Max Jack-Monroe
Over the past several months, I’ve thought a lot about the idea of accessibility to knowledge. As a student at a renowned university with a plethora of resources at my disposal, I have privilege that most don’t. Especially as someone studying topics such as language and gender and sexuality, which are of worldwide importance, it often makes me feel uneasy to know and talk about things that don’t have the resources and/or space to.
Last semester, I was presented with concrete examples as to how to make knowledge more accessible to people outside of the academia bubble. In my Women’s Studies class, my professor, Dr. Alex Ketchum, an alum of McGill who is now a course lecturer at the school, brought our attention to some of the work she has done throughout the past several years in order to bring her dissertation topic to the masses. She has created websites and twitter accounts that are easy to find, easy to read, updated often. Now anyone, regardless of background, who is interested in learning more about feminist cafés, coffeehouses, and restaurants has access to that information at their fingertips. Dr. Ketchum continues to work hard to make knowledge accessible, which is the theme of one of her latest undertakings, The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies Practices Speaker and Workshop Series.
Seeing Dr. Ketchum’s work and reflecting on my own experience, I decided to make a website related to my research interest of queer language and sociolinguistics. Especially as queer people have long depended on the internet as a safe haven and a knowledge hub, a website seemed like the inherent way to get information out to the masses, queer and otherwise. Queerlanguage.com is still very much in its early stages, but it truly is a labour of love, and, I see it as much more than a simple class project. The website includes information that would otherwise only be available to someone with access to a university database and/or sufficient amounts of time and effort, as well as the words of everyday queer people and their own experiences with queer language and sociolinguistics.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Accessibility and Tooting My Own Horn”