BIOGRAPHY
Jen Jack Gieseking is an urban cultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, environmental psychologist, and American Studies scholar. S/he is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments. Jack’s work pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice in regards to gender and sexuality. S/he is working on her second book project, Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queer Women, 1983-2008, and conducting research on trans people’s use of Tumblr as a site of cultural production. S/he is Assistant Professor of Public Humanities in American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Jack’s first book is The People, Place, and Space Reader, co-edited with William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert, and recently out with Routledge. S/he has held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as German Chancellor Fellow; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellows Program. Jack also writes about her research as a blogger with the Huffington Post Gay Voices. Jack uses both she/her/hers and he/him/his pronouns.
RESEARCH PRESENTATION:
Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Trans Feminist Interventions into Data, Algorithms, and Visualizations
Does “not tiny” data ever qualify as big enough when marginalized people do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data”? How can algorithms support projects of resistance and resilience, rather than merely enact processes of data sorting and surveillance? In which ways can data visualization multiply rather than simplify narratives? Most data collected about lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (LGBTQ) people throughout history has only been used to pathologize and stigmatize. Gieseking draws upon the geographic concept to address how the size of data, the construction of algorithms, and the outcome of data visualizations matter to lesbians, queers, and trans people too. S/he examines the relationship between the digital and material spaces of lesbians, queers, and trans people, and their social and economic repercussions through research completed at the Lesbian Herstory Archives on LGBTQ publications and organizing records, as well as data scraping of the #ftm and #mtf hashtags on Tumblr. Drawing upon a queer trans feminist and critical geographic perspective, Gieseking argues that a wide range of imbricated scales of technology exist which extend the usual vertical portrayal of scale (from the body to the global) to a horizontal positionality that reveals the nuanced way power operates.
Loading...
Reload document 
Open in new tab Poster design by Megan Doty (http://www.megandoty.com/)