Jessa Lingel, Ph.D.
- Associate Professor of Communication
- Director, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program (GSWS)
- Affiliate Faculty in Cinema and Media Studies
Jessa Lingel’s research focuses on digital culture and technological distributions of power. She uses qualitative and interpretive methods to understand relationships between people and technologies.
Jessa Lingel is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where she studies digital culture, looking for the ways that relationships to technology can show us gaps in power or possibilities for social change. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Information from Rutgers University. She has an M.L.I.S. from Pratt Institute and an M.A. from New York University.
Lingel’s research focuses on three key areas: alterity and appropriation, and investigations of how information and technology is altered, tinkered with, subverted, and articulated by marginalized groups; politics of infrastructure, where systems of categorization, organization, and design can reveal underlying ideologies and logics; and technological activism as a way of exploring how socio-technical practices can contribute to projects of social justice.
In her activist work, Lingel concentrates on prison abolition, libraries as vehicles for DIY education, and local access to mental health resources.
Education
- B.A., University of California, San Diego, 2004
- M.A., New York University, 2005
- M.S., Pratt Institute, 2008
- Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2013
Selected Publications
"Dazzle Camouflage As Queer Counter Conduct." European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021.
"A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online." Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2021.
“Shadow Bodies and Information Sharing: Analysing Obstacles in Mental Health Care Provision.” Information Research, 2020.
“Notes from the Web that Was: The Platform Politics of Craigslist.” Surveillance & Society, 2019.
“Networked Field Studies: Comparative Inquiry and Online Communities.” Social Media + Society, 2017.
Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. MIT Press, 2017.
“Occupy Wall Street and the Myth of Technological Death of the Library.” First Monday, 2012.
“Information Tactics of Immigrants in Urban Environments.” Information Research, 2011.
“The Order(ing)s of Things.” International Journal of the Humanities, 2010.
“Adjusting the Borders: Bisexual Passing and Queer Theory.” Journal of Bisexuality, 2009.
Courses
- COMM 1230 (formerly 123) Critical Approaches to Popular Culture
- COMM 3360 Feminism and the Internet
- COMM 5230 (formerly 523) Qualitative Ways of Knowing
- COMM 7220 (formerly 722) Theories and Methods in Qualitative Research
- COMM 8140 (formerly 814) Doing Internet Studies
- COMM 8700 (formerly 870) Advanced Qualitative Research
- COMM 8410 (formerly 841) The Ethics of Forgetting: Media at Risk of Deletion
A Comm Major’s Journey from Pop Culture to Free Speech to Networked Technology and Beyond
Anika Gururaj (C’24) followed her intellectual curiosity throughout her time at Penn, and will soon be off to Harvard Law School.