Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium

The University of Toronto, October 18, 2014

 

Biographical Statements

Melissa Adler is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Perverse Apparatuses: Library Classifications and Disciplining Sexual Deviance.

Agatha Barc is a reference, research, and instruction librarian, with background in information technology and rare books. I study the role of women in the development of education for librarianship.

Joan E. Beaudoin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Beaudoin holds a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the iSchool at Drexel University, a Master of Science in Library and Information Science in the Management of Digital Information from Drexel University, a Master of Arts in Art History from Temple University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from Massachusetts College of Art. She teaches courses in information organization, metadata, digital libraries, and digital preservation. Her primary research interests include metadata, digital libraries, preservation of digital content, technologies used to support humanities scholarship, and visual information use, access and retrieval.

Oliver Bendorf is a writer and visual artist, currently earning an MA in Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been published in Best New Poets, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere, and his book of poems, The Spectral Wilderness, is forthcoming Fall 2014 from Kent State University Press. http://www.oliverbendorf.com/

Amber Billey received her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2009 with certificates in Archives and Museum Librarianship. At Pratt, she focused on metadata standards, cataloging, and digital libraries for cultural heritage institutions. She currently works as the Cataloging/Metadata Librarian at the University of Vermont, Bailey/Howe Library. She is also a metadata consultant for the Vermont Queer Archives and the Transgender Digital Archives.

AJ Blechner received a Juris Doctor at Villanova University School of Law, will graduate from the Gallagher Law Librarianship program at the University of Washington in the summer of 2014, and join the University of Miami Law Library as a Reference/Outreach Librarian in August of 2014.

Raina Bloom (College Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an academic librarian at UW-Madison. Her interests include include mentoring graduate students, staying caffeinated, critical information literacy, talking about food while making/consuming it, being a fangirl, and doing feminism to absolutely everything.

D. Grant Campbell is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. He conducts research on issues of classification, linked data and big data particularly as they relate to dementia.

Pamela Carson has been a librarian at Concordia since 2011 when she received her MLIS from McGill University. Her research interests include web usability, lifelong learning about IT, and librarians' attitudes and identities around IT.

Marika Cifor is a second-year doctoral student in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is also pursuing a Concentration Certificate in Gender Studies. Her research interests include archival studies, sexuality, affects, and queer and feminist theories. She holds a MS in Library and Information Science and an MA in History from Simmons College and a BA in History and Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis from Mills College.

nina de jesus is a librarian working in digital preservation and a passion for non-traditional publishing.

Ingrid Erickson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University. She received her PhD from the Center for Work, Technology & Organization at Stanford University in 2009. Her current work focuses on the development and evolution of norms in sociotechnical environments like urban co-working spaces, civic hackathons, and social media sites such as Flickr and Twitter.

Melodie J. Fox is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s iSchool and is a member of the IOrg research group there. Her research interests include epistemology and the social consequences of classification, particularly on gender categories.

Richard Fry is an assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He works primarily on Early Modern Philosophy and Philosophy of Science.

Dinah Handel is a student at Pratt Institute's MLIS program. Dinah holds an undergraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. Dinah holds an undergraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. Dinah cares about the intersections of social justice and librarianship.

Kadin Henningsen is an artist and graduate student in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Anna Lauren Hoffmann (PhD, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is a trans woman and scholar working at the intersections of information, technology, culture, and ethics. Her work centers on the ways in which standards and categories imposed on the world by informational and technological systems can discriminate by supporting the development of self-respect for some while also hindering its development for others.

Kristen Hogan, English Literature and Women's and Gender Studies Librarian at the UT Libraries, co-creates and curates tools including the Black Queer Studies Collection and the UT Poetry Center. She has taught Women's and Gender Studies in Louisiana and Texas, worked as a staffer at BookWoman in Austin and as book buyer and co-manager at the Toronto Women's Bookstore. Her book, under review, is Accountable to Each Other: Lesbian, Antiracist, and Literary Activism of the Feminist Bookstore Movement, 1970-2007.

Dalena Hunter is a PhD Candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. Her research and practice touch upon representation in archives, social justice, ethnic studies, and gender studies.

Amelia Koford is the Outreach and Information Literacy Librarian and an assistant professor at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. She holds an MS in Information Studies and an MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her undergraduate degree is from Grinnell College. She has shared her work in the journal Cataloging and Classification Quarterly and at conferences of the Society for Disability Studies, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning. Her research interests include information seeking in critical interdisciplinary fields, use and perceptions of subject headings and index terms, and undergraduate information literacy.

Jen LaBarbera recently graduated with an MLIS from the University of Denver with a concentration in archives and special collections. Her research and professional interests include queer and women's archives, increasing representation in and access to archives for underrepresented communities, and the responsible stewardship of digital libraries and archives. Jen is currently a resident with the National Digital Stewardship Residency program in Boston.

Amy Lau is a student at Pratt Institute's MLIS program. Amy holds an undergraduate degree in English, and a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought. Amy cares about the intersections of social justice and librarianship.

Emily Lawrence is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research focuses mainly on the history and philosophy of librarianship.

