A Public Talk on Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke University Press, 2020)

Presenter: Cait McKinney, Author of Information Activism and Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University

This talk was given via Zoom on 15th October 2020

LINK to talk

The Centre for Media History at Macquarie University invites you to attend a talk by Cait Mckinney on their monograph Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and group discussion.

About the book: For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge. https://www.dukeupress.edu/information-activism

About Cait McKinney: My research is interested in how queer and feminist social movements use digital technologies to build alternative information infrastructures. I focus on how these movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious. My research illustrates how information activism by queer and feminist social justice initiatives offers novel approaches to issues of accessibility, data-management, and participation in networked media environments. Methodologically, I draw primarily on archival research and interviews to do my work.

My current projects are focused on:

• queer activist responses to early online content regulations censoring sexual expression
• the relationship between HIV and computing in the 1980s and 90s
• the ways sexuality has been used to explain data and databases since the 1960s