I had the blissful, joyous experience of co-organizing the second Queer Internet Studies Symposium with my dear friend and colleague, Jessa Lingel (Annenberg UPenn). I framed our opener to the conference as “What’s Queer @ Internet Studies Now?” so that Jessa and I could riff on that state of the field–a field defined by having this very meeting, as our participants told us! This post was originally shared on the UPenn Alice Paul Center website and newsletter. Check out the http://jgieseking.org/qis2/ for posts from other attendees. A special issue on QIS is in the works! Jessa also shared our post on the Microsoft Social Media Collective, where I recently spent a truly fabulous week in the company of Mary Gray, Dan Green, Dylan Mulvey, Tarleton Gillespie, and Nancy Baym at MSRNE in Boston. This was another three year-previous parallel since my visit to Microsoft SMC in 2014 led to …

I’m excited to announce that the second Queer Internet Studies (QIS2) Symposium, which I am again blissfully organizing with the fabulous Jessa Lingel, will be a one-day event on February 17th at UPenn’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Read more about QIS2 here and get to the registration via this link: http://jgieseking.org/qis2/. Please share widely!

The goal of the day’s conversation is to broaden our thinking about the internet: to think about intersections of technology and media, sexuality and queering, gender and feminism. The final schedule is still being determined, but we’re hoping to have a mix of sharing research, making art and developing an interdisciplinary conversation of what Queer Internet Studies might mean for research, policy and activist agendas. Presenters and panelists include T.L. Cowan, Oliver Haimson, Adrienne Shaw, Carmen Rios, Mia Fischer, Mitali Thakor, Shaka McGlotten, and Katherine Sender. All in attendance will be invited …

Immediately after the election, my colleague/friend Emma Jackson at Goldsmiths asked to be part of The Sociological Review‘s rapid response collection to the US election. I said yes even though I was mostly in a fog about what to write beyond making it for, by, and about queers. No surprise there.

Shortly thereafter, Rhon Manigault-Bryant’s brilliant post “An Open Letter to White Liberal Feminists” on the African-American Intellectual History Society site launched. I was inspired by Manigault-Bryant’s words when she wrote that she was “delighted” that white women were forced to finally reckon with violence and injustice that women of color faced daily. In writing a contemporary historical geography of New York City, I often struggle with the inane notion that lgbtq lives have gotten “better” when there has never been evidence of decreasing rates of LGBTQ youth suicides, harassment of LGBTQ people of color, or violence against …

WOOHOO! The LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History theme study has been released by the U.S. National Park Service of the Department of the Interior for National Coming Out Day! Happy coming out, National Parks!!!

Who made this happen? (Queen) Megan Springate is a kind, brilliant scholar who works on queer archaeology (that’s a thing! and it’s such a cool thing!) and she truly led the effort to bring this to life. There are dozens of authors involved. And what was my role? Besides serving as a peer reviewer for many, many essays, my own essay, “LGBTQ Spaces and Places,” is meant to be a really wide-ranging piece that allows those unfamiliar with LGBTQ geographies and pushing thinking beyond the notion that all “gay” people live and/or hang out in gay neighborhoods in cities, and just adoreeee bars. Amen. I account for the …

WOOHOO! The LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History theme study has been released by the U.S. National Park Service of the Department of the Interior for National Coming Out Day! Happy coming out, National Parks!!!

Who made this happen? (Queen) Megan Springate is a kind, brilliant scholar who works on queer archaeology (that’s a thing! and it’s such a cool thing!) and she truly led the effort to bring this to life. There are dozens of authors involved. And what was my role? Besides serving as a peer reviewer for many, many essays, my own essay, “LGBTQ Spaces and Places,” is meant to be a really wide-ranging piece that allows those unfamiliar with LGBTQ geographies and pushing thinking beyond the notion that all “gay” people live and/or hang out in gay neighborhoods in cities, and just adoreeee bars. Amen. I account for the …

I recently made my article, “Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data,” public via the open access (OA) services SocArxchiv and SSRN. While I am sharing a new publication through same means but on the geographical imagination–the topic of my first blog post and, still and weirdly, my most popular–I also want to write a little more about why I am keen to place my OA work in these archives. Specifically, my dear friend / feminist geographer Sara Koopman pointed out in a recent comment that I didn’t “explain why [I] like these two cites better than academia[.edu] or research gate – both of which have their issues but are WAY prettier and easier to use than these two [sites, i.e. SSRN and SocArxchiv].” Indeed! In brief: while I will surely load my work to academia.edu and ResearchGate as well, I …

My. Best. Journal article title. Ever. Is finally ready to share. It’s also my favorite publication to date and I’ve loaded it in pre-print form to make it accessible now and posted the full cite at the end. Enjoy the likes of….

Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data

Abstract: How can we recognize those whose lives and data become attached to the far-from-groundbreaking framework of “small data”? Specifically, how can marginalized people who do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data” claim their place in the big data debates? I examine the place of lesbians and queer women in the big data debates through the Lesbian Herstory Archive’s not “big” enough lgbtq organizing history dataset—perhaps the largest dataset known to exist on lgbtq activist history—as one such alternative. A contribution to critical data studies, I take a …

Rick Paulas is a fantastic journalist who is as enthralled with environmental psychology as I am. We recently spoke about the way notions of geography and identity are co-produced by and evident in “Home Games: The Strange Overlapping Borders of Sports Fandom.” I rarely get a chance to discuss athletics so that — coming from a NESCAC school where *surely* we will *finally* beat Amherst for the football title this year, i.e. go, Trin! — it was a special pleasure to contribute to thinking on this topic.

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I’m already in Tucson taking in the first ever and utterly incredible Trans Studies Conference. My paper on the my #ftm and #mtf Tumblr research is tomorrow, with a focus on the subset of my way-too-big-to-analyze-on-my-computer-dataset of millions of posts over 2 years(!): “Networked Trans: #FtM Culture, Identity, and Knowledge Production on Tumblr.” I hope there will be some great tweets to share. I’ve been thinking a lot about what trans theory is and could be and hope to work those ideas in to this.…

48 (3): 262–70.

A year and two weeks ago, I posted the text of “Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City” — which is now published in print! Here’s the citation and abstract:

The geopolitical focus on territory as a fixed and cohesive nation-state simultaneously conceals the ways territories form and are operationalized at other scales. At the same time, the fleeting ability of minority bodies to make and retain cohesive, property-owned territories overlooks the limited agency that marginalized groups possess while they continually reproduce social territories as they …

My review of Christina Hanhardt‘s utterly delicious Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence is available online and below (OA) in Gender, Place and Culture. When I say “delicious,” this is a spot on description for an important, beautiful work of lgbtq geographical history. I include the first two paragraphs below–you can read the entire publication here. (I was going to put it up on SSRN, only to find out, depressingly and shockingly, that it has been sold to the evil and most profitable-upon-academic-unpaid labor company Elsevier.)

Christina B. Hanhardt writes in Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence that one cannot “fully understand changing spatial development patterns apart from LGBT politics” (9). Geographers everywhere should take heed and would do well to read this book. Drawing upon Hanhardt’s insightful text will prove an exciting way to incorporate geographies of sexuality …

I’m thrilled my new chapter, “Dyked New York: The Space between Geographical Imagination and Materialization of Lesbian–Queer Bars and Neighbourhoods,” is out in Kath Browne and Gavin Brown’s new The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities. The chapter is the third in the fourth set of chapters and articles I’ve been writing about lesbian-queer and lgbtq neighborhoods, along with two book reviews I’ll be posting shortly on Ghaziani and Hanhardt’s lgbtq neighborhood books in Gender, Place and Culture. To be honest, writing about neighborhoods in and out of themselves drives me batty because it feels like an oversimplified notion to claim the existence of this absolute space that is, at best, always contested and contingent, partial and fleeting. But!, writing about gentrification and financialization thrill me because I am writing about processes of urban political economies as they are far from stagnant and help me …

In my recent blog post, Teaching Queer America, I reflected on my second senior seminar. In this post, I want to briefly touch on the pleasures of teaching my first intermediate-level course, Data Driven Cultures, at Trinity this spring. The course is fueled by a pair of basic yet profound question: how does the internet work, and how does it work upon us? Our daily existence is increasingly structured by code and data, from the algorithms that time our traffic lights to those that filter our search criteria and record our thoughts and ideas. In this course, we explored the possibilities, limitations, and implications of using digital methods and analytics to study issues that affect our everyday lives through a social scientific approach. We pay special attention to the ways we collect, trust, analyze, portray, and use data, most especially the tools and meanings involved in data visualization …

This spring I taught two incredibly exciting courses. The senior seminar, Queer America, was comprised of a small group of students, primarily from our American Studies program. This is my second senior seminar at Trinity College and my first full-semester lgbtq studies course. Of course, the latter is the more shocking of these components: all of this queering I’ve been up to and I’m only just achieving this beautiful moment. I taught Queer(ing) New York with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies with their Seminar in the Series course in 2013.

