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Archives, libraries, and cultural information institutions influence and contextualize our cultural knowledge. Embedded in these practices are white supremacist, colonial legacies that have excluded crucial cultural knowledges and contexts, particularly for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. While momentum is building to create space for other knowledge frameworks, the scholarship broadly has yet to address how archival professionals and students are taught about these concepts, particularly in relation to archival description. Through a critical discourse analysis, we identify the ways in which white supremacist heteronormative practices are upheld within archival description education and training. To highlight interventions, we look at the ways in which scholars are already engaging with alternative or disruptive practices. By applying these approaches more intentionally within these frameworks allows for a more robust and critical archival practice that provides the ability to support the diverse user needs of these communities to create and perpetuate reparative justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As survivors have complex and varied motivations for disclosing sexual assault, information and communication technologies (ICTs) can offer unique affordances that either facilitate or hinder sexual assault disclosures. In response, this systematic review draws connections between the functions of sexual assault disclosures and how ICT design choices can impact the sexual assault disclosure process. Findings from 23 empirical studies indicate that platform affordances can facilitate sexual assault survivors' motivations of visibility, naming sexual assault experiences, anonymity, and destigmatizing sexual assault. Further, findings categorize ICT‐based sexual assault disclosure within three frames: disclosure as a linguistic act, disclosure as a reciprocal act, and disclosure as a cultural response. In turn, findings from this systematic review reveal a need for a better understanding of how ICTs function as counter‐discursive information spaces and identify important considerations for redesigning ICTs to allow for sexual assault disclosure work to flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersections of Indigenous knowledge management systems and gender in knowledge organization, reflecting on their potential to shape, challenge, and enrich our understanding ofidentity. We begin by reviewing the ways that Indigenous Knowledge Organization (IKO), knowledge management systems, and queer archival theory are converging in information spaces, before presenting two case studies of knowledge organization that highlight intersectional problems and tensions inherent in attempting to represent complex identities in archival and knowledge management systems. We discuss how two-spirit identities are challenging traditional categories of gender identity in traditional naming conventions. Second, we examine the complexity of Native American boarding schools, the inherent hierarchical structures in knowledge management systems, and the relational systems that can be used to create more inclusive and responsive knowledge structures. We explore how archival knowledge management systems can be made more relational, using the examples within the digital tool Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), and the challenges of relying solely on written structures to verify embodied knowledge and gender identity. We consider practical interventions to modify knowledge systems into being more adaptable, and the tension between deconstructing and building upon existing knowledge structures, using queering metadata as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education professionals with a keen eye and commitment to advocacy face many obstacles through their work. Manifesting the realities of embodiment of these identities, with professional duties and implications can be treacherous. Evidence exists of marginalized voices being silenced by the majority when speaking about their own lived experiences and community, but how is this situated for queer and trans educators? This project aims to investigate this phenomenon to better understand how these educators transverse educational institutions who continue to relegate issues of inclusion to a tertiary level, preferencing instead neoliberal logics of diversity management regarding LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgender) inclusion. Education professionals who have queer embodiments face a dilemma. Do we do our job and forsake our activist commitments, in turn, being complicit in oppression, or do we forsake our job to stand in solidarity with our kin? This project explores the way three activist-scholar navigate being an outsider in the academy. Using creative autoethnography to explore our own experiences of facing personal and professional backlash, we explore how to tear down the brick and mortar in order to build a new formation of an institution built upon radical inclusion.

This paper reports on findings from two studies focused broadly on the health information practices of queer persons in the American South. The first study consists of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 65 queer community leaders and members, focusing on their responses to identifying ICT-related barriers to health information. The second study is a participatory design project in which queer individuals received Community Health Worker (CHW) training and certification. As part of their coursework, these CHWs collaborated with health sciences librarians to create an informational resource focused on an issue facing the queer community. By combining the two studies, we offer additional evidence of the cisnormative and heteronormative biases entrenched within ICTs in health contexts and illuminate how communities radically repurpose, or queer, ICTs to uplift and center themselves for health promotion. Findings inform a framework for queer-centered design addressing the importance of affective value within ICTs for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is near-impossible for casual consumers of images to authenticate digitally-altered images without a keen understanding of how to “read” the digital image. As Photoshop did for photographic alteration, so to have advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics made seamless video alteration seem real to the untrained eye. The colloquialism used to describe these videos are “deepfakes”: a portmanteau of deep learning AI and faked imagery. The implications for these videos serving as authentic representations matters, especially in rhetorics around “fake news.” Yet, this alteration software, one deployable both through high-end editing software and free mobile apps, remains critically under examined. One troubling example of deepfakes is the superimposing of women’s faces into pornographic videos. The implication here is a reification of women’s bodies as a thing to be visually consumed, here circumventing consent. This use is confounding considering the very bodies used to perfect deepfakes were men. This paper explores how the emergence and distribution of deepfakes continues to enforce gendered disparities within visual information. This paper, however, rejects the inevitability of deepfakes arguing that feminist oriented approaches to artificial intelligence building and a critical approaches to visual information literacy can stifle the distribution of violently sexist deepfakes.

This article proposes queer digital forensics as a method for exploring the discursive manifestations of queerness across multiple institutes of higher education (IHEs). Informed by historical frameworks of queerness within IHEs and contemporary understandings of queer archival theory, the article identifies queer digital forensics as an innovative tool to highlight both the resilience and absence of queerness within geographically and ideologically diverse IHEs. Through analysis of four IHEs, the article finds that the imagined presence of queerness on a campus often contradicts queer visibility within digital settings while offering new ways to enumerate queer visibility, even within fiercely anti-queer IHEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive. BY KATHERINE GROO UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2019 Any scholar of film with a finger on the pulse of the myriad movements [...]