The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Panelists: Merrilee Proffitt, Victoria Robinson, Juana Maria Rodriguez

Though Wikipedia has in many ways democratized the information landscape, racial and gender bias in Wikipedia is well-documented. The alarming lack of women editors and editors of color has resulted in both biased and absent information in one of the most important collective knowledge repositories. The Art + Feminism + Race + Justice Wikipedia edit-a-thon at UC Berkeley is part of a national effort that invites participants to become a Wikipedia editor and contribute to addressing this problem. The edit-a-thon takes place Tuesday March 2, 12-5pm, 405 Moffitt Library. In this panel, speakers will address the importance of moving marginalized voices to the center in repositories like Wikipedia.

This event is free, open to the public, and all are invited to participate. The event will be recorded. Sponsored by the University Library’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) Café Programs Committee and The Art + Feminism + Race + Justice Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Planning Committee. For more information: contact fsmprograms@lists.berkeley.edu

If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, including sign-language interpretation, please contact the event sponsor, fsmprograms@lists.berkeley.edu, ideally at least two weeks prior to the event.

Event Contact: fsmprograms@lists.berkeley.edu, (510) 642-6480

Speaker Bios:

Merrilee Proffitt works in OCLC Research and provides project management skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Merrilee is an active member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (RBMS-ACRL). She has also served on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Editorial Board, the Text Encoding Initiative Council and on the Encoded Archival Description Working Group. She is passionate about forging connections between Wikimedia projects and cultural heritage institutions. She is the editor of Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge (ALA Editions, 2018).

Victoria Robinson is the director of the American Cultures Center and a lecturer at UC Berkeley in Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, teaching courses addressing race and ethnicity in the United States and global female migrations. Her most recent area of research addresses the gendering of post-industrial return migrations to the Caribbean. As director, Victoria has continued to build the nationally-recognized American Cultures undergraduate diversity curriculum. Dr. Robinson's most recent scholarship and teaching reveals the woven connections between mass incarceration, immigration detention and deportation, and centrally those community-based movements which seek to mobilize the political and social rights of those inside and between walls and cages.

Juana Maria Rodríguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Core faculty in Performance Studies, is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies. In addition to her publications in academic journals internationally, she has also been featured on NPR’s Latino USA, NBC.com, Canadian News Network, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Cosmopolitan for Latinas. She is currently working on a book on visual culture and Latina sexual labor and co-editing a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on "Trans Studies en las Americas".