Jamie Ann Lee

Jamie A. Lee is Assistant Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society in the School of Information (Arizona’s iSchool) at the University of Arizona. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Digital Storytelling & Culture, Information Environments from Latino and Native American Perspectives, Collaborating in Online Spaces, Social Media & Ourselves, and Archival Studies. She serves on the Executive Committee for the newly established Social, Cultural, Critical Theory Graduate Minor. Jamie is an alum of the Knowledge River Scholars Program (cohort 9) and is currently a member of the Knowledge River Faculty Executive Committee. She is a member of the Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric, FARR, collective. She has served as Member and Chair of the City of Tucson’s Human Relations Commission (2011-2013) and has recently accepted a place on the board of the Alliance Fund of Southern Arizona (http://www.alliancefund.org/wp/).

In her ongoing research, Jamie attends to critical archival theory and methodologies, media-making contexts, storytelling, bodies, and ongoing analyses of the ways bodies and archives are mutually constitutive. Her work is intricately woven through the intersections of archival studies, media studies, digital and visual culture, society, and the body. She is currently part of a group of international archival studies scholars developing theory and methods in and for critical archival studies within the archival studies discipline.

In 2008, Jamie founded the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project, Arizona’s first LGBTQ archives. Since 2011, this project has expanded into the Arizona Queer Archives, AQA, which she directs and where she is developing and applying a queer/ed archival methodology, Q./M, to support archivists through rapidly changing information environments and the implications — socially, culturally, and technologically — of these changes. She works closely with LGBTQI communities and conducts hands-on archiving and oral history production workshops to support the participatory ethos that informs the AQA’s mission, vision, and practices. She has been invited to present her research and to conduct hands-on workshops on archival practices and productions at Oregon State University, UCLA, the International Conference on Information Law and Ethics in Pretoria, South Africa, and the Lesbian Lives Conference at the University of Brighton in Brighton, UK. Additionally, she is an International Affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (http://storytelling.concordia.ca/) through Concordia University in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Professor Lee is a co-PI with Professors Tracey Osborne (Geography) and Ben Colombi (American Indian Studies) on the Climate Alliance Mapping Project (CAMP), which is a collaborative project in the Schools of Information, Geography (Public Political Ecology), and American Indian Studies to build a layered mapping tool to display geo-referenced digital stories collected from communities throughout the Americas experiencing fossil fuel extraction. Drawing from both archival studies and media studies, Jamie’s focus is on the power of storytelling. Her research brings in-the-field digital story production and archival acquisition to academic digital repositories in order to highlight the importance of stories as data situated alongside the geographic, ecologic, and scientific data that otherwise stands outside of the realm of everyday lives that are being affected by environmental degradation.

Professor Lee has published in Archival Science Journal and in the co-edited collection Research in the Archival Multiverse (Monash University Press, 2016). She has forthcoming articles in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, the Journal of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (UK), and the co-edited collection Queering Media (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Since 1991, Lee has worked in film/video/TV and has owned and operated a multimedia production firm in Minneapolis/St. Paul and Tucson, AZ. As an award-winning social justice filmmaker, Lee’s work has screened on PBS, Free Speech TV, and at film festivals and conferences throughout North America and Europe. She has collaborated with local activists and artists through Pan Left Productions and Kore Press on social justice media projects, such as Invisible City (https://invisiblecityproject.wordpress.com/about/artists/). She has taught workshops on documentary film and social justice media through the Grrls Literary Activism Program of Kore Press. She presented at the 2008 Women's World Congress with Professor Adela C. Licona on their digital media borderlands project titled “aguamiel: secrets of the agave” in Madrid, Spain and was the keynote speaker at the 2009 New Directions in Critical Theory Conference. She is the recipient of the 2009 Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Project Grant and a 2010 Arizona Governors Arts Award nominee for her work connecting her artform to community activism.