iSchool Research Day 2026

Melissa Nelson and Kim Correa, " 'Bucky Barnes shows love through surveillance:' Sensemaking surveillance through fan-generated tags on Archive of Our Own” 

• We explore fans’ conceptualizations of surveillance through an analysis of tags applied to works on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Extant scholarship demonstrates that fandoms offer rich grounds to explore social and political issues (e.g., Allen & Moon, 2023; Dannar, 2024; Dean, 2017; Jurg et al., 2024; Leitzi & Norman, 2024; Nelson, 2025; Reinhard et al., 2022) and that analyzing fanworks—especially fanfiction—is a generative avenue to explore how fans navigate sensitive topics (e.g., Breyfogle, 2022; Kustritz, 2024; Popova, 2018a, 2018b). Similarly, scholarship spanning the boundaries of fan and information studies demonstrates that fan-tagging practices are a mechanism through which fans negotiate the boundaries of sensitive topics in their works (Gursoy et al., 2018; Hill, 2021, 2024; Nelson and Bullard, 2025; Price, 2017; Price and Robinson, 2021).To bring these fields into conversation with surveillance studies, we examine a set of tags related to the term “surveillance” and situate them within an established taxonomy (Price, 2017; Price and Robinson, 2021; Nelson and Bullard, 2025). We discuss a subset of these tags using newer surveillance frameworks such as pleasurable (Chan and McKnight, 2024), playful (Lee and Ahn, 2024), and squeeveillance (Benjamin, 2024), introducing fandom to broader discussions of surveillance culture (Lyon, 2017).

Dan Hackborn, " 'I guess we're just going to have to become firemen': collective reflections on a year of library work in the aftermath of the 2024 Jasper wildfire"

• Industrialized colonialism has entangled with climate on a planetary scale, exacerbating severe geophysical phenomena via sociopolitical choices and actions to disastrous and unequally distributed effect. The infrastructures tasked, in turn, with 'managing' these consequences are broadly framed around three stages: preparation, response, and recovery. Of these three stages, recovery from a disaster is acknowledged to be the least understood, especially over longer-term timescales extending beyond news and academic funding cycles. A public library may seem an unorthodox site to think about disaster resilience. Nevertheless, these participatory knowledge infrastructures are increasingly orienting themselves towards aiding their communities in adapting to climate impacts whether by providing services to evacuees or serving as public cooling and clean air centres. Moreover, researchers and urban planners are increasingly recognizing their potential as 'post-disaster information' and 'resilience' hubs, even as scholars like Paul N. Edwards, Kim Fortun, and Jo Guldi speculate on the characteristics required of knowledge infrastructures during climate change. Combining these perspectives highlights the unique, liminal position a library occupies post-disaster, being infrastructure both of the impacted community and, simultaneously, positioned by these emerging configurations as recovery-oriented institutions, organizations of 'last responders'. These lines of inquiry, long-term recovery and speculative possibilities for knowledge infrastructures, converge within this photovoice study, conducted in collaboration with the staff and volunteers of the Jasper Municipal Library. How might a library serve to acknowledge immense loss while preparing to support a trajectory of justice for community and culture in the wake of disaster?

Bryn Shaffer, “Gameboy libraries: a play-based method for designing information spaces with GB Studio” 

• This talk will present a novel GameBoy design method for UX spatial design of information spaces using the video game engine GB Studio, and the preliminary results of an ongoing research through design (RtD) (Zimmerman et al, 2007) study testing this method through participatory workshops with information professionals. Drawing on play-based methodologies to design (Sanders and Stapper, 2012; Lucero et al, 2014; Platt, 2016), the presented method uses the open-source and no-code game engine GameBoy Studio and a pre-created asset catalogue to prototype information spaces, such as libraries. The result is the design of information spaces as playable GameBoy levels, where interactive elements, non-player characters, and game mechanics are introduced to otherwise typically static designs (Nissinen, 2015; Gylje, 2022), making the envisioned library a playable space that can be iterated and experienced prior to being built. This talk will describe how GameBoy design tools and approaches make UX spatial design an accessible and playful process where the designer can enter their game worlds and feel what it is like to be and play in their library. Further, this talk will demonstrate how introducing changeable avatars, interactive level elements, player quests, and gameplay loops enables the designer to discover through play the needs of a variety of future patrons including children, those with disabilities, and multi-lingual users. This talk will provide an overview of the method, examples of completed playable library designs, and preliminary results of the ongoing RtD study where information professionals are learning to prototype future libraries through play.

