Jessa Lingel, Ph.D.
- Associate Professor of Communication
- Director, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program (GSWS)
- 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.
“Notes from the Web that Was: The Platform Politics of Craigslist.” Surveillance & Society, 2019.
“Networked Field Studies: Comparative Inquiry and Online Communities.” Social Media + Society, 2017.
Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. MIT Press, 2017.
“Occupy Wall Street and the Myth of Technological Death of the Library.” First Monday, 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
- COMM 1230 (formerly 123) Critical Approaches to Popular Culture
- COMM 3360 Feminism and the Internet
- COMM 5230 (formerly 523) Qualitative Ways of Knowing
- COMM 7220 (formerly 722) Theories and Methods in Qualitative Research
- COMM 8140 (formerly 814) Doing Internet Studies
- COMM 8700 (formerly 870) Advanced Qualitative Research
- COMM 8410 (formerly 841) The Ethics of Forgetting: Media at Risk of Deletion
The Wayfinder: Jessa Lingel Creates Community and Belonging on Campus
As the new director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, Annenberg Professor Jessa Lingel creates community and belonging on campus.
Jessa Lingel on Video
Ten years after Occupy Wall Street, Dr. Lingel's class "We are the 99%: Media and Memory of the Occupy Movement" helps students understand that moment in participatory democracy.
In The Gentrification of the Internet, Lingel argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it.
In her book An Internet for the People, Jessa Lingel reveals how craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web.
Lingel extends the concept of “dazzle camouflage” — the practice of painting World War I ships in outlandish patterns — to the way that the LBGTQ community uses highly-visible practices to avoid surveillance.
A joint panel discussion in New York City and Washington DC, hosted by the New York and Washington, DC Chapters of the Internet Society. The panel addressed the technical and ethical questions raised by the social, political, and economic impact of the increasing prominence of algorithmically negotiated information spaces.
In this talk, "Uncommon People: Digital Technologies and the Struggle for Community," Jessa Lingel discusses themes from an upcoming book drawing on years of mixed methods field work, including ethnography, focus groups, and archival textual analysis.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews and cognitive mapping with 14 craftspeople, Jessa Lingel analyzes the socio-technical arrangements of people and tools in the context of workspaces and productivity.
Once a week from January through mid-May, Penn rising juniors Jodi Marcus, Adam Ginsberg, and Leopold Spohngellert made granola bars with a team of middle and high school students at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Center for Culinary Enterprises at 46th and Market streets.