The course was framed around the following questions: What is queer about America? What can be and has been queered about America? What, if anything, is not queer about America?

I was really energized and excited to see …

You say: Ack! You are going to submit something you wrote! To a journal! This is happening!

I say: Good for you, friend!

Wow, you did it. You wrote something and you sent it into the ether of peer review and three months to two years went by and, suddenly! (because it feels that way), your peer review is back. Quite like my most recent post on How to Do Peer Review, it is just as important to think about how to respond to peer review. Junior researchers and scholars can especially get bent out of shape–cough, cough, myself included–when overwhelmed by criticism and critique, some of which is inevitably at odds at one another.

This post includes some steps (below) on how to reply to peer review and keep a sane distance in the process, all the while producing a clear, tight, and logical series of responses that …

A grad student friend of mine called in a panic a few months ago asking how to do a peer review. “Should I say yes? Is this a good thing? Is this just free labor? How the hay do I even do one of these things?!?!?!?!”

I admit the last question floored me until I recalled that I took a class with the amazing Barbara Katz-Rothman and Juan Battle when at the Graduate Center CUNY that explained this process to me. As a cultural geographer, I begged my way “Writing for Sociologists” and it made my academic life so much easier. To write this post, I reached out to colleagues about how they do peer review. I also draw on my experience as admin associate of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly for three years and my service on multiple editorial boards to offer some best practices / shortcuts / ways to …

I am honored to share that insights from my research were heard around the world for two minutes on August 23rd, 2016, in the BBC World Services “Beyond Binary” documentary. If you care to listen me especially, I am a minute 10. You can hear me speak about my new research on trans use of Tumblr. For about two years, I’ve been collecting data on the use of the #ftm hashtag and, for a shorter time, #mtf hashtag on Tumblr. I came upon the world of trans Tumblr, as I call it, in 2010 when I was choosing my own new name. I found a tightly-knit network of trans people who are otherwise unanchored through their geographic diaspora. You can click here to read more about that research project.

Here’s more on the “Beyond Binary” documentary from the BBC World …

I am honored to share that insights from my research were heard around the world for two minutes on August 23rd, 2016, in the BBC World Services “Beyond Binary” documentary. If you care to listen me especially, I am a minute 10. You can hear me speak about my new research on trans use of Tumblr. For about two years, I’ve been collecting data on the use of the #ftm hashtag and, for a shorter time, #mtf hashtag on Tumblr. I came upon the world of trans Tumblr, as I call it, in 2010 when I was choosing my own new name. I found a tightly-knit network of trans people who are otherwise unanchored through their geographic diaspora. You can click here to read more about that research project.

Here’s more on the “Beyond Binary” documentary from the BBC World …

For about two years, I’ve been collecting data on the use of the #ftm hashtag and, for a shorter time, #mtf hashtag on Tumblr. These oft used trans hashtags, standing for female-to-male and male-to-female respectively, drew my attention as I was coming into my own trans identity. I came upon the world of trans Tumblr, as I call it, in 2010 when I was choosing my own new name. I found a tightly-knit network of trans people who are otherwise unanchored through their geographic diaspora. They were mostly very young, publicly sharing and connecting about the everyday violence and life milestones, accomplishments and losses that fuel life in general and trans life specifically. I was particularly struck by the small number of voices that dominated the conversation, as well as the suicide notes that would float to the surface and the resounding and instant response of those around them …

Semester after semester, I find myself receiving an increasing number of requests to write recommendation letters. They are a pleasure to write. Unfortunately, my students often appear confused about who to ask or feel nervous to ask so that they send their requests at the last possible minute, thereby leaving me with little time to write the best letter for them. Another dilemma is that undergraduates often have never asked for letters and fail to supply all of the needed information, or do not know how to tell me the story of what they need and how they need it. Yet another issue is that students do not know the labor involved or the depths to which professors and others go in writing such letters.