Andrea Kampen, “Time and space and shitty lighting: The use of polaroid photographs in qualitative research” 

• This presentation offers methodological reflection on the use of Polaroid photography within interview-based study research. In my dissertation study, titled Understanding information-sharing of artist-researchers, I drew on semi-structured interviews, and collaboratively selected and took three Polaroid photographs in the participant’s studio. These photographs served multiple functions: they helped counter recall bias by capturing moments of information-sharing in real time, and they documented the physical environments in which artistic research takes place.The presentation will examine why I selected Polaroid photography to foreground temporality and materiality, as well as intimacy and proximity.These types of photographic process invited both immediacy and patience, allowing the participant and researcher to witness the photograph as it developed. Unlike digital photography, which is instantly reproducible and embedded in personal devices, the Polaroid existed as a shared, physical object created together within the studio space.The limited frame of the Polaroid introduced intimacy and proximity, while also emphasizing exclusion. Cropping drew attention to what remained outside the image, invoking what Metz (1985) describes as the “off-frame effect,” marking an irreversible absence. Many photographs contained visual imperfections, such as blown-out exposures or warped edges caused by uneven chemical development. These imperfections prompted discussion and closer interrogation, highlighting the uniqueness of each image and the material limitations of representation.The expense of Polaroid film further shaped the process, making selectivity explicit. Decisions about what to photograph were negotiated, with participants often suggesting or arranging subjects themselves. The images were later labeled, digitized, and analyzed using visual content analysis (Rose, 2016), examining themes, patterns, and their broader social and cultural contexts. I’ll conclude the presentation by considering analysis and application to findings.

Georgia Franklin, "Evolving BC Summer Reading Club: Investigation into the capacity and requirements for an early years age expansion"

• In 2026, the BC Summer Reading Club (BC SRC) will pilot an expansion of participant age ranges to include children aged 0–5, broadening a program that has traditionally served school-aged children. This presentation will outline the methodologies and findings of research conducted in 2025, which examined early literacy needs and opportunities within public libraries, current Summer Reading Club practices across North America, and the approaches of participating libraries in British Columbia. The research also explored the potential impacts of this age expansion on the existing BC SRC program structure.In addition to presenting research findings, the session will propose a framework for future development of the expanded program. This framework would address the creation of parental and caregiver supports, the development of targeted resources for children aged 8–12, and the design of scalable program scaffolding capable of accommodating the diverse capacities and community contexts of public libraries across the province.Overall, the presentation will highlight the translation of research into practice, demonstrating how evidence-based approaches can inform program development, support early literacy, and strengthen service delivery within public library systems.

Inaam Charaf, "From classroom to workplace: preparing future librarians for compassionate workplace"

• Libraries are deeply social institutions grounded in human relationships, care, and community responsiveness. Librarians are increasingly called upon to design services, spaces, and interactions that center compassion, inclusion, and dignity. While frameworks such as compassion-in-action highlight the role of care in achieving broader social goals, professional education in library and information studies (LIS) often remain shaped by Western pedagogical traditions that prioritize content delivery over holistic learning experiences.This short talk draws on my course assignments and classroom lessons to explore how an ethic of care can be intentionally embedded in LIS education and extended beyond the classroom into library workplace practice. Grounded in critical and care-centered pedagogies, my approach recognizes students as whole people whose emotional, social, and intellectual experiences are inseparable from learning. I reflect on how this pedagogy is enacted through four interrelated modes: modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. I argue that cultivating an ethic of care in the education of future information professionals contributes directly to more inclusive and welcoming library spaces, fostering cultures of care that better serve both workers and communities.

Nataliya Radke, "AI Tools for Processing Audiovisual Records"

• My research is an educational module in the form of paper as part of the InterPARES Trust AI project with Dr. Richard Arias-Hernández as the principal investigator.This paper explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools to expedite the processing and arrangement and description of audiovisual records, a traditionally time-consuming and laborious task. An interdisciplinary review was conducted to outline the history of AI/ML tools such as automatic speech recognition for audio as well as facial and emotion recognition for videos, how these technologies work, current use cases, and, finally, the concerns of implementing AI/ML tools into archival processing workflows including copyright issues, privacy concerns, resource demands, algorithmic bias, and copyright issues. The paper finds that AI/ML technologies present a unique opportunity to assist archival institutions amidst persistent backlogs and funding restrictions while increasing patron access to collection materials.

Sloane Madden, "Anazlying policies: UBC's educational integration of AI"

• Due to the wide range of tools available, instructors now face the challenge of developing learning materials and activities that allow students to engage critically with course materials, while also limiting a student’s ability to completely outsource their critical thinking. Already at UBC we have seen a wide variety of approaches to this, with some professors banning AI entirely, others requiring students cite AI’s contributions as though it were an academic source, and others still not having a clear policy and leaving the students in the dark regarding what counts as unethical AI, leading to students being unsure how to perceive or implement these tools.
  This project seeks to examine this question of AI policy and ethics more closely, specifically when it comes to how these policies influence student perception and implementation of Generative AI. By distributing identical surveys to courses with different policies around AI usage, we can conduct a comparative analysis, tracking the degree to which educational frameworks impact a student’s perception of Generative AI (for instance, if a course encourages AI usage, do students see the tools more positively than if the professor highly discourages Generative AI). These surveys, when distributed to students in classes with different AI policies across a term, would allow us to systematically track evolving perceptions of AI and how it interacts with classroom policies, thereby considering the ethics of AI, potential academic frameworks, and how AI tools have impacted stakeholders within the university.

Posters

Bashar Talafha, "Zero-shot context-aware ASR for diverse Arabic varities"

• Zero-shot ASR for Arabic remains challenging: while multilingual models perform well on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), error rates rise sharply on dialectal and accented speech due to linguistic mismatch and scarce labeled data. We study \textit{context-aware decoding} as a lightweight test-time adaptation paradigm that conditions inference on external side information without parameter updates. For promptable encoder–decoder ASR (e.g., Whisper), we incorporate context through (i) decoder prompting with first-pass hypotheses and (ii) encoder/decoder prefixing with retrieved speech-text exemplars, complemented by simple prompt reordering and optional speaker-matched synthetic exemplars to improve robustness in informal and multi-speaker settings. To extend contextual adaptation beyond promptable architectures, we introduce proxy-guided n-best selection for CTC ASR: given one or more external proxy hypotheses, we select from a model's n-best list by minimizing text-level distance to the proxies, enabling contextual inference without direct prompting. Across ten Arabic conditions spanning MSA, accented MSA, and multiple dialects, context-aware decoding yields average relative WER reductions of 22.29% on MSA, 20.54 on accented MSA, and 9.15% on dialectal Arabic. For CTC models, proxy-guided selection reduces WER by 15.6% relative on MSA and recovers a substantial fraction of oracle n-best gains, demonstrating that context-aware inference generalizes beyond encoder-decoder ASR.

Care Barker, "Autistic Individuals and Visual Narrative Preferences: A Literature Review"

• As an Autistic person and educator, I am deeply interested in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Lived experience suggests that both reading and creating topic-specific comics for neurodivergent learners can act as effective and accessible means of knowledge translation.Research suggests that, when compared to other neurotypes, Autistic individuals have a unique and significant preference for multimodal comic narratives (Lucas & Norbury, 2018; Cohn, 2020).Noting this preference, my research asks if Autistic individuals and communities prefer to engage with information that is complex, uncomfortable, and challenges their beliefs when this information is presented in a multimodal comic narrative. In later phases, this research hopes to explore ways in which comic formats can be used to combat disinformation within the Autism community through knowledge translation of academic research.This phase of research consists of drafting a systematic literature review to analyze the state of knowledge in the intersections between comics, knowledge translation, and Autistic individuals. This review will be performed with support from V. Rahbar and with ongoing participation in UBC Comics Studies initiatives.The review will exclude sources prior to 2015 and prioritize Autistic voices by excluding pathologizing search terms and using a combination of AIMS-2-Trials community preferred language and a self-developed Autism Thesaurus. Comics search terms will likely include “comics”, “sequential art”, “visual narratives”, “graphic storytelling”, “graphic novels”, and “manga”. Due to differences in visual narrative culture, it is suspected that the country where the research was conducted will also play an important role in the analysis.

Eric Meyers, Rica Quebral, Emily Willcox, Piper Foster, "Anazlying Canadian historical fiction: the Geoffrey Billson Award"

• Historical fiction is one of the keystone genres of children’s writing (Cart, 2022), but it is also a way that young Canadians come to understand who they are, and how they are situated among the cultures and nation states of the world. Historical Fiction, then, is not just an entertainment nor simply a window to learning about the past, it also plays a large role in supporting the development of Canadian cultural ethos (Brown, 1998).We are working to expand and query a database of nominees and winners of the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, 2004-2024, a prize administered by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. We will analyze the nominated literature on a micro and macro basis; that is, we intend to do close reading of select titles to understand the nature of Historical Fiction in Canada as it is present in these nominated texts, and well as uncover themes and trends across 20 years of Canadian publishing. Such a project in the area of young people’s literature in Canada is unprecedented, and represents a unique methodological approach.

