Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia — April 23, 2016
Gender and sexuality organize much of social life. How we understand ourselves and each other often begins–or, when we interact with institutions, even requires–checking off binary boxes: man or woman, gay or straight. Of course, lives and selves are more complicated than this, and these complications are what we wish to explore at the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium in April 2016. We are particularly interested in the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with other social categories. Too often, when we talk about women we only talk about white women, cisgender women, wealthy women, or women with access to other forms of power.
We explicitly invite presenters who can disrupt these tendencies. From the collections and technologies we build and the access tools we design, to the histories we collect, catalog, and preserve, to the ways in which we engage with our daily practice, information studies theorists and practitioners are always engaged in the political projects of making and being made — impacted by the social categories through which we live our lives.
We invite proposals to join and extend these conversations during a one-day colloquium to be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre Campus in Vancouver, BC, on April 23, 2016. Presentations will consist of 20-minute individual papers organized around themes that emerge from the submissions.
Suggested topics include:
– Intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, and other axes of social organization in information environments, both in theory and practice
– Information studies and its engagements with cross-disciplinary theories of gender and sexuality
– Practice-based responses to critical theories of gender and sexuality in information studies responses
– Critical approaches to cataloging and classification
– Feminist and queer library pedagogies, both in information studies schools and at the K-12 and undergraduate levels
– Queer and feminist archival practices, both theoretical and material
– Feminist and queer library and archival technology
– Critical feminist and queer critiques of the technologies of information production, organization, and dissemination
Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words and a brief biography: http://bit.ly/gsisc16
Proposals due November 16, 2015. Notification December 15, 2015. Registration opens January 2016.
Thanks to Simon Fraser University Library for generously hosting this colloquium.
Committee: Emily Drabinski, Baharak Yousefi, Tara Robertson
For more information about this colloquium, including accommodations, go here:
http://litwinbooks.com/2016colloquium.php
For information about our 2014 colloquium in Toronto, including the agenda and a selection of papers, go here:
