CLIR is thrilled to announce the featured speakers at this fall’s DLF Forum and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place:
Kishonna Gray, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky and faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University.
Dr. Gray will present Archiving Cultures: Gaming as Black Digital Storytelling: While conversations on contemporary video games often focus on violence, online harms, and the military industrial complex, they can also be sites of much more. Black gamers recognize the contentions relationships with gaming and work to resist and reframe and create spaces of community, support, and culture. As such, this presentation will focus on gaming as a place where Black history and culture can be told outside conventional tropes and stereotypes that often pervade media. Streaming cultures also provide the ability to tell one’s own story using digital tools.
About Dr. Gray:
Dr. Kishonna Gray is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. Dr Gray is the author or co-editor of numerous books and articles including her foundational 2014 work Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins, 2018’s edited collections Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play and most recently Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. She also has a book currently under contract with NYU Press entitled Black Game Studies.
She’s a highly sought after speaker and regularly addresses both academic and industry audiences such as at the Game Developers Conference. She is the winner of a number awards over the years including The Evelyn Gilbert Unsung Hero Award and the Blacks in Gaming Educator Award.
Follow Her:
Twitter: @KishonnaGray
Instagram: @kishonnagray
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kishonna-gray-5097511a/
Jamie Lee, Associate Professor Digital Culture, Information, and Society at the School of Information, University of Arizona.
Lee will present Kairotic and Kin-centric Archives: Addressing Abundances and Abandonments: In this presentation, Jamie A. Lee traverses the persistent memories and memory-making practices of their local queer borderlands communities through frameworks of the kairotic and kin-centric. Sharing stories from two distinct community-based digital archiving projects, Lee attends to loss and to re-collection and explicitly addresses both abundances and abandonments. This presentation considers space and time and, especially, context(s) when archives and the communities they represent come together to ‘mind the gaps’ in the archives. Using first-hand archival experiences, Lee engages myriad ways of preserving and maintaining memory through enduring, what they call endearing, and ephemeral practices. Building on their understanding of the archival body, Lee shares their timely and relational archival approach to develop and, also, to reveal the practices, pedagogies, and possibilities of working in, with, and for non-dominant communities in the maintenance of their memories as bodies of knowledge, experiences, affects, and relations.
About Jamie Lee:
Jamie A. Lee (they/she), Associate Professor Digital Culture, Information, and Society at the School of Information, University of Arizona, is a scholar, activist, filmmaker, archivist, oral historian, partner, co-parent, neighbor, and friend. They founded and direct the Arizona Queer Archives (www.arizonaqueerarchives.com) where they train community members on facilitating oral history interviews and building collections in and with their own families and communities. With storytelling at the heart of their life’s work, Lee also directs the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab and co-founded the Critical Archives and Curation Collaborative, the co/lab, through which they collaborate on such storytelling projects as secrets of the agave: a Climate Justice Storytelling Project
(www.secretsoftheagave.com), the Climate Alliance Mapping Project, CAMP (www.climatealliancemap.org), and the Stories of Arizona’s Tribal Libraries Oral History Project (with Dr. Sandy Littletree and Knowledge River). Lee’s 2021 research monograph, Producing the Archival Body, engages storytelling to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, Lee introduces new understandings of archival bodies that interrogate how power circulates in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. For more on Lee’s projects, visit www.thestorytellinglab.io.
Follow Them:
Twitter: @JamieALee2013
Instagram: Jamie.lee.qarchives
Facebook: Jamie A. Lee
Get Ready to Register
Get ready to elevate your skills and expand your network – registration for the 2023 CLIR events opens this summer! Hotel booking information is coming even sooner, so keep an eye out for that. Booking at the events venue through our room block will guarantee the lowest available room rates. In the meantime, check out our Registration page.
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– Team DLF