Jamie Lauzon, "How hard can it be? Mapping the name change process in British Columbia"

• Within archival scholarship, transgender (trans+) identities are mentioned, but often not represented. There are only a handful of formal articles written by openly trans+ folks about trans+ recordkeeping. This proposal responds to calls by prominent archival scholars like Brilmyer (2022), Watson et al. (2023), Michelle Caswell (2023), and K.J. Rawson (2009) for information research by and for trans+ users.My research at the UBC iSchool seeks to examine the barriers experienced by trans+ individuals in updating their gender ID data (name and gender marker) on legal documents. If we understand one’s name and gender marker as points of metadata in an information context, then we can understand how the “mislabeling” of trans+ individuals causes direct harm, both physical and mental (Brilmyer, 2022; Rawson, 2009; Watson et al, p. 433).This poster will present my emerging research on gender ID data in legal documents, particularly provincial IDs and Canadian passports. I am interested in creating a flow chart that illustrates the process a trans person must go through to getting a Canadian passport with an updated name and gender marker. I believe that creating a visual representation of the process in the form of a poster will help illustrate the complexity of the issue in a way that will generate interesting discussions within the iSchool.

Linnea Thorson, Curtis Ho, Dhanya Indraganti, Rachel Lau, Bette Smith, "Woodland watch: A mobile-first website for Woodland Cree First Nation"

• As part of the iSchool’s “LIBR 506 — Human-Information Interaction” course this fall, students were asked to design an information resource and related services for a specific user community in the context of the course-wide theme of Information Access, Rights and Censorship. Using the interface design tool “Figma,” our group built a mobile-first design resource website prototype entitled “Woodland Watch” (WW), created with the Woodland Cree First Nation (WCFN) as the intended primary user group. Through the creation of an evidence-based profile of the information needs and behaviours of WCFN, the use of information behaviour models and theories of Everyday life information seeking (ELIS) and Social media engagement theory (SME), and research conducted regarding the need for this information service within our user group, our prototype aims to address the user needs of WCFN as it relates to information access, environmental protection, and economic wealth and livelihood. Key features of WW include a “Projects and Reports” function (wherein incident reports and resource extraction projects are presented on an interactive map and in list form), an Incident Report Form (for WCFN members and individuals in the area to document and report environmental emergencies or incidents of pollution relating to resource extraction), and resources intended to address everyday life information needs related to life in proximity to resource extraction and its effects (e.g. resources on emergency preparedness). Questions of researcher positionality were crucial within this assignment and remain at the forefront of any future work that may develop regarding this project.

Luanne Sinnamon, Ben Mertick, Lisa Nathan, Dan Hackborn, Belinda Suen, "Making Space for Climate Sensemaking in Libraries"

• As individuals around the world face uncertainties and threats arising out of climate change, how might libraries leverage collaborative sensemaking activities/processes to support local agency and resilience? Over the past year, our research group has partnered with libraries in BC and Alberta to design and facilitate programs exploring this question while reflecting the unique goals, conditions, and contexts of these communities and libraries. The resulting programs included two “Climate Conversation” events co-hosted with the Nelson Public Library, three “Future Framing” workshops with the Fraser Valley Regional Library, and a PhotoVoice project with the Jasper Municipal Library. In each case, we conducted follow-up interviews and focus groups to gain insight into participants’ experiences. The notion of climate sensemaking was the common thread woven through each, which we framed through a set of sensemaking axioms distilled from prior research. In this poster, we share and reflect on these sensemaking axioms, their usefulness in informing these programs, and what we have learned from these experiences that can refine and deepen our understanding of climate sensemaking through libraries.

Piper Foster, "A not so natural disaster: what depictions of disasters in middle grade novels can tell us about addressing climate change"

• This research examines the way in which middle-grade natural disaster books approach environmental change and empowerment for action. Given the gradual uptick in natural disasters worldwide and the irrefutable reality that human action has worsened these disasters, it is important to recognize the role of humans in these novels while offering hope and action for the young readers. Through analyzing two recently published books, I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005: A Graphic Novel (2022) and Claudia in the Storm: A Hurricane Katrina Survival Story (2023), for environmental language, child agency, and community action, their approach to recognizing human action can be gleaned. From this, the presentation highlights and critiques the novels’ approaches to portraying the disaster stories in the new age of climate crisis.

