Jessa Lingel of the Bushwig Magic Grant Team is organizing a Workshop on Queer Internet Studies. She writes “Thanks to the awesome support of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and Just Publics 365, I’m working with Jack Gieseking to organize a one-day series of conversations, presentations and art-making. As we gear up for April 4, we thought we’d spell out our main objectives for the QIS workshop.” Learn more about this event!
More than anything else, we want to bring together people working on different components of queerness and technology. In academia, queer studies and internet studies are areas of scholarship that span a number of disciplines, which sometimes means that people end up working in isolated silos rather than collaborative conversations.
In addition to providing a space for those conversations to happen among academics, we’re bringing artists and activists (who have their own experiences of silos!) who do work that in some way draws together queer issues and technology. We believe that awesome things happen when you invite people with different experiences and backgrounds to participate in robust, complex discussions.
Spaces for the workshop filled up after only a week, which makes us feel like we’ve very much identified a gap in conversations. Jack and I are still in the process of determining the exact shape and outcomes of the workshop, largely because we want both to be driven by participants and not just our own narrow interests. We’ll have a follow-up post as the workshop gets closer–in the meantime, we’re very excited about the enthusiasm and support we’ve received so far on bringing these ideas, people, technologies and conversations together.
Learn more at www.jgieseking.org/qis2014/.