The Digital Image of the City, American Studies, Trinity College 2015. Standing, left to right: Andrew Fishman ’16, Madelaine Feakins ’16, Rick Naylor ’16, Dalton Judd ’16, Assistant Professor of American Studies Jack Gieseking, and Callie McLaughlin ’16. Seated, left to right: Molly Mann ’16 and Georgianna Wynn ’16. CC BY-SA-NC Trinity College 2015.

As the new semester is upon us–how did that happen so quickly?–I wanted to reflect back on my courses from last semester. I had a beautiful first semester at Trinity College, thanks mostly to those incredible faculty, staff, and students with whom I spend my days.

My senior seminar, The Digital Image of the City, which was a huge success–or so said the students on the final day, all smiley as they were on the last day (and as you can see on the image in the left)! I share a short explanation about …

As I just wrote on the Gender & Geography Bibliography (GGB) website, during Geography Awareness Week in mid-November 2015, over 49 individuals and groups participated in the Gender & Geography Bibliography Hackathon! Over a 1,000 new entries–many of them sorely missing books, book chapters, and articles, a large number of which are blissfully not in English–now fill the GGB. Thank you to all who participated and cheered us on!

For those of you who still want to take part in the Hackathon, head to our group at https://www.zotero.org/groups/gendergeog/ and request to join and Jack Gieseking (lead admin) will get a note to add you. From there, you and perhaps your friends–perhaps this is the new wild idea for wine night amongst the feminist dorks among us?? how fantastic–and follow the directions in previous posts. Email jack DOT gieseking AT trincoll DOT edu if you have any questions.

We will …

Over ten years ago, I spent a year pursuing the role of the instinct for aggression–the instinct to act, behave, take part, stand up, speak out, and so on–in my masters thesis, “’Ecstasy Has Been Given to the Tiger:’ Aggression in the Quaker Meeting for Worship,” which I share below.

ABSTRACT. Together, aggression and Quakerism are two seemingly disparate aspects of the intersection of psychiatry and religion. Society generally encourages disavowing aggression because of its incitement of and pairing with hatred and violence. Quakerism is branded at the other end of the spectrum as entirely passive for its silence (in the worship service) and dedication to peace (evident in its renowned social justice efforts). Yet aggression and Quakerism are intrinsically and necessarily intertwined for any religion’s healthy survival. Drawing upon work by Winnicott, Holbrook, and Ulanov to theorize the place of aggression in Quaker Meeting, I use William James’ method …

I am delighted to share that the Gender & Geography Bibliography Hackathon will take place November 15th-21st, 2015. A hackathon is a time when a group of people come together to work on a digital project, usually by coding and creating content for an app or website. Skills and time involved are minimal. The outcome is a profound source of public knowledge across fields, as well as training in the citation management software, Zotero.

We are eagerly seeking faculty, students, staff, & citizens who want to take part any time and anywhere during the week of 11/15 to add to and edit the now 3,000+ large online, citation database of feminist geographic sources. We are particularly keen to have folks contribute books, book chapters, and multimedia citations from across disciplines, and we are extremely eager for contributions of non-English materials. Folks can work on their own or form their …

We had a rousing conversation about the merits of open access (#OA) during Open Access Week at Trinity College. My presentation focused on how I came into OA and the key resources that make a busy faculty member or graduate student’s entrée into sharing their research publicly as part of the open education movement. I include my slides and the handout I shared below. After an introduction from our digital librarian Amy Harrell, I was joined by my colleagues Jack Doughtery in Urban Education Studies, and Charles Lebel in Language and Culture Studies in brief individual presentations followed by a conversation with our faculty.

Download (PDF, 49KB)

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I was interviewed earlier this year by Fortune Magazine regarding trans* issues in the workplace, and was quoted in their article yesterday, “What it’s like to be young, gender neutral and in the job market.” I had an incredible conversation with journalist Vivian Giang this spring and I am delighted, relieved, and inspired to see that she is writing about these issues for the business community. As always, I am deeply honored to be able to talk about trans* issues publicly.

To read more about transgender people’s experience of navigating bathrooms, see the following:

This Thursday I will be speaking on a panel regarding on my home turf, Trinity College, regarding the import of open access (OA) in the production of knowledge. The panel is open to the public!