Rica Quebral, "Sneaky scanlations: the note so secret tensions over illegal fandom media"

• Scanlations, based on the portmanteau of “scanned translations,” are critical to the global dissemination of manga outside of Japan, and this illegal practice has demonstrated the power of mobilized fandom in the shadows long before the New World Era of scanlations. While a part of the larger umbrella term of multimodal translations (Vazquez-Calvo et al., 2019), scanlations are unofficial translations created by scanning comics and translating them into a desired language without permission from the publishers. As a public network, this expression of fandom through publishing has captivated manga readers for over five decades. As relevant to the library community, it provides an insight to another medium consumers engage with and consume translated literature. This analysis aims to provide an overview of what scanlations are and how its internal culture impacts a young global audience.

Demonstrations

Alexander Ross, "Introducton to Playful Engagements: Catalyzing Game-Based Approaches to Teaching and Research"

• When we engage with games and play, what do we learn? This seemingly simple question has revealed itself to be startlingly complex. Although games and play have been construed as a “fundamental” part of human experience (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), it has been difficult to gauge the kinds of teaching and learning that occur through games as they invoke highly varied social and cultural modalities. Furthering this complexity are the ways digital games and play have become an increasingly ubiquitous and integrated part of life, work and leisure (Deterding, 2019). Only by embracing the lateral, creative, and expressive possibilities of games as tools for teaching and research can these latent gamified processes be made visible.The demo will serve as an introduction to the larger project Playful Engagements: Catalyzing Digital Game-Based Approaches to Teaching and Research, a workshop series designed to facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to incorporating game-based learning and research. The demonstration will combine a game-based walkthrough methodology with two short 10-minute talks, structured like a game walkthrough, focusing on the intersection of games, labour, and digital platform economics. Demo attendees will then participate the playing of a small selection of independent digital games that highlight the issues of work, habituation, and “precarious playbour” (Kuklich, 2005) raised in the talks. Our goal is to pedagogically demonstrate how games can be used as holistic teaching and research tools that can encourage a deeper and more playful engagement with crucial questions in information studies.

Danielle Alves Batista, "Visualizing blockchain to reduce records-based fraud in public procurement: a design demo from Brazil"

• Public procurement processes are particularly vulnerable to fraud when public records are forged, omitted, or manipulated across procedural stages. This risk is especially pronounced in Global South contexts, where institutional capacity and recordkeeping infrastructures may be uneven, despite strong legal frameworks.This demo presents a blockchain-enabled model designed to mitigate records-based fraud in public procurement, developed in the Brazilian context and aligned with democratic governance principles and international standards promoted by UNCITRAL, the OECD, the World Bank, and the European Union. The model focuses on reducing fraud opportunities by strengthening record authenticity, reliability, and traceability across the procurement lifecycle.Rather than showcasing a fully implemented system, the demo presents simulated user interfaces designed in Figma and inspired by information systems used in Brazilian federal government procurement. These screens demonstrate how blockchain, verifiable credentials and NFTs can be embedded into existing workflows supporting supplier qualification, document verification, and contract execution without disrupting institutional practices.By visualizing how emerging technologies can be operationalized through user-centered design, the demo encourages discussion on practical, scalable, and ethical adoption of blockchain for public sector recordkeeping. While grounded in Brazil, the model is adaptable to other democratic procurement environments across the Global South worldwide contexts.

Kendra Oudyk, "Interactive visualization of the Canadian Library Challenges Database: A prototype"

• Book and material challenges in libraries directly affect intellectual freedom and access to information. The Canadian Library Challenges Database tracks these incidents by recording where challenges happen, what materials are targeted, and how libraries respond. While this information is valuable, it currently lives in a spreadsheet-style format that makes it hard to see overall patterns, trends over time, or regional differences at a glance.This project demonstrates an interactive visualization approach to making the Canadian Library Challenges Database easier to explore and use for advocacy and public communication. So far, I have created several interactive, static, and dynamic (video) visualizations that show how challenges vary across place and time. These include an interactive map of where challenges have occurred across Canada, stacked bar charts showing common types of complaints and how libraries respond, and a bar chart 'race' video that illustrates how complaint categories change over time. The longer-term goal is to bring these visuals together into an online dashboard that can be updated as new data are added.This presentation is a live demonstration rather than a traditional research talk. It focuses on how visualizations can help tell clearer stories about book challenges, support conversations about intellectual freedom, and make existing data more accessible to librarians, advocates, and the public. I will walk through the current visuals, explain key design decisions and data limitations, and invite discussion about how dashboards like this could be used in library practice, advocacy work, and professional communication.