In my new Pedagogy sub-page, “My Recommendation Writing Policy,” I share my recommendation writing policy with my Trinity students and also offer advice on how, …

My dear friend and colleague, Maggie Galvan, put up a post some time ago with a pretty powerful quote from feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonical theorist Gloria Anzaldúa:

The American Association of Geographers and Sexuality & Space Pre-Conference meetings took place in San Francisco last week. I’ve been back in Hartford a week and still feel like I’m getting my sea legs back after six days of conferencing. The Sexuality & Space Pre-Conference served as a great kick-off for the week and allowed to catch up with or connect to geographers of sexualities on their research-in-process. I reflect on the great papers and ideas I heard throughout the week and, most importantly, the segregation and diversity of the meeting, and how we must come together even further to create truly rigorous and diverse scholarship.

I took part in four exciting sessions during the week. In the first two, “Dilemmas III: Institutionality, Queers, and City Exclusions and Negotiations” and “Queering code/space: difference, disorientation, and the digital,” I acted as discussant for papers from scholars ranging from Sarah Schulman to …

Excited to share the great news that our panel, “Geography, Maps, and Visions of Home in the Classroom,” organized by Eric Covey (U Miami) and including the likes of Elizabeth Belanger (Hobart & William Smith College), Anita Elizabeth Huizar Hernandez (U Arziona), and Patrick McGreevey (American University of Beirut). The abstract is below. It will be wonderful to think about the place of geography in the American Studies pedagogy and contribute to its teaching including and beyond the role of maps through conversations about the meaning and role of space, place, and environment. What is the geographical imagination of American Studies in the research we teach and discuss, and in the assignments we give students that allow them to shape their own understanding of the world and its practices and processes? What geographical imagination should we offer them in order to produce more justice worlds? The abstract for the session …

I’m in NYC again, walking around among the places where it seems everyone I knew over the last 16 years in this city used to be able to afford to live. What a perfect frame of loss and longing, transition and possibility in which to speak on the Eulogy for the Dyke Bar (EFTDB) at PULSE today. EFTDB is an installation by artist and queer Macon Reed: a fully-immersive structure that revisits the legacies and physical spaces of dyke bars, an increasingly rare component of the contemporary queer cultural landscape. Made of simple materials and seductively saturated colors, Reed’s hand-made installation includes a full bar, pool table, jukebox, and wall-to-wall wood paneling.

I am honored to be part of that exhibit! I will be on a panel discussing the present moment of dyke bar closings at 1pm on 125 W 18th St. between 6th & 7th Avenues. I’ll …

Whoa. It was August 1st and a chemist friend (god bless you, Ryan) and I are in a U-Haul on I-495 wrapping around Boston ever so slowly creeping to I-90 and then I-84 until we see Hartford on the horizon and I say, “That’s my new city, buddy!” Yes, Hartford has an actual skyline and I was ready to be romanced by this urban tract. As much as I learn and love about the city, I admit it’s tough at time as Hartford is dependent upon and revolves around car commuter culture attached to suburbs (which make up a large part of the State of Connecticut. Over the course of the semester, I’ll make some great connections and breakthroughs, and also connect to activists who want to change that dynamic. Looking for permanent housing–also: whoa and FINALLY–allows you to really get to know a place like you have not before…not …

I am honored to announce that I’ve accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the leading US geography journal, Annals of the Association of American Geographers. A hub for truly important and ground-breaking research and blissfully not managed by Elsevier, I hope to contribute to policies of open access, grow our digital presence, peer review a lot of fantastic work, and help grow the beautiful field of geography within the public and academic eye alike.

In the fall of 2013, I published the first book review in the Annals on the topic of lgbtq geographies and geographies of sexualities. Mind blowing. And it’s only up from here, team!

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Belinda Carlisle was right: heaven is indeed a place on earth. For me that would be the  experience of teaching my American Conflicts and Cultures in the 1980s course. I, of course, equally loved my Digital Image of the City course as I discussed earlier, but teaching the 1980s was just…fun? Perhaps it’s that as a child of the 1980s, I could step back in time and make recent policy, legal, and social shifts resonate in the bodies and minds of young people born in the late 1990s. Actually, it was attaining that learning objective with a group of really incredible, curious students that was all the fun.

In this post, I’ll share how the course unfolded and how I structured teaching a decade so that it mattered to my students. As a project of public humanities, students worked together to build a timeline of the key events of the …