Generating Community

Registration is free and open to the public (online and in person):  https://forms.gle/hba3S4bvS8SfEqDc8  (Zoom links will be sent a week ahead of the conference)

No registration required for Emily Drabinski's talk at Museum London.

Please register separately for the Coves Collective workshop (open to the Western community first, and if there is space, we will open it to the general public): Registration link for the workshop:  https://forms.gle/3iue7BtgwVU96LfdA 

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The FIMS graduate conference will take place on April 9th, 2024 in the FIMS and Nursing Building (FNB) at Western University. This conference is interdisciplinary and is open to all graduate students in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies (FIMS), offering a valuable opportunity for students to share their work with members of the FIMS community.

Our keynote speaker will be  Emily Drabinski , President of the American Library Association. The keynote speech will be open to members of the public. Details will be provided in forthcoming correspondence prior to the conference.

A land-based archival workshop, led by  Michelle Wilson  and Candace Dube, will be offered the morning of the 10th.

The theme for the conference is Generating Community. Since FIMS graduate programs are home to media studies, communication, health-based, and information science research united by a common ethos of engaged scholarship and practice, this conference brings together graduate student researchers and topics from a variety of domains. The faculty encourages interdisciplinary and team research, resulting in a wide range of research conducted by students -- both in their own academic areas of interest and in meaningful contributions made to faculty-led research. FIMS graduate students have recently produced research/content on topics ranging from internet trolls, trauma and violence-informed care, and the impact of influencer culture.

The conference will include papers, lightning talks, posters, and making & thinking presentations by graduate students in Library & Information Science, Media Studies, and Health Information Science Programs.

All papers will be presented in hybrid formats, so any one can join us in-person or online. People outside of the FIMS community are welcome to attend!

Moderator: Luke Stark

Eden Hoffer: Protectionism, Paternalism, and Punishment: Intimate-Partner Violence, Mandatory Charging Policies and the Criminalization of Victim-Survivors (HIS PhD)

Dereje Gultineh: Health Equity, Open Science, and Diagnostic Imaging: The Risks of Multimodal AI (HIS PhD)

Daniel Arauz Nuñez: Phenotyping, Predication, Quantification, and the Suicidal Subject (LIS PhD)

Alicia Hois: Embodying the Witch-hunts: The Witch's Body as Record (MLIS)

Moderator: Paulette Rothbauer

Hanna Bergman: Balancing Customer Service and Information Literacy Instruction in Library Chat Reference (MLIS)

Hillary Anderson: Why You Should Care About Victorian Women’s Fashion (LIS PhD)

Kevin Oswald: Embracing Critical Reflexivity in Doctoral Research (LIS PhD)

Moderator: Nataleah Hunter-Young

Sina Torabi: Stories of Collapse: Locating Disability in Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice and the Last of Us Part 2 (MS PhD)

Revna Altiok: "The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride": Gender and Identity in Blue Eye Samurai (MS PhD)

Jasmine Proctor: "Block & Report”: Fansites, K-pop, and the policing of fan labour (MS PhD)

Shengpei Li: The Silent Beat: Depoliticization of rap culture in Chinese Media (MS PhD)

Moderator: Amanda Grzyb

André Wolmer: Environmental Justice and Independent Journalism: Narratives about Mangrove Communities in Brazil's Northeast (MS PhD)

Belonwu Ezenwa: Migration & Misinformation: Case studies from CBC’s first person series (LIS PhD)

Jules Koncovy: Exploring Deafhood (HIS)

Z Coltman: On Being Other in the Catalogue (LIS PhD)

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Alec Mullender: The 'Invisible Structures" Classification Workshop (LIS PhD)

Selena Gignac, Hillary Anderson, Z Coltman: Sense-Making When Nothing Makes Sense: Grief in the Academy (LIS PhD)

D St-Amour (MLIS), Masha Kouznetsova (Art and Visual Culture PhD): Controlled Vocabularies

Moderator: Joanna Redden

JP Mann: Navigating the Intersection of Cybersecurity, Right to Repair and Policy (LIS PhD)

Zahra Falahatpisheh: Threads and Instagram: Ethics of Cross-platform Online Identity Management (MS PhD)

Earlel Thiyagaratnam: Implementation Science: Ontario Provider’s Ethical Perspectives on Signal 1’s Machine Learning Model for Human-Artificial Intelligence Collaboration a Mixed Methods Study (HIS)

Spencer Kahler: More Than Love on the Line: Privacy and Self-Disclosure Practices of Non-Heterosexual Users of Dating Apps (MLIS)

Moderator: Sarah Smith

Papers by Brittany Melton, Charlotte Nau, Darryl Pieber, Effie Sapuridis (all MS PhD)

Moderator: Alissa Centivany

Sodiq Onaolapo: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Initiatives in the Collection Management Practices of Canadian Research University Libraries (LIS PhD)

John Kausch: Semantic MediaWiki, A Bibliographic Approach (LIS PhD)

Matt Ward: The FIMS Staff Wellness Committee (Computer Services staff)

Pinar Barlas: WIP: Undergraduate students’ perception and use of language-based technologies at Western (LIS PhD)

Takuya Maeda: “General purpose” or misalignment? Examining the potential uses and risks of LLM chatbots in mental health care (MS PhD)

Lina Hamid: Ethnographic Study of the Community Practices of Diaspora Eritreans (MLIS)