Graduate education in information science and archival studies continues to reproduce colonial pedagogical structures that constrain how Indigenous knowledge systems, methodologies, and responsibilities are taken up in the classroom. This project responds to these limitations by piloting a hybrid teaching model that explicitly centres the 4Rs, respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility, within the MLIS core curriculum at UBC’s iSchool. Developed in direct response to requests from Indigenous graduate students, including Indigenous parents who must currently leave their communities to attend in-person classes in Vancouver, the project seeks to reimagine where and how graduate learning can take place. Beginning in the 2025–26 academic year, three MLIS core courses were reconfigured to combine in-person instruction with synchronous and asynchronous online participation, enabling students to remain in community while engaging fully in graduate study. Importantly, this work understands hybridity as a relational and ethical practice, not simply a technical solution. The talk will trace the project’s collaborative design process with Indigenous students and advisors, outline the pedagogical commitments shaping the pilot, and share early reflections on implementation. By focusing on the core curriculum as an initial site of intervention, the project aims to investigate potential shifts in teaching practice, student experience, and institutional capacity, that is accountable to Indigenous students, communities, and lands, while strengthening teaching and learning across the iSchool.

Cath Ayres, "Projects of Possibility: Identity and Intelligibility in Nonbinary Middle Grade Fiction"

• In the introduction to Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asks: “What maximises the possibilities for a liveable life?” (2004, p. 8). They pose this question in relation to the intelligibility of one’s gender, or the potential of being recognisably human while subverting normative ideals of gender and personhood. For a life to be possible, it must be intelligible; to be intelligible to others, one must first be intelligible to the self.My research considers the intelligibility of nonbinary identities in middle grade fiction. Drawing on theories of trans identity, intelligibility and phenomenology, I have developed a unique lens through which to interpret the essential, embodied and constructed elements of nonbinary identities, and the intersections therewithin (Baldino, 2015; Nagoshi et al., 2014; Rubin, 1998). I apply this lens to a narratological analysis of three recent middle grade novels to identify if, when, and to whom the nonbinary protagonists are rendered intelligible. According to Butler, intelligibility invites possibility, as “the thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible” (2004, p. 31). This paper seeks to illustrate if, and how, nonbinary middle grade fiction presents readers with examples of possible, liveable nonbinary lives.

Eric Meyers, Neil Aitken and volunteer readers, "Diegetic prototypes: telling stories about the future of children's media"

• Fictional narratives, in print, television and cinema, have been a source of inspiration to the technology industries for more than a century (Kirby, 2010). These narratives also serve as a way of surfacing and interrogating our hopes and anxieties about how technology is incorporated in social practices. We suggest that short stories have the potential to create diegetic prototypes—prototypes of technologies and practices that are embedded in narrative fiction, allowing us to envision future scenarios both exciting and disconcerting (Dourish & Bell, 2014).For four years (2020-2024), the PI tasked graduate students with creating short stories to illustrate their learning about the possibilities and pitfalls of new media and children. We analyzed a corpus 84 2000-word stories of varying levels of sophistication, both in terms of the writing and thinking. We employed content analysis and close reading techniques (quant+qual) with the goal of understanding trends in student thinking about technology as it relates to children: what are their aspirations and anxieties? How do they frame the future? What literary devices and tropes are present in these stories? How do they support or constrain hope in the future of children’s media?Our presentation will have two components: a presentation of our findings from the content analysis, and readings of select short stories (by current iSchool students) to illustrate technique.

Samuel Hinds, "Wings at what cost? Depictions of martyrdom in Winx club"

• Drawing on the tradition and tropes of “magical girl” anime, Winx Club (2004-19) depicts the lives of six teenaged fairies as they confront evils and high school social dynamics. As the series progresses, the members of the titular club gain new powers called “transformations” that aid in their endless struggle to save the world. But at what cost? During season 3, each member of the Winx Club must perform a self-sacrificial act, rescuing somebody from their homeworld to obtain the “Enchantix” transformation. In doing so, the Winx girls become “full-fledged” fairies and graduate from high school.This paper problematizes the undue burden placed on teenage characters and examines Enchantix to understand the intercommunal relations of Winx Club. Using an intersectional feminist theoretical lens, I closely read how the Winx Club fairies’ attainment of Encantix demonstrates the demands from their community. This paper uses Nicoletta Marini-Maio and Ellen Nerenberg’s analysis of the Winx’s transformations as saint-like (30-31) and expands on this Christian reading by understanding Enchantix as depictions of expected martyrdom of young girls (Nelson 25-26). I ask the question: how much are we willing to let young women give up for their communities and homes?Given the release of Winx Club: The Magic Is Back (2025), a reboot of the franchise, now more than ever is a crucial time to think critically about what we require of the target demographic of young girls watching this show.

