In 2020-21 I'll be teaching two required courses in the MLIS program: GRADLIS 9004 Research Methods and Statistics and GRADLIS 9005 Managing and Working in Information Organizations, in both fall and winter terms. These are two of my favourite courses to teach, and I'm excited to be working with my colleagues to develop them really effectively online. We've got some cool ideas, so stay tuned!
I'm also looking forward to the possibility of supervising individual student projects: theses, Major Research Papers, and individual reading courses and studies. I've mostly supervised in Library and Information Science but also in Health Information Science and Media Studies. My students have been interested in an incredibly wide range of topics, including in-hospital patient education, LGBTQ2+ picture books in public libraries, K-pop fandom, how people talk about breastfeeding on Facebook, nutrition education for children in schools, academic librarians' information literacy work, the information work people do when caring for loved ones with dementia, the nature of privacy and anonymity in the 21st century, harm reduction education for recreational cannabis use, open peer review, and how people find information about non-hormonal contraceptives. You can find the list of FIMS theses supervised in this profile.
You can read more about my research under the Research tab, but here's one bit of current news:
Erin Isings and I are looking for two undergraduate students (Fall/Winter 2020-21), one MLIS student (Fall 2020), and one MMJC student (Winter 2021) as research assistants on a study of the representation of public libraries in the news over the last century. Please contact me if you're interested!
I've got
three major projects on the go. One is about the work parents do to
get their young children ready for school, like taking them to storytime
programs at public libraries and community sites. The second is about
how people "keep track" in everyday life: all those calendars, sticky
notes, journals, objects placed where you'll see them, alarms and
reminder texts. The third is a still-developing, loose set of small
studies about the value and purposes of the public library over time and
from a variety of perspectives. Erin Isings and I will be hiring two
undergraduate students (Fall/Winter 2020-21), one MLIS student (Fall 2020), and one MMJC student (Winter 2021) as
research assistants on a study of the representation of public libraries
in the news over the last century.
