Jessa Lingel is a social science researcher and information activist, and co-organized QIS1 and QIS2. She is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, she was a post doctoral research fellow at Microsoft Research New England, working with the Social Media Collective (SMC). She received her Ph.D. in communication and information from Rutgers University. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and an M.A. from New York University. Her research interests include information inequalities and technological distributions of power. She also posted the text below on the SMC site earlier today.
What’s queer about the internet now?
This past month, I organized the Queer Internet Studies Workshop with my longtime friend and collaborator, Jack Gieseking, and Anne Esacove at the Alice Paul Center at UPenn. This was the second QIS (the first was in 2014 at Columbia), and our plan was to organize a day long series of conversations, brainstorming sessions, panels, and chats dedicated to broaden thinking about the internet. Rather than a formal conference of people presenting their research, QIS is intended (1) to identify what a queer internet might look like (2) to give a sense of research that’s being done in this area, and (3) to collaborate on artistic, activist and academic projects.We’ve been lucky to have folks post some terrific blog posts about the event, but here’s a quick recap. After opening the day with group discussions about what queer internet studies might be and how (or whether) we could study it, a carefully curated group of researchers and activists shared their expertise in a facet of queerness and media.
- Mia Fischer talked about intersections between trans people and surveillance studies.
- Oliver Haimson described his work on trans identity and social media.
- Carmen Rios spoke about online communities and feminist politics.
- Adrienne Shaw shared her work about building an LGBT games archive.
- Mitali Thakor shared her work on digital vigilante-ism against sex trafficking.
Artist and academic TL Cowan led a participatory workshop called “Internet of Bodies/Internet of Bawdies.” Part theoretical inquiry, part brainstorming session, and rapid prototyping exercise, the workshop offered an embodied means of working through sexuality, performativity, and technological change.
Rather than a traditional keynote dialogue, we asked Katherine Sender to act as an interlocutor for Shaka McGlotten. Their dialogue ranged from racism and desire to sped up and slowed down experiences of intimacy, from surveillance and performativity to social media platform politics. As a freeform conversation, Sender and McGlotten both addressed and reworked themes that had surfaced throughout the day around queerness, technology, and desire.
We closed the day with breaking into groups to talk about outcomes, which included pooling resources to develop syllabuses and course materials, collaborating on a special issue, and developing best practices around respecting privacy and ownership of online content. I’m excited to see where these plans and provocations end up in the coming months. A huge thanks to my co-organizers, the attendees and speakers, and our sponsors. In 2017, it’s clear that we need spaces for queerness and media provocation more than ever, it’s my hope that QIS can continue to be a space for those connections and creativity, both as a physical meetup and as a chance to build enduring social ties.