Shannon Hunt, " 'Magic' eraser: an intertextual analysis of disability representation in The Secret Garden and Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star"

• Despite promising growth in the percentage of disabled main characters between 2019 and 2024 (7.1% up from 3.4%), disability representation is still lacking in children's literature (Dickinson). In competition with this progress are the harmful disability narratives of canonical texts, which are continually reprised for consumption by generations decades beyond the eras in which they were written. One such text is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s "The Secret Garden" (1911). This intertextual analysis positions Laura Noake’s "Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star" (2023) as a “disability counternarrative” (Curwood 21) that upends the harmful tropes of "The Secret Garden." Both works feature disabled and/or chronically ill protagonists, explore themes of friendship and belonging, and are set in turn-of-the-century England. This study is an exploration of textual and contextual findings, using a framework that combines Critical Disability Theory (Hosking) with Bishop’s “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (xi). The analysis of these findings reveals the ways in which disability counter/narratives convey messages about and to disabled and nondisabled children alike, and, perhaps most importantly, points to the implications and enduring nature of such messages.

Anna Kovtunenko, "Rerooted on Coast Salish Land: Culturally adaptive design for living cultural heritage"

• While HCI seeks to provide common theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding human experiences with technology, its foundation in Western epistemology can obscure culturally appropriate information and interaction design, particularly in archival systems. Collections developed to digitize and preserve the living cultural heritage (LCH) of Indigenous communities can inadvertently render that knowledge inaccessible or unusable when their design fails to account for culturally specific practices and values. Consequently, digital archives must be informed by the cultural norms, practices, and protocols that shape how Indigenous communities understand and steward their information. For this project, I created a speculative redesign of the UBC Botanical Garden’s digital archive “Garden Explorer”, aiming to challenge the Western epistemic lens that excluded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm plant names, stories, and uses from the collection. Using Figma, I designed an interactive prototype titled Rerooted on Coast Salish Land that reimagines five Garden Explorer records through a more relational, accessible, and place-based framework. The prototype foregrounds hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ plant names alongside English and scientific nomenclature, introduces new ways for visitors to browse and engage with records, and reimagines a more dynamic, robust metadata scheme. Together, these interventions illustrate how culturally adaptive HCI might begin to question archival authority and unsettle colonial epistemologies, while highlighting a pressing area of design research that calls for further inquiry into more culturally informed approaches to designing archives for LCH.

Carolina Rocha, "The ethics of piracy as radical preservation"

• When operating within a legal system founded on capitalism, efforts to preserve the moving image must inevitably contend with the paradox of art and industry, wherein the archivable artifact straddles the line between commercial property and cultural heritage. In light of the ongoing consolidation of filmed media cultures under corporate monopolies, opaque platform governance and streaming-based distribution models have further complicated the politics of access in an era of digital upheaval. Piracy therefore emerges as a disruptive manifestation of the archival impulse—a form of radical preservation that surfaces the limits of authorized archival stewardship. This research considers how archival ethics, a paradigm largely developed within Eurocentric and settler colonial traditions, addresses the contradictions between legality, preservation mandates, and public access when preservation may require operating beyond the limits of legal and policy frameworks. By engaging intellectual property legislation, policy instruments, and professional ethical codes as sites of power, rather than neutral safeguards, this research undertakes a critical examination of how archival practice is shaped, and/or constrained, by colonial legislative infrastructures and contemporary platform capitalism.

Emma Quan, "The baby pages: baby record books, prescriptive design, and women's maternal recordkeeping"

• This research examines historical baby record books as a form of maternal and vernacular archives, arguing that they offer critical insight into women’s domestic recordkeeping practices and the social construction of motherhood. While often dismissed as sentimental ephemera, baby books are deeply shaped by cultural systems of gendered labour, medical authority, and documentary norms. Drawing on archival theory, feminist scholarship, and material culture studies, this research treats baby record books as intentional records that both reflect and shape historical understandings of maternity, childhood, and maternal responsibility.Through close analysis of the structure, prompts, and visual design of selected baby record books from the early to mid-twentieth century, this research explores how these artifacts prescribe what kinds of information mothers were expected to record, what forms of maternal labour were rendered visible, and what experiences were marginalized or silenced. Particular attention is paid to the interplay between institutional and medical authority and maternal agency, as well as to the affective and emotional dimensions of domestic documentation.

