MELA Notes

Nushafarin Ansari (b. 1939), librarian, educator, and long-standing secretary of the Children's Book Council of Iran, is a central yet largely unexamined figure in the feminist history of librarianship outside Western contexts. This paper argues that her career, spanning outreach to psychiatric patients, rural communities, refugee children, and the visually impaired, constitutes a feminist practice of democratic care that systematically refuses to treat the library’s excluded readers as private problems or institutional afterthoughts. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s framework of “democratic care”, the paper reads Ansari’s institutional practice as a sustained effort to move librarianship in Iran from a profession organized around an imagined normative public toward recognizing and responding to the full range of lives it is meant to serve. The paper traces this movement across three dimensions: her outreach practices as a form of structural critique that translates individual exclusion into institutional accountability; her investment in participatory reading cultures, and her model of collective professional culture as an enactment of caring from within the institution. Situated against the broader feminization of the profession, and traced through the trajectory of her policy-making in knowledge dissimilation, Ansari’s work exemplifies the shift from a feminized space to a genuinely feminist institution that works democratically, relationally, and in accordance with a politics of care.