Mackenzie Jessop: "I've tried and I can't: How movies make love mandatory" (MS)

Lina Hamid: Braille on Library Cards & Signage: Recognizing the Humanity of all Community Members (MLIS)

Mary Secco: Using Community-University Partnerships to Implement WHO's Intersectoral Global Action Plan on Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders (IGAP) 2022-2031: An example focusing on mental health in epilepsy. (HIS PhD)

Hanna Bergman, Eilis Eagen, Danielle Izzard, Cecilia Molto, Katie Tran: Book Displays and Circulation in Public Libraries (MLIS)

Librarians are experts at the pivot. We move between print indexes, CD-ROMS, and relational databases with ease, leaping big technology shifts in a single bound. We connect students to reading materials of all kinds, create sanctuary for our most vulnerable students, all while advocating for ourselves and our communities inside and outside the building. But we can’t do it alone! Join American Library Association President Emily Drabinski for a discussion of the good work libraries do, the support we need to keep it going, and strategies for staying nimble as we fight for the world we want. 

Emily's  Truthout column 

 The 2023 Out 100 

Emily's  Google Scholar  profile

 America's Top Librarian on the Rise of Book Bans,  New York Times

Thanks to the generous support from the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western Libraries, the FIMS Graduate Library, and the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Western, and the Andrew Osborne Seminar Fund

Link to Abstracts:  https://pdflink.to/9d253e45/ 

Dr. Michelle Wilson and Candace Dube

At the Coves (see map below)

Registration link:  https://forms.gle/3iue7BtgwVU96LfdA 

Wednesday, April 10th, 2024: 10 am – 12 pm

In 1793, Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), a military and political leader of the Kanien’keha:ka people, along with twenty men from the Haudenosaunee confederacy, accompanied British General John Graves Simcoe on a trip to Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. During the journey, they passed through an area that was later colonized by settlers and called London. Simcoe’s secretary wrote a detailed description of The Coves, making it one of the earliest geographic landmarks recorded by colonizers in the region. He described it as an inland island surrounded by a rapidly flowing oxbow meander, with rich meadows that were renewed every year by spring floods.

Today, The Coves is an Environmentally Significant Area, but it exists in a liminal legal space between private ownership and public property, with a large part of the land neglected and forgotten by the surrounding city. The area has plenty of edible berries, but they are unsafe for consumption due to lead contamination. At the time of colonial contact, it was a thriving planting ground used by local Indigenous peoples but has since been transformed by military, agriculture, and industrial settler projects, violently reordering the relations between water and land, and between humans and non-humans.

Join Michelle Wilson and Candace Dube, members of the Coves Collective, in a hands-on land-based workshop where they will guide you through a walk in the Coves. During the workshop, you will learn about what the land remembers and how the collective's work incorporates a methodology called Archive as Land. This methodology, envisioned by political scholar Ruoyu Li, aims to create a decentralized and embodied archive that is grounded in a relationship to place. The collective's work challenges colonial and racialized notions of property as an indefinite settler right. As a participant, you will have the opportunity to create cyanotype counter-flags as an offering to this place. Light refreshments will be provided, and all participants are kindly asked to bring their own mug and plate.

Meet at the South end of Duke Street (see map below)

Parking is available.

Bus from Western: Take the 93 from Western and Lambton (stop 1996) to Wharnclife and Byron (stop 2023) and walk down Springbank Dr to Duke Street. Turn left on Duke Street and walk to the end of the road.

Michelle Wilson is a neurodivergent artist, researcher and mother who currently lives in London, Ontario. She is of settler descent and her intermedia practice focuses on confronting colonial knowledge systems and conservation regimes with criticality and care. She is an organizing and founding member of the Unsettling Conservation Collective, the Coves Collective, and the (Re)mediating Soils Collective. She recently completed her SSHRC-funded doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. Currently, Michelle is an instructor in the Faculty of Design at OCADU and a postdoctoral scholar working with the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership at the University of Guelph. 

The One Who Sees Ahead is how Candace Dube is known by the Spirits in Ojibwe. She is Marten Clan from Baawaating. Candace holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Justice and Peace Studies from King’s University College and a Bachelor of Education with an Additional Qualification in Special Education from Western University. She is currently enrolled in the three-year Master of Clinical Therapeutic Herbalism program at Wild Rose College. She has completed her certification as an Indigenous Death Doula with Blackbird Medicine and is certified as an Auricular Acu-detox Specialist through The Institute of Traditional Medicine. Her previous work includes many years doing Restorative Justice Circle facilitation and community programming. Candace is mother to her son Tayson, a sister, and auntie to many nieces and nephews. She enjoys a lot of laughter and the privilege of being the parent of two fur-babies Winston and Daisy. In her spare time, she can be found outdoors curiously and carefully building relationships with our more-than-human relatives. She has been a member of the Coves Collective since its inception.

This workshop has been made possible by a FIMS Initiatives Grant.

Hillary Anderson (LIS)

Z Coltman (LIS)

Belonwu Ezenwa (LIS)

Selena Gignac (LIS)

Eden Hoffer (HIS)

Shenpei Li (MS)

Takuya Maeda (MS)

Jasmine Proctor (MS)

Mary Secco (HIS)

Dianne Si (LIS)

Melissa Adler (Grad Chair)