Diversity Statement
Libraries are designed as buildings of service, whether they are public facing institutions that serve the citizens of a given city, or a private academic institution serving students and researchers to promote ideals of education. Who receives the benefits of these services has been historically dependent on those working within the space and the demographics of librarianship, unfortunately, paint a homogenous picture of the industry. For my MLIS I have been studying a variety of things that relate to queerness exhibited within the library as well as mental illness. With queerness, I have spent time addressing issues of classification, subject headings, archival representations of historical queer events, and the institutionalization of queer community archives.
For mental illness, I have spent a significant amount of my research time at UCLA looking at library’s as a physical/theoretical space and dissecting anxiety and alienation within the student population. This research, which can be seen upon