Primary Portfolio Components
50 Word Statement
Contemporary public librarianship is fraught with precarity. As more of the workforce is relegated to part-time and temporary positions, our field grows increasingly unstable and workers become more vulnerable to workplace trauma. Since precarity-based trauma is a collective issue, contending with these questions is best done by looking outside of the field and embracing an ethos of collective healing.
Issue Paper
A full-text PDF of this essay can be viewed and downloaded here.
A Collective Effort : Healing, Trauma, and Precarity in Public Librarianship
This essay was adapted from a final course paper written for Professor David Shorter’s Healing, Ritual, and Transformation in the Department of World Arts and Cultures. The class took place in Winter 2019 and was a cross-cultural exploration of healing practices. Our coursework and discussions intended to destabilize preconceived assumptions about care outside of Western medicine, the scientific authorities that inform societal understandings of the body and health, the role of healers in a variety of culturally-specific contexts, and healing outside of object-oriented epistemologies.
Major Paper
A full-text PDF of this essay can be viewed and downloaded here.
The Smartphone as a Personal Archive : Investigating Chechnya’s Anti-Gay Purge and its Impact on Future Archival Protocols
In my first quarter at UCLA, I elected to take Professor Anne Gilliland’s Archives, Records, and Memory as my first non-core class in the program. Throughout the course, we continually examined the historical and global role of archives as both community memory repositories, as well as records of power. Inspired by our discussions on contemporary archival and record-related issues, I wrote the following paper as a way to connect my interest in technology, privacy, and queer rights with archival practice.
Core Course Paper
A full-text PDF of this essay can be viewed and downloaded here.
Beyond Neutrality : Questioning Professional Ethics, Neoliberalism, and Data Violence in LIS Praxis
Written for my final core class in the program, Values and Communities taught by Professor Ramesh Srinivasan, this essay explores whether or not LIS professionals are responsible for the harm caused by new technologies like surveillance and predictive policing. I advocate, like many scholars before me, that the language of neutrality found throughout our field’s professional organizations is problematic and engenders things like data violence through a lack of critical professional ethics.
Professional Development Statement
A full-text PDF of this statement can be viewed and downloaded here.
Prior to pursuing this degree, I was at a professional crossroads. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 2010 with a degree in film studies, I worked across multiple creative industries gaining skills as a researcher, project manager, audio and video producer, artist assistant, web designer, writer, and editor. Though I was often intellectually and artistically challenged through these opportunities, my work consistently centered around facilitating the creative projects of others. I desired more structure, more community connection, more autonomy, and more focus in my practice. As my professional opportunities began to involve more historical research and archival coordination, I realized that a graduate degree in library and information science could offer a more fulfilling and meaningful path forward.
When I initially applied for this program, I intended to pursue public librarianship with an emphasis on media literacy and instruction. Despite still being drawn towards this specialization, I have spent the past two years working across numerous fields of information science. My interest in library and information science is cross-disciplinary and incorporates my knowledge of film history, interest in art and computers, capacity to adapt to new technological environments, and desire to share my skills through teaching and community building. I have taken classes in nearly all departmental tracks: informatics, media archiving, archives, digital humanities, and librarianship. I am also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. With this experience, I feel deeply prepared to work within a variety of information environments upon graduation.
I am interested in working as a public librarian creating media literacy campaigns and programming, guiding readers to resources, and supporting patrons through technical instruction. I am also interested in working as an academic librarian, specifically as a digital initiatives or scholarship and instruction librarian. I would love to support faculty, students, and staff, in both four-year and two-year institutions. In terms of subject expertise, I see myself as highly qualified for librarian work within the humanities, arts, and social sciences. That said, an ideal academic position would center around film studies, art history, literature, or gender studies. In addition to librarian work, I am also curious about pursuing archival positions, especially those that pertain to digital archiving, film or sound archiving, community archiving, oral history, and/or work with museum collections or artist archives. Further, as an amateur mycologist who is deeply invested in nature, I am hopeful that my professional path will eventually involve work with an ocean or desert institute, fungarium, herbarium, or natural history collection.