Andrea Marshall’s training is in feminist theory, information science and human-computer interaction. She is currently a doctoral student and research assistant at Drexel College of Computing and Informatics. In her research, she uses an ethnographic approach to understand how queer sociotechnical identities emerge within the Steampunk subculture and maker spaces that support queer identities, through contexts of play and critical making. Marshall aims to contribute theoretically to feminist HCI and the larger field of digital anthropology, to understand the relationship between gender construction and technological artifacts. Her major teaching area is human-computer interaction. Ms. Marshall’s work is informed largely by feminist theory, information science, and digital anthropology.

Melissa A. McCleary is a recent MSLS graduate of Clarion University of PA and the current Youth Services Librarian at Pembroke Public Library in Massachusetts.

Cait McKinney is a PhD candidate in the Communication and Culture Program at York University. Her dissertation research traces a cultural history of the Internet through lesbian feminist information activism, beginning in the early 1970s. Cait’s writing has appeared in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual Culture, and is forthcoming in No More Potlucks and the Radical History Review’s special issue on queer archives.http://caitmckinney.com

Elaine Ménard is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Professor Ménard completed her Ph.D. at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal. She holds a Master Degree in Information Studies, a Master degree in Translation, and a Bachelor Degree in Translation from the same university. Her teaching expertise includes indexing, cataloguing, classification and information retrieval. Her main research interests deal with image indexing and retrieval, cross-language information retrieval, and metadata. Professor Ménard has published in a number of scholarly journals, including Documentation et Bibliothèques, The Indexer, Journal of Information Ethics, Knowledge Organization, and Library Hi Tech. She has presented papers at conferences such as ACFAS, ASIS&T, CAIS-ACSI, ISKO, ISKO France, ISKO North America, ISKO UK, HCII Conference, and LIDA.

Amanda Menking is a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Information School. She is interested in issues at the intersection of gender studies, feminist theories, and social computing systems.

Bobby Noble is Associate Professor in Sexuality Studies at York University. He is one half of the Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project studying, in part, the relationship between porn cultures and trans* bodies, desires and pleasures. He is the author of 2 monographs, Sons of the Movement (2006) and Masculinities without Men? (2004), and co-editor of The Drag King Anthology (2003).

Nicole Ritchie is a Master of Museum Studies Candidate in Collaboration with Sexual Diversity Studies at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on her SSHRC-funded research that is interrogating the theoretical foundation of non-normative arts and cultural space through the act of queering.

K.R. Roberto is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jennifer Rode's training is in informatics, human-computer interaction and anthropology. In her research, she uses an ethnographic approach to understand technology users in the context of their daily lives and to understand issues surrounding gender, security and privacy. Her work is used to inform and evaluate the design of ubiquitous computing technologies, especially "smart homes." In doing so, Rode aims to contribute theoretically to understanding the design process and the larger field of digital anthropology. Her major teaching area is in human-computer interaction. Dr. Rode’s professional experience has included several academic posts as well as consultant and research positions at a variety of private-sector companies. Early in her career, she was one of the initial members of the User Experience team designing the initial UI for TiVo.

Trina Joyce Sajo is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario. She holds an International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canada grant to study cybersex from the perspective of Philippine ICT policy and regulation, which is part of her dissertation project to explore tensions between lived realities of cybersex and laws surrounding the phenomenon.

Gina Schlesselman-Tarango is a newly hired Instructional Services and Initiatives Librarian at California State San Bernardino where she will spend her time working with the library’s critical information literacy program. She is excited about student-centered pedagogy, information politics, feminism, and critical animal studies.

Caitlin Shanley is the team leader for instruction and the librarian for American Studies, Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Rebecka Sheffield is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Rebecka’s research draws from social movement theory and archival studies to explore the sustainability and strategic actions of lesbian and gay archives as social movement organizations. Her dissertation project examines queer archives at a moment in time when the socio-political environment has opened up opportunities for these organizations to engage with the mainstream in ways previously unavailable.

Lisa Sloniowski is an Associate Librarian (English Literature) and a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University. She researches feminist archives and libraries, neoliberalism and libraries, and critical information literacy. She is co-investigator on Dr. Bobby Noble's SSHRC-funded Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project. http://www.yorku.ca/lisasl/ David Squires is completing a dissertation in English that traces the transatlantic rise of library science and its impact on modern literature. He recently co-edited the volume Porn Archives (Duke University Press, 2014).

Michael Waldman is the Head of Collection Management at Baruch College, CUNY. He is interested in creating vibrant and diverse library collections. He wrote Libraries and the Transgender Community, which can be found in Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users, edited by Ellen Greenblatt. He can be reached at Michael.Waldman@baruch.cuny.edu

Kellee E. Warren is a Master of Science candidate in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests focus on the underrepresented in the archives, specifically enslaved black women of the Diaspora, and how this history impacts current trends in diversity in the LIS and archival science professions. Her research began with an interest in the culture of enslaved black women, labor and reproduction, and their role in the economics of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Michael M. Widdersheim is a PhD student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh with experience in public and school libraries.