Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium

Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium
The University of Toronto, October 18, 2014

Gender and sexuality are two of the critical organizing axes of contemporary life. Alongside and intersecting with race, class, nation, and others, they constitute the ways through which we make ourselves known to ourselves and to one another: as men, women, or one of the 58 new gender options offered by Facebook, and as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, and all the other varied and ever-changing linguistic markers of preferences of physical and emotional intimacy. Just as legal studies, the hard and social sciences, philosophy and literature, information studies is a discourse called to respond to the challenges posed by critical perspectives on gender and sexuality. Perhaps more than any other discipline, information studies confronts the theoretical with the material. How do both the “the archive” and the archive organize, and how are they organized by, gender and sexuality? From the collections we build to the access tools we design to the histories we collect, catalog, and preserve, information studies theorists and practitioners are always engaged in the projects of making and being made.

We invite proposals to join and extend these conversations during a one-day colloquium to be held at the University of Toronto on October 18, 2014. Presentations will consist of individual papers organized around themes that emerge from the submissions.

Suggested topics include:

• Information studies and its engagements with cross-disciplinary theories of gender and sexuality
• Practice-based responses to critical theories of gender and sexuality in information responses
• Critical approaches to cataloging and classification
• Feminist and queer library pedagogies, both in information studies schools and at the K-12 and undergraduate levels
• Queer and feminist archival practices, both theoretical and material
• Sexed and gendered labor in information environments
• Intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, and other axes of social organization
• Critical feminist and queer critiques of the technologies of information production, organization, and dissemination

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words to emily.drabinski@gmail.com.

Proposals due May 1, 2014. Notification June 1, 2014.

Thanks to the University of Toronto Faculty of Information for generously hosting this colloquium.