  By foregrounding women’s everyday recordkeeping practices, this research challenges archival paradigms that privilege institutional and predominantly male-authored records. It argues that baby record books function as materially and ideologically structured recordkeeping systems that reveal how social norms of motherhood are produced, reproduced, and occasionally resisted through ordinary documentary practices. In doing so, this research contributes to feminist archival scholarship and expands understandings of what constitutes significant and meaningful archival material.

Jessie Trafton, "Shifting and persisting barriers to information access for the LGBTQ+ community"

• To better serve the lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender, queer/questioning (hereafter LGBTQ+) community, information professionals need to understand what barriers impact the community’s ability to access information. Pierson’s (2017) literature review synthesized barriers related to information and access persistent in the LGBTQ+ community. This community continues to face discrimination, harassment and legislation intended to strip rights despite an increase in LGBTQ+ community acceptance (Stańczykiewicz & Senczyszyn, 2024). The language used about and by the LGBTQ+ community is ever evolving (Moulaison-Sandy et al., 2023; Thelwall et al., 2023) requiring shifts in material and resource description. This study seeks to expand Pierson's 2017 study by incorporating contemporary literature and new terminology and to surface barriers uniquely experienced by youth or elders in this community. This presentation will draw on preliminary findings and emerging considerations from the initial phases of the study.

Alia Hijaab, "Seeds of Return: Seeds as Artefacts of Cultural Heritage in the Arab Diaspora"

• This talk proposes seeds as archive: living records that carry cultural memory, ancestral knowledge, and relational belonging across time, land, and displacement. Drawing from archival theory, ethnobotany, diaspora studies, and decolonial scholarship, this project asks how seeds function as records of cultural heritage and survival. Using the Arab diaspora as a primary case study - particularly in relation to displacement, land loss, and disrupted knowledge transmission - the framework extends beyond this community across to other communities affected by the
  same colonial and imperial lineages.Situated on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) People, this research emerges amid intensifying colonial violence and global displacement of Arab and Muslim peoples combined with the collapse of our sensitive climates from resource extraction. Our ancestral and traditional epistemologies are increasingly threatened, and our people are calling for a return. The project brings together theoretical work on decolonization, land-based methods, provenance, and archival ethics with story-based and ethnographic accounts of seed keeping, seed saving, and community stewardship. It argues that seeds operate as embodied records that hold memory, encoding relationships to place, and enable continuity even in displacement.

  As an emerging project, this talk outlines a conceptual framework rather than empirical findings, inviting discussion around meaningfully questioning traditional archival frameworks and offering a living, relational, and future-oriented conception of archiving for and with community. By positing seeds as archive, we call to attention the practice of seed keeping/seed saving as a mode of cultural survival.

Sophie Abbott, "An Introduction to and Integrations of New Materialist Theory in Archival Studies"

•  This presentation introduces new materialism, the emerging interdisciplinary applications of the theory, and how archival studies could integrate the theory. While I have written a thesis that integrated this theory, I would prefer to present the theory from an archival lens instead of a historical one.As we handle objects/materials/records, we often consider the history of the human/institution, the creator, before the history or agency of the item. New materialism suggests the items themselves have genealogies and assert ‘object will’ on their surroundings. The manner in which an item is maintained and how it functions is therefore simultaneously reflective of a human process and an inhuman process. New materialism suggests that the concept of creatorship (and more broadly history), should be understood as a combination of human and non-human agencies.

Stephanie Weber, "The craft of archiving/the archiving of craft"

• This project is concerned with craft and the archive, and will centre on considerations, both practical and intellectual, that arise when archiving “craft,” a mode of creative making with feminist, queer and intersectional significances and whose preservation and art historical value has been undervalued in archival scholarship. I aim to address a notable dearth of both practical and theoretical works in archival literature devoted to craft archives. This project aims to investigate what happens to made objects when they enter the archival repository, suggesting that as archives increasingly become custodians of craft and object histories, a consideration of when and how they become “archival” is vital. I will consider this archival methodology question in concert with literature that positions the professional practice of archiving as a “craft,” asking about the relationship between information work and craft practice as twinned examples of feminized and thus devalued labour, an undervaluing that ignores the creative and intellectual work underpinning both. Also integrated will be a concern with crafting itself as “archiving,” drawn from works that position, for example, fibre art as record-keeping instruments. I propose that an encompassing theory of archiving craft that integrates these conceptual areas will add to bodies of literature in archival theory, non-textual archival methodologies, and craft theory.