About

I am Jack Jen Gieseking, a psychology PhD highly skilled in conducting evaluative and generative qualitative research, developing research plans, and selecting research methods to match organizational goals. I have over 18 years’ experience in recording, writing, and presenting key findings in social scientific studies to relevant stakeholders and publishing in academic and popular venues. I’m passionate about managing and mentoring junior researchers and other workers, and supporting a successful, collaborative workplace as a team member. While working as an academic coach, public speaker and writer, and gender inclusivity consultant, I’m looking for my next full-time role.

My personal research demonstrates alternative ways that marginalized groups find one another and then make spaces together to survive and thrive. Namely, I am interested in how lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people make, claim, sustain, imagine, and lose spaces, and why and how these geographies shift over generations. In other words, I’m enthralled by the intersection of political economy, political organizing, and spatial design that supports and/or inhibits social, spatial, and economic justice for lezbiqueertrans people.

My mixed ethnographic / archival approach resulted in his rethinking the construction of “data” to produce a series of LGBTQ data visualizations about queer history, a project of visualizing the invisible. As part of my commitment to public queer history, I created a companion website including interactive maps of over 3,000 lesbian and queer places and organizations I gathered from archival sources. The An Everyday Queer New York website will also include teaching and research ideas and, eventually, virtual tours through NYC lesbian-queer-trans history for the maps.

After devoting myself trans health activism, I temporally shelved my research on trans people’s use of Tumblr until recently. I am looking forward to returning to examining nine years of longitudinal data with my colleague Crystal Hall. We are examining the use of trans hashtags on the photo-blog-sharing website, Tumblr, or what is long affectionately known in the trans community as “trans Tumblr.” With over 15 million unique posts, keep an eye out for our forthcoming posts and papers using text and social network analysis to understand how trans youth produced a sense of privacy in public, using social media as a site of cultural production and a hub for co-produced medical knowledge.

When time allows, I update a Gender, Sexuality, and Space Reading List, extending the work I contributed to for years in restructuring the 30+-year old Gender & Geography Bibliography. I co-edited The People, Place, and Space Reader (Routledge, 2014) with William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert. I have held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as German Chancellor Fellow; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellows Program.

I am Managing Editor of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography, the only fully open access journal in geography, as well as a board member of the Rainbow Heritage Network and contributor to the National Parks Service’s LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History.

I am presently affiliate faculty at Mount Holyoke College and a Research Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. In 2022, I resigned from my tenured position at the University of Kentucky — the only out trans tenure-track faculty member in the university’s history — over their failure to support trans students, faculty, or staff with equitable healthcare or on-campus LGBTQ student support. I identify as a woman and a trans masc butch dyke, and use he/him/his and they/them/their pronouns.