Decoding the Past with Alex Ketchum
The Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum is proud to announce Dr. Alex Ketchum as the next guest in our Decoding the Past speaker series!
“Digital Queers and Cyber Activism: The Early LGBTQ+ Internet ”
Online – October 10, 12:00 – 1:00 PDT
This session of Decoding the Past is a conversation with Dr. Alex Ketchum, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University, on her upcoming book, Digital Queers, TechnoDykes, Hi-Tech Gays, and Lavender Bytes: A History of American, Canadian, and British LGBTQ+ Cyber Activism 1992-2002. Join Dr. Ketchum and Silicon Valley-based author and editor Karen Wickre as they discuss early online LGBTQ+ activism and how activists adapted their work to a rapidly developing interconnected digital landscape and played a role in shaping Internet culture.
Dr. Alex Ketchum is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, technological, queer, and gender history. She is currently finishing writing the book Digital Queers, TechnoDykes, Hi-Tech Gays, and Lavender Bytes: A History of American, Canadian, and British LGBTQ+ Cyber Activism 1992-2002. Ketchum’s first peer-reviewed book, Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ketchum’s second book, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (2022), is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. You can find out more about her writings, podcasts, zines, exhibitions, and more at https://www.alexketchum.ca.
Karen Wickre is a veteran connector, editor, and communicator based out of Silicon Valley. As a corporate writer, Karen has developed stories, styles, and cadence for Google, Twitter, and many startups. More recently, she has served as an advisor for a range of companies, developing strategies for their messaging and the content they produce. A strong supporter of journalists and journalism, Karen serves on the boards of The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford and the News Literacy Project, and in 2018 she published Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections that Count (Simon & Schuster).
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