Open for Collaboration: Scholarship in the Age of Open Access

Academic publishing in the digital age has opened new channels for scholarly communication. But are those channels truly reaching those who can most benefit from your research? On Thursday, October 22, we will host a Common Hour program featuring guest speakers who will address the status of the Open Access movement, and the ways in which it facilitates broader, collaborative scholarly discussions. The program is part of International Open Access Week, a global annual event that promotes discussion and awareness of Open Access publishing models.

Thursday, October 22nd at 12:15 pm in the Rittenberg Lounge, Mather Hall, Trinity College.

Sponsors: Trinity College Information Services…

My slides from my Futures Initiative talk, “Queering the Map: Theoretical Reflections on Spatial Methods,” at the CUNY Graduate Center this Friday (October 2nd) can be found below, and the Storify, notes, and photos from the talk can be found here on the FI blog.

As is the usual (and never the norm, wrote the queer theorist) for my approach, I drew upon both feminist and queer approaches for this project. While this talk highlighted the queer aspects of my project, an earlier talk this year at SDSU. “Personal/Political/Feminist Maps,” focused on the feminist dynamics and those slides can be found here. A number of paper are forthcoming from the intersection of both talks, including the piece I am presently working on: “Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Feminist and Queer Contributions to the Scale of Big Data.”

My thanks …

The Futures Initiative. 2015. “Queering the Map.” Graduate Center CUNY.

I’m over the moon that 1) I do not have the flu as I did last February when I had to cancel this talk, and 2) I finally get to give this talk at my alma mater with the brilliant, wonderful people at the Future Initiative. It will be great to share my thoughts on selecting the right tool to fit the right public humanities project, particularly in regards to multiple layers of data analysis and collaboration in my Queer Public Archives project. The detailed abstract is below.

WHERE: The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
ROOM:   9204-9205
WHEN:   October 2, 2015, 2:00 PM-4:00 PM
CONTACT INFO: futuresinitiative [at] gc.cuny.edu; (212) 817-7201
WATCH ONLINE: http://bit.ly/futuresed-live
RSVP NOW
HASHTAG: #futuresED

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau writes that “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.” But what …

Many thanks to the ridiculously smart and cool Nicole Pasulka for including my work in her newest Vice piece, “The History of Lesbian Bars.” I’ll have more coming out about lesbian bars in my next collected book chapter and, of course, they’ll be a key element in the book. Which I write every morning. Finally.

Gayme on.

 

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In the last month while moving to Hartford and getting settled in my new office at Trinity, I am happy to share that I joined the founding Board of Directors of the Rainbow Heritage Network (RHN). RHN is a national organization for the recognition and preservation of LGBTQ+ sites, history, and heritage. While always one for conspiring with archivists, librarians, historians, and their various home turfs, my collaboration with preservationists and archaeologists is a new endeavor that emerged from my roll in the LGBTQ Monuments Advisory Council of Scholars of the US National Parks Service. I am particularly keen in observing and helping to support the truly wide-ranging and radical representations of LGBTQQTSTSIA life that exist within the US and in relation to the US. I am also devoted to working with the RHN to think about our preservation efforts play a roll in the gentrification and financialization of …

My short reflection piece, “Urban Margins on the Move: Rethinking LGBTQ Inclusion by Queering the Place of the Gayborhood,” is now out in the Berlin Blätter with a focus on the shifting relationships between the center and margin, both material and metaphorical. I address this idea through the lens of LGBTQ neighborhoods, gentrification, and the work of feminist theorist bell hooks. The full text of the piece, as it is so short, is pasted below. Enjoy!

2015. Gieseking, J. Urban Margins on the Move: Rethinking LGBTQ Inclusion by Queering the Place of the Gayborhood. Berliner Blätter – Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge, 68, 43-35.

Urban Margins on the Move: Rethinking LGBTQ Inclusion by Queering the Place of the Gayborhood

Jen Jack Gieseking

We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks to shacks and abandoned …

I am delighted to announce the publication of “Useful Instability: the Queer Social and Spatial Production of the Lesbian Herstory Archives” in Radical History Review. The article is in the second of a two part special issue on “Queering Archives” titled “Queering Archives” Intimate Tracings,” both of which were edited by Daniel Marshall, Zeb Tortorici, and Kevin Murphy. The abstract and full citation are below, and a link to an open access version of this article is above. My thanks again to the Lesbian Herstory Archives for the work they do and place they keep that inspired this piece!

