Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics Lecture Series

Speaker: Mary Gray, Department of Communication and Culture, IUB
Topic: Beyond "Online/Offline": Information access, Public Spaces, and
Queer Youth Visibility in the Rural U.S.
Date: Friday, September 24, 2010
Time: 1:45pm-2:50pm
Place: LI001 Wells Library (SLIS in Wells Library; East 10th St. entrance)

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and
coffee, available at 1:35pm. There will be an informal meeting
with graduate students following the talk.

ABSTRACT
Drawing on her nearly two years work in rural parts of Kentucky and in small towns along its borders, this talk discusses how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of social media and local resources to combat the marginalization faced in their own communities and their absence in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups. This talk explores how boundary publics—visibility strategies that blur offline/online experience—act as responses to "digital inequality" against increasing privatization of information access and government-mandated censoring of information at educational institutions in the rural United States. The complete abstract is available at: http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/media/M_Gray.pdf

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Mary L. Gray is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research examines how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999).
Her latest book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work. For more information about the book, see the BLOG for "Out in the Country, Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America" @ http://www.QUEERCOUNTRY.org. Her home page is http://www.indiana.edu/~cmcl/faculty/gray.shtml

This series is designed to introduce faculty, students and staff across the university to current research in social informatics conducted at IU and around the world. The Center is jointly sponsored by the IU Schools of Informatics and Library & Information Science, and the Kelley School of Business. For more information about the Center, please visit http://rkcsi.indiana.edu