In our conversations about how to best open a generative space for forging activist and research connections and partnerships, we began to imagine what sort of group exercise could bring us to the table with open minds and imaginations.

Therefore we have a small and important request. In our conversations about how to best open a generative space for forging activist and research connections and partnerships, we began to imagine what sort of group exercise could bring us to the table with open minds and imaginations. Therefore we ask each QIS participant to draw and bring your own mental map of queer NYC to the QIS workshop.

A mental map is your own hand-drawn or labelled map–by “labelled map” I mean using a GoogleMap printout or NYC subway, for example. Include all of the places and spaces that you would identify as queer. You can spend as long as you like on drafting your map, use color or not, and they only need be 8.5″x11″ (a regular size piece of paper). All levels of drawing skills are expected and welcome. It does not matter when these places existed, but do your best to label them. It also does not matter what your sexual identity is or if you are from NYC or beyond; everyone’s geographical imagination of the queer city is key regardless of how detailed or recent it may be. The map will be a part of the afternoon group workshop to kick off conversations and collaborations. Just like every voice matters, every map matters.

See you soon with your mental maps!

We’re happy to announce the schedule for next week’s workshop on Queer Internet Studies.  For the scoop and detailed schedule, click here.

Thanks to everyone who’s filled out our participation form to attend the Queer Internet Studies Workshop in April.  Jack and I have been blown away by interest in this workshop, and we’ve had to close the form because we’re well over capacity.  In the next week or so, we’ll be reaching out to those of you who’ve signed up to attend, confirming that we have you on our list of participants and soliciting feedback for topics you’d like to discuss during the workshop.

In the meantime, thanks again to everyone who’s supported this workshop (especially our sponsors, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, JustPublics @365 and Microsoft Research). It’s really exciting to see this project come together!

We’re very excited to have the Queer Internet Studies Workshop coming together, and are currently in the process of confirming a really terrific group of writers, thinkers and makers.  Thanks to the awesome support of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and Just Publics 365 we’re pulling together a one day series of conversations, presentations and art-making.  As we gear up for April 4, we thought we’d spell out our main objectives for the QIS workshop.

+More than anything else, we want to bring together people working on different components of queerness and technology.  In academia, queer studies and internet studies are areas of scholarship that span a number of disciplines, which sometimes means that people end up working in isolated silos rather than collaborative conversations.

+In addition to providing a space for those conversations to happen among academics, we’re bringing artists and activists (who have their own experiences of silos!) who do work that in some way draws together queer issues and technology.  We believe that awesome things happen when you invite people with different experiences and backgrounds to participate in robust, complex discussions.

If you’d like to join us, just fill out this form.  Space is limited, so we’re doing this on a first-come, first-serve basis.  Looking forward to seeing you in April!

The Queer Internet Studies conference (#QIS2014) brings together thinkers, makers and doers in a workshop format who draw upon social scientific methods to do work at the intersection of queer life and the internet. Taking Samuel Delany’s (2001) call for lgbtq contact and networking to heart, we seek to bring together researchers who investigate the construction of queer communities, the development of queer knowledge production and cultures, and assess how queer identity is understood and archived. This workshop is geared towards fostering scholarly, activist, and journalistic opportunities for digital technologies and queer storytelling and visualization. We look to identify existing projects as well as suggest future collaborations of writers, scholars, and technologists interested in possibilities for supporting the development of the queer internet and queering the internet.

The conference will take place on Friday, April 4th, 2014, at Columbia University in NYC.