From the beginning of the program, I have wanted to weave together many different ways of engaging with information work in my educational experience as well as my professional future. I have also wanted to remain committed to my own creative interests and find ways to invite that part of myself into this experience as well. Additionally, I never imagined that I would finish graduate school having reached some static level of area expertise. Thus, to remain competent and grow as an information worker, I know that future professional development and continuing education will always be part of how I work within the world.
My immediate goals for professional and personal development are fairly simple. Since I have been unable to undertake language courses during my time at UCLA, my first priority is to further my understanding of Spanish. I plan to enroll in an intermediate level language or conversation class very shortly after graduation. Regardless of what my professional future holds, being more proficient and confident in speaking, writing, and reading Spanish will be incredibly useful and increase my capacity to work with a broader audience of archival and library users as well as materials. Additionally, I was unable to take a class on intellectual property or copyright law while enrolled at UCLA. Gaining this knowledge will prove absolutely critical as my career continues. There are numerous professional outlets that offer affordable workshops and online seminars on this topic. The Society of American Archivists, for example, regularly holds a rather ideal two-day Copyright Law for Archivists course within their continuing education program. Outside of these two external education opportunities, I intend to continue to explore technical skills that I have yet to master as a graduate student. Building greater competency in coding, scripting, as well as textual and visual analysis will make me a stronger job applicant and more confident digital librarian.
If I achieve my current professional goals, a large component of my future will involve teaching and instruction. In all of my past professional positions, I have taken on a training leadership role, whether that be with interns, colleagues, or supervisors. While at UCLA, I have expanded my capacity as an educator through working as a teaching assistant and, more recently, as a teaching associate. Over six quarters, I have taught and supported nearly 240 students in the Departments of Communication, World Arts and Cultures, and Comparative Literature. In the fall of 2018, I refined my teaching expertise through a teaching assistant seminar in the Department of World Arts and Cultures. Outside of my formal classroom experience, I have also developed my skills as a workshop facilitator by co-leading README, a newly formed digital rights student group in the Information Studies department. My work with README has been a central component of my experience at UCLA. Through the organization, I have facilitated workshops and book club meetings with multiple age groups, organized and executed public events, created educational resources, presented at conferences, and hosted regular lab hours. I hope to continue this kind of organizing and movement building work once I leave UCLA, potentially through a feminist technology collective or reading group.
In addition to balancing coursework with student organizations and teaching, I have also spent the last year working in multiple information environments. Over the summer of 2018, I worked as a graduate student assistant in the UCLA Digital Library, contributing to various metadata and web development projects. Then, beginning in the fall of 2018, I began working as a Mellon Foundation and UCLA Community Archives Lab intern with the Southern California Library and, later, the Women’s Center for Creative Work / Feminist Library on Wheels. Through this experience, I’ve been able to reimagine workflow protocols for small institutions that largely rely on volunteer labor, connect with local material seekers in two active community organizations, and produce internal materials to guide future digital asset management projects. I feel that these professional positions represent the breadth of my expertise and am optimistic that they will prove critical in my pursuit for employment after graduation.
Further, since my academic interests and professional goals are rather multifaceted, I have been involved with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA) while at UCLA. I have attended happy hours, tours and networking events, and, for ARSC, done a considerate amount of organizing as a founding member. Though I have yet to participate in any local or national conferences, I hope to do so in the near future. I see conferences as an opportunity to learn about emerging research trends, find solutions for tricky workflow questions, and connect with potential collaborators. With regard to future networking or working group opportunities, I intend to become involved with and attend ARLIS, Code4Lib, and the DLF Forum, specifically. At this stage in my young career, I feel that it is important to engage with diverse professional environments as this will expose me to a multitude of working methods and facilitate new learning experiences.