social inertia as a cross-disciplinary framework for sustainability transformation

Article References: Sutoris, P. (2026). Reading persistence: Social inertia as a cross-disciplinary framework for sustainability transformation. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02480-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02480-1

Keywords: social inertia, sustainability transformation, patterned persistence, climate policy, carbon lock-in, practice theory, oral history, Future Design, decolonising research, community resistance, interpretive social science, Ambio