GSLIS doctoral students Emily Lawrence and K.R. Roberto and master's student Kellee Warren will present separate talks at the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium at the University of Toronto on October 18, 2014. The colloquium aims to view the information field through the critical lens of gender and sexuality, considering the challenges and advantages of that interaction.
Lawrence will co-present, along with Richard Fry of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, “Pornography, Bomb Building and Good Intentions: What would it take for an internet filter to work?” Lawrence and Fry will argue that objections to content only make sense relative to situated knowers. The “situated knower” is a concept from feminist epistemology that relates to situated knowledge or knowledge that reflects a person’s individual perspectives, which are influenced by social locations. Thus, a genuinely successful Internet filter would account for features of both content and knower. Without mind-reading, Internet filters are at least conceptually capable of failure, and their “successes” will be in some sense incidental.
K.R. Roberto will co-present, along with Amber Billey of the University of Vermont, “Questioning Authority: Describing Gender in Name Authority Records.” New cataloging rules (RDA Rule 9.7) instruct to catalogers record the gender of a person. Roberto and Billey will discuss how this policy by the Library of Congress (LC) and the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) limits catalogers to a binary list of male, female, and not known, and reinforces regressive conceptions of gender. Roberto also will be moderating the session, “Descriptions and Discontents.”
Kellee Warren will present, “The Archival Science Profession and the Underrepresented: Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles, French Archives, and French Attitudes.” She will specifically discuss archival appraisal theory, Black Feminist theory, archives, and power and the influence on the collection of archival materials on enslaved black women of the French Antilles. This history alludes to the global lack of diversity in the archival and library and information science professions.