Jessa Lingel

Jessa Lingel, Ph.D.

Jessa Lingel
  • Associate Professor of Communication
  • Core Faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
  • 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.

“Alexa, Tell Me about Your Mother: The History of the Secretary and the End of Secrecy.” Catalyst, 2020.

“Margins as Methods, Margins as Ethics: A Feminist Framework for Studying Online Alterity.” Social Media + Society, 2020.

“Notes from the Web that Was: The Platform Politics of Craigslist.” Surveillance & Society, 2019.

“A Bookmobile Critique of Institutions, Infrastructure and Precarious Mobility.” Public Culture, 2018.

“Socio-Technical Transformations in Secondary Markets: A Comparison of Craigslist and Varagesale.” Internet Histories, 2018.

“Lit up and Left Dark: Failures of Imagination in Urban Broadband Networks.” New Media & Society, 2018.

“Networked Field Studies: Comparative Inquiry and Online Communities.” Social Media + Society, 2017.

Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. MIT Press, 2017.

“The Poetics of Socio-Technical Space: Using Craft to Reflect on the Internet of Things.” Proceedings, ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, 2016.

“Incoded Counter-Conduct: What the Incarcerated Can Teach Us About Resisting Mass Surveillance.” First Monday, 2016.

“Working Through Paradoxes: Transnational Migrants’ Urban Learning Tactics Using Locative Technology.” Mobile Media and Communication, 2015.

“In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn's Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication.” Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 2015.

“Data-in-Place: Thinking through the Relations Between Data and Community.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015.

“Information Practices of Urban Newcomers: An Analysis of Habits and Wandering.” Journal for the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 2015.

“Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking From the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015.

“‘It’s in Your Spinal Cord, It’s in Your Fingertips’: Practices of Craft in Building Software.” Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2014.

“The Geoweb and Everyday Life: An Analysis of Spatial Tactics and Volunteered Geographic Information.” First Monday, 2014.

“City, Self, Network: Transnational Migrants and Online Identity Work.” Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2014.

“‘Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe’: Information Poverty, Information Norms and Stigma.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2013.

“Practices of Information and Secrecy in a Punk Rock Subculture.” Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2012.

“Occupy Wall Street and the Myth of Technological Death of the Library.” First Monday, 2012.

“Alternative Libraries as Discursive Formations: Reclaiming the Voice of the Deaccessioned Book.” Journal of Documentation, 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