1,721,005 research outputs found
“Next Stop, Sayville”: COVID-19, Precarious Labour, and Queer Memory Work on Fire Island
Get PDFGrounded within the experience of seasonal workers on Fire Island, New York during the Summer 2020 vacation season, this thesis exists at the intersection of COVID-19, precarious labour, and queer memory work. Examining the impulse toward forgetting held by many community members on the island, the author parses out the concept of “safe havens,” exploring both their value and their limitations – most acutely in relation to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Turning inward, Evans explores the difficulty of embodied research creation amid overwhelming grief and personal loss. Finally, he uses oral history interviews conducted with Fire Island colleagues to position the concepts of recreation, refusal, and reciprocity as integral to an understanding of Fire Island during COVID-19. Through the modalities of oral history and autoethnography, Evans engages in a historiographical project that centres subjects often left out of Fire Island’s storied past and present.M.I.S
The Intellective Touch: A Phenomenology of Digital Modernism
Get PDFThis dissertation re-examines the methods of existential phenomenology and media ecology by situating both within the aesthetics of “digital modernism,” which, following the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, I employ as an “anti-environment” to reveal the psychic and sensory attitudes engendered by the digital media environment. Drawing on McLuhan’s reading of the cultural environment constituted by electric media as – what the media ecologist Walter Ong famously labeled – “secondary orality,” I argue that the environment constituted by digital media is more profitably understood as “secondary literacy,” a term that Ong employed but did not develop. In contrast to the “secondary orality” of the electric environment, which, according to both Ong and McLuhan, retrieves the psychic attitudes associated with pre-literate tribalism, I characterize the “secondary literacy” of the digital environment as retrieving the psychic attitudes associated with ancient Greek and medieval manuscript literacy. Through contextualizing the interpretive attitudes of Husserl’s phenomenology and McLuhan’s media ecology within the primary literacy of medieval manuscript culture, I argue that both may function as important theoretical lenses, through which the attitudes of digital secondary literacy can be uncovered. On the basis of this theoretical integration, through which I analyze the artistic work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Christopher Alexander, and Anton Webern, I re-evaluate McLuhan’s use of modernist aesthetics as an anti-environment to the electric environment so as to position modernist aesthetics as an anti-environment to the digital environment.Ph.D
Swallowing Misandry: A Survey of the Discursive Strategies of r/TheRedPill on Reddit
Get PDFThe Red Pill (r/theredpill) (TRP) subreddit lies at the heart of an interconnected network of misogynistic blogs and websites known as the manosphere. It disseminates radical anti-feminist and discriminatory content across Reddit and the broader internet. Acknowledging the community’s staggering size - with membership that numbers in the hundreds of thousands - this research fills a gap in standalone investigations into the toxic subreddit. Using mixed-methods critical discourse analysis (CDA), qualitative and quantitative research methods identify how misogynistic ideologies are constructed, consumed, and exchanged by RedPills on their virtual platform, Reddit. This study does not seek to define their discursive strategies as uniquely RedPill. Instead, it situates them in the context of a growing community based in gendered rage and the validation of violence. As result, it reveals the complex affordances Reddit provides, to create, engage, and disseminate RedPill discourses online.M.I.S.2019-11-15 00:00:0
Data Here and There: Studying Web Archives Research Infrastructures in Danish and Canadian Settings
Get PDFWeb archives collections are an important site for preserving digital cultural heritage, capturing online resources and the underlying data of web pages and websites over time. This dissertation explores the data practices involved in the curation and scholarly uses of archived web data, and the emerging humanities research infrastructures that support this work. I focus on how data are created by and interact with multiple, varied, conflicting and often opaque systems from collection through to analysis and visualization, involving a range of actors and systems. Through interviews and observations in two settings centred on emerging research infrastructures from national libraries and academic libraries, I explore how web archiving processes involve technical systems that impose or manipulate data structures, as well as policies, legal restrictions, and a range of decisions and interpretations of the data made by the people involved in curation practices.
My analysis is guided by the approach of infrastructure studies towards describing, documenting and contextualizing archived web data at varying scales and through their sociotechnical relationships. By studying these settings ethnographically, I seek to understand how data produced here are different from data produced there; in spite of the use of similar technologies and standard formats of data, I reveal how the particular contexts of these research infrastructures serve to shape the data found in each. I highlight the role of categories and classifications both in the construction of digital materials and the design and tailoring of computational systems. Ultimately, I argue that one cannot study, describe, or otherwise work critically with data without also understanding the classification systems and infrastructures through which data categories are developed and applied. It is in fact these categories of data that determine judgments and decision-making, and impact movement and legibility between systems and contexts; digital curation practices are in essence categorical work. I conclude by highlighting contributions to digital curation theory and practice and new directions for emerging work in critical data studies to consider how data categories are compatible or incompatible, and the complex sociotechnical relationships between categories, meanings and uses in data-centered algorithmic systems.Ph.D
LGBT and Information Studies: The Library and Archive OUTreach Symposium at UCLA; and In the Footsteps of Barbara Gittings: An Appreciation
Get PDFOn November 17, 2006 the InterActions editorial team attended the Library and Archives OUTreach symposium at UCLA. This galvanizing event brought together academics, practitioners, and activists from the information studies field to discuss the importance of increasing visibility around lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) issues as they pertain to libraries and information seeking. Given the tremendous energy generated by these proceedings, we asked Patrick Keilty, a doctoral student in UCLA’s Information Studies department and OUTreach founding president, to share his impressions and insights on this important event. Keilty prepared the following essay with full cooperation from the remarkable ensemble of symposium panelists. In order to expand upon some of the themes introduced at this event, Keilty also conducted follow-up email discussions with panelists. His essay represents a summary of these on-going discussions.Sadly, LGBT activist and symposium keynote speaker Barbara Gittings died February 18, 2007 as this essay was being prepared. Keilty’s appreciation of Gittings serves as a fitting accompaniment to this piece.
In the Footsteps of Barbara Gittings: An Appreciation
Click on the supplemental links for video clips of Barbara Gittings' keynote address at the Library and Archive OUTreach Symposium at UCLA.
Barbara Gittings remembers HQ 76.5.
Barbara Gittings tells the story of the first gay kissing booth.
American Library Association members ogle the kissing booth.
The kissing booth will "show them how it's done."
"Hug a Homosexual" gets noticed.
An outraged ALA member objects to "Hug a Homosexual."
Barbara Gittings looks toward the future.
Barbara Gittings on her career with librarians
Review: Serving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians by Hillias J. Martin, Jr. and James R. Murdock
Get PDFHarm Reduction As The Commons of Care: Three Case Studies in Toronto
Get PDFIn the context of the current toxic drug supply crisis that has claimed the lives of over 52,000 people in Canada since 2016, the inaccessibility of publicly available washrooms, and the closure of life-saving supervised consumption sites across Ontario, there is a rising need for libraries and other public infrastructures to support the most vulnerable people in our communities. Following this thread, this dissertation takes up Berlant’s conception of “the commons” through three pragmatic and urgent case studies. Focusing on accessible washrooms and bookstores in Toronto’s gay village, Ontario’s supervised consumption sites, and a packed library school classroom, each of these three case studies locates the commons in a different style of constructed social space. On the surface, these three spaces are designed to support a positivist goodness and the infrastructures of social sanitization. However, as I unravel the implications of political rhetoric, geospatial coordination, public health policy, and moral sanitation attached to these zones of correctness, I complicate the “it gets better” narrative of forward social progress undergirding each of these case studies.Throughout this project, I argue for consistent and pragmatic action as a solution to the abject despondence produced by a crumbling infrastructure of care. Importantly, this is not a nullification of despair in the face of death and suffering, but an offering of action over hopelessness. Following the principles of harm reduction, I contend that harm is inevitable in any assemblage. Further, while harms cannot be eliminated, the magnitude of their impact can be reduced. And sometimes, that’s all we can do. Fundamentally, this project is about doing something, anything, to stem the flow of political and personal inaction in the face of seemingly impassable infrastructures. Fueled by an unrelenting dissatisfaction with how things are and an absolutely inarticulate vision of how things could be, this dissertation purposefully embraces the generative power of a push for something just a little bit better. Taking Berlant’s assertion of the commons as “an action concept” to heart, I detail the practical, real-world intervention I have applied to each case study and analyze the outcomes and implications.Ph.D
Actuarial Bodies: Data, Value, and Fairness in Insurance and Workplace Wellness Programs
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the data practices of personalized interactive insurance (PII) and workplace wellness programs (WWP) in the Canadian and American contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with PII and WWP industry professionals and participants, direct observation at industry events, and analysis of industry documents, I analyze the logics and data practices of PII and WWPs. I argue that the insurance industry’s historical methods of valuing human life, with their raced, gendered, and classed notions of financial value, inform PII’s and WWPs’ data practices. I show how PII and WWPs deploy actuarial data practices to identify ‘burdens’ and ‘crises’ amongst policyholders and employees, frame ‘lifestyle’ and ‘behaviour’ as sites of investment for insurers and employers, and establish rewards as means of activating the future value of health and wellness. I also show how, in the face of uncertainty or doubt around their efficacy, PII and WWPs reorient the way they articulate the value of their services.I analyze the broader power dynamics in these programs, showing how industry actors position themselves as data curators who can facilitate ongoing experimentation on policyholders and employees. I argue that PII and WWPs demand datafied performances of value in the form of ‘healthy behaviour’ and ‘engagement’ from participants. I show how PII and WWPs frame ‘personalized’ data profiles and rewards as a way of increasing actuarial fairness, and argue that ‘fairness’ operates as a strategy of power that plays on an individual desire to control how we are perceived as different than or similar to others in an effort protect social status. Finally, I show how PII and WWPs continue the long-established practice of mobilizing both care and neglect for corporate profit, and argue that the actuarial logic of allocating costs, burdens, and (potential) value creates investable and disposable populations.Ph.D
Swallowing Misandry: A Survey of the Discursive Strategies of r/TheRedPill on Reddit
No full textThe Red Pill (r/theredpill) (TRP) subreddit lies at the heart of an interconnected network of misogynistic blogs and websites known as the manosphere. It disseminates radical anti-feminist and discriminatory content across Reddit and the broader internet. Acknowledging the community’s staggering size - with membership that numbers in the hundreds of thousands - this research fills a gap in standalone investigations into the toxic subreddit. Using mixed-methods critical discourse analysis (CDA), qualitative and quantitative research methods identify how misogynistic ideologies are constructed, consumed, and exchanged by RedPills on their virtual platform, Reddit. This study does not seek to define their discursive strategies as uniquely RedPill. Instead, it situates them in the context of a growing community based in gendered rage and the validation of violence. As result, it reveals the complex affordances Reddit provides, to create, engage, and disseminate RedPill discourses online.M.I.S.2019-11-15 00:00:0
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