Queer theory’s embrace of instability paints stabilizing practices as normalizing and unjust. Rather than upholding a stance of opposition by championing instability alone, what can be gleaned for queer theory by examining the tension of the in/stability dialectic? This essay reflects on the author’s own embodied experience as researcher within …

The view from my window in Seabury Hall.
CC BY-NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2015

I am delighted to share that I am Assistant Professor of Public Humanities in the American Studies Program at Trinity College as of yesterday. Hurrah! I will be blogging soon about how I imagine and enact public humanities in my research, and how I frame it as part of my teaching. I applied for an received a competitive Community Learning Initiative grant to support my development of “The Digital Image of the City” course at Trinity with a focus on Hartford. I will also be teaching “Conflicts & Cultures American Society: the 1980s” through the lens of gender and sexuality in that period, from the Barnard conference to AIDS, from Reagan’s cowboy past to the neutered but vibrant Saturday morning cartoon characters. I am honored and excited to be a part of the Trinity faculty and …

I was recently interviewed by Fortune Magazine regarding trans* issues in the workplace. I had an incredible conversation with journalist Vivian Giang in the article: “Transgender is yesterday’s news: How companies are grappling with the ‘no gender’ society.” I am deeply honored to be able to talk about these issues publicly, but it’s more exciting to me to know that a major publication outfit is addressing gender fluidity in such a thoughtful, dynamic way. Here’s an excerpt from the end of the article:

With more young people refusing to be put in the binary-gendered box, more companies may follow suit, especially if they want to reach young consumers. The expanded ideas about gender identities are not a passing fad, says Jen Jack Gieseking, who identifies as transgender, lesbian, queer and goes by the pronoun “s/he.”

“The shifts we see happening around gender and gender identities are the opposite of …

Although I add readings to my Gender, Sexuality, and Space Reading List about every six months, it’s been a few years since I did a detailed review to include any and all possible cites. The list has been extended by about 200 sources as a result!

The Gender, Sexuality, and Space Reading List builds primarily from my experience as a geographer and an environmental psychologist. I welcome colleagues and visitors to recommend other works in the field below in any format (text, film, art, music, performance, etc.). This page is updated about twice a year with new literature.

I also recommend checking out the Gender and Geography Reading List which I help to support, a much longer term project.…

I was recently quoted in Rick Paulas’ “Mental Maps and the Neuroscience of Neighborhood Blight” for Pacific Standard. It’s incredibly exciting to see critical geographic work in the public eye.

I excerpt the selections where I was interviewed from the end of the article below:

For a contemporary example of this phenomenon, check out the media’s portrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests become riots, protestors become thugs, dramatic images of broken windows and burning cars are beamed to white, middle-class viewers who have never been inside the neighborhoods being covered. “[Viewers] presume the neighborhoods are violent,” says Jack Jen Gieseking, a postdoctoral fellow in New Media and Data Visualization at Bowdoin College. “And blame the people within them rather than thinking about how those neighborhoods got that way.” …

Racist practices like redlining, used from the 1930s through the ’60s to deny loans, insurance, supermarkets, and health coverage …

In celebration of the year since the absolutely magical Queer Internet Studies (QIS) workshop, I went and realized that the final notes from our conversations never posted. Oy! I take solace in the fact these even exist and can still be shared. As described in this great final post from the QIS site by my colleague, friend, and QIS co-organizer partner in crime, Jessa Lingel, most of our panelists and presenters highlighted the digitization and import of queer archives, including the likes in New York City alone of the Downtown Collection at NYU, NY Public Library Gay and Lesbian & AIDS/HIV Archives, LGBT Community Center National History Archive, Lesbian Herstory Archives, and OutHistory.org.

When we broke into discussion groups at the end of the day, our conversations repeated five key topics.

• The internet affords a space to convey the import of our queer history

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My most recent book review of Tina Harris‘ Geographical Diversions: Tibetan Trade, Global Transactions (UGA Press) is now up on the Society & Space website.

