Librarians’ Conflict Management Skills in Power Relations: Representation in The Film The Public

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_30How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Librarians’ conflict management skills; Homelessness issue; Power relations; Representation

Abstract

Libraries are open to all visitors, regardless of gender, race, age, and other. Each library user has a unique personality, which presents librarians with a variety of challenges. Librarians are therefore required to have conflict management skills in order to prevent conflicts and to handle them peacefully. This study explored the representation of librarians’ conflict management skills in the film The Public, with the aim of understanding how they respond to conflicts caused by homeless individuals in the library and how they navigate power relations with local authorities. This research used a qualitative method and used Van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that the librarian demonstrates emotional intelligence in conflict management by recognizing their own emotions, regulating those emotions to remain calm, identifying appropriate actions to support decision-making, and understanding others’ emotional states. This study highlights the librarians’ capacity to handle social conflict, power relations, and social justice that are rarely studied in library science studies. While many library studies tend to focus on information services, this research shows that librarians have a social role, particularly their skills to manage conflict and power relations as represented in the film. The film portrayed the librarian profession as not merely managing collections, but also as agents of social change engaging with communities and showing awareness to social justice issues, especially marginalized groups abandoned by the government, such as the homeless.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Syifa Nabila Yuhirman
AU  - Ika Krismayani
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/19
TI  - Librarians’ Conflict Management Skills in Power Relations: Representation in The Film The Public
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Culture and Sustainable Development (ICOCAS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 242
EP  - 249
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_30
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_30
ID  - Yuhirman2025
ER  -