The iSchool at UBC is excited to announce the appointment of two new faculty members to begin July 1, 2017.
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Julia Bullard will join the School in a tenure-track Assistant Professor position. She will receive her Ph.D. from the Information School at the University of Texas at Austin this May and previously completed Master’s degrees at McMaster University (MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory) and the University of British Columbia (MLIS). Ms. Bullard’s dissertation work at the School of Information examined the daily design of classification systems through an ethnography of a fanwork repository’s curated folksonomy. Her research areas include information and knowledge organization, information ethics, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. Her ongoing research will focus on the design of organizing systems such as metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies and how these systems might align with the values and activities of their communities. She is particularly excited to work with students, faculty, and practitioners on projects that extend information organization theory as they support complex and interdisciplinary work.
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Dr. Richard Arias-Hernandez will join the school in a tenure-track instructor position. Dr. Arias-Hernandez has been a Lecturer at the UBC iSchool since 2013 in the MLIS, MAS, and Bachelor of Media Studies programs. Before that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in visual analytics and interactive science at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. He holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA), a M.Sc. in Information Management Systems and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). His past research and publications have centered in the following domains: information systems designs for social justice, sociology, politics, and cultural studies of information technologies, visual analytics and human-information interaction. His current research is on the evaluation of online teaching of technical skills for iSchool students (MLIS/MAS), evaluation of community-based experiential learning for undergraduate students in UBC’s Bachelor of Media Studies, postcolonial/decolonial perspectives for digital libraries and archives, and linked data for digital libraries and archives.
“I am very excited to join the iSchool as an Instructor. This is a time where librarians, archivist, and other information professionals are set to play a central role to preserve social justice, the respect and value of factual scientific knowledge, and the democratic values that are currently being systematically eroded, confronted, and challenged by autocratic governments. I look forward to being at the centre of this dynamic working with students and my colleagues at SLAIS to continue strengthening the socio-technical aspects of our programs with a social justice goal,” Says Dr. Arias-Hernandez.