Geographical Diversions is a well written ethnographic contribution to the study of mobilities, fixities, and trade, with a focus on trade routes in Nepal, Tibet (or Tibetan Autonomous Region, i.e. TAR), India, and China. In her first monograph, anthropologist and geographer Tina Harris traces the “properties, spatial origins, and trajectories of commodities” that serve to fix some geographies while rendering others mobile and free. Moving between ethnographic thick descriptions of traders’ precarious stop and start movements over dangerous and shifting routes, dull-yet-revitalized British colonial diaries, local and international newspaper clippings and archival records, and interviews with traders, the book is a dialogue between geocultural and geopolitical economies of those living and trading across national, regional, and local scales. Unable to reproduce Owen Lattimore’s …

To honor Jim Blaut's efforts, the award will recognize a scholar who, over the course of her/his life, has used a geographic and historical analysis of capitalism to explain current social injustices and inequalities, and promoted activism against oppressive power relations both within and outside the academy. Award winner Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology & Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In the spring of 2013, I taught Queer(ing) New York as a Seminar in the City course with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The focus of the course was as follows: While lgbtq studies has begun to extend itself to look at rural and other non-urban environments, much of the urban still remains to be accounted for, particularly difference within the city. To truly account for our difference, we must queer the city in the way it normalizes groups and spaces, and New York City is the exciting urban environment to begin within. In this Seminar in the City, we will read work that challenges and queers the normalized histories and spaces of lgbtq life. How can we queer the neighborhood, bar, streets, and bodies within it to tell stories of difference?

I often …

Lauren Berlant Society and Space lecture at the #AAG2015 Chicago on Friday, April 24th, 2015. Find the abstract for the "Affects of the Commons" talk at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/14cee71fe9fb758f?compose=14cf692f75e22b37.

To honor Jim Blaut's efforts, the award will recognize a scholar who, over the course of her/his life, has used a geographic and historical analysis of capitalism to explain current social injustices and inequalities, and promoted activism against oppressive power relations both within and outside the academy. Award winner Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology & Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This session brings together compelling scholars within diverse intellectual traditions in educational research to discuss corresponding and sometimes competing definitions of justice. Each panelist will respond to a set of questions designed to reveal the salient points of convergence and difference between Indigenous studies, critical disabilities studies, critical race studies, immigration and border studies, and queer studies in education. A noted critical discussant will synthesize perspectives, offer ideas for future inquiry, and prompt further discussion between the panelists.

Today is Equal Pay Day, a day I much admire because it is 1/365th of the reminder we need as a society in the US that women are paid $.78 on the $1. My research and a great deal of other research on lesbian, bisexual, and queer urban spaces indicates that the limited number and limited tenure of these spaces with ever increasing property values–such as the likes of NYC–is greatly affected if not driven by women’s lesser income.

The constant conversation about the ever closing lesbian bar is a case in point, which younger LGBTQ people do now see as linked to patterns of gentrification as well as, I suggest, financialization. Yet this isn’t anything new. Research also shows that women drink less, go out less, and socialize less outdoors. WI suggest this is not only because of predatory behaviors against women in public spaces, but also because …

I am blissfully attending and participating in the Feminist Social Justice Conference at San Diego State University, a Workshop on Participatory and Feminist Research Methods to give the talk “Personal/Political/Feminist Maps: Reflections on Spatial Methods for Action Research.” The abstract and slides are below — I expect those who will find them most helpful are dealing with how to work with spatial methods and layering different data types and sorts in order to place them into conversation. I especially highlight mental mapping in conversation with the GIS platforms QGIS and Mapbox, with helpful hints on all as to how to move forward using the methods and analytics in your own research. One addition: my own 2013 paper on the methods and analytic techniques for mental mapping can be found here.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau writes that “What the map cuts up, the story cuts …

The following is a post I recently shared with the American Friends of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation blog in reflection to the German Chancellor Fellow / Bundeskanzler-Stipendium (BUKA) Alumni Meeting in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in November 2014.

I doubt I can express how honored, nervous, and excited I was to attend the BUKA Meeting in St. Petersburg this fall. However, as a BUKA, I persist.

The sense of honor came from having been selected as an American representative at the Russian gathering. I admire a lot of the research emerging in the Russian social sciences, a passion that developed through my conversations as a BUKA with Dr. Olga Sveshnikova, Visiting Scholar in the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. Her work examines the culture of Soviet-era anthropological digs as a production of Soviet myth and history. Sveshnikova’s project always fascinated me and left …

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2015. Gieseking, J. Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City. Area. doi: 10.1111/area.12147.

I am pleased to report that my new article in Area, “Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City,” is available via preview! As I am unable to pay the $3k-$5k fee to make this article open access (per the Wiley-Blackwell requirement to do so), you can (legally) download a pre-print version of the article for free by clicking here are on the image to the left. Enjoy! The abstract is also below. Many thanks to Sara H. Smith and her student colleagues who brought to life the AAG 2012 sessions on bodies, borders, and territories together and this following special issue.

2015. Gieseking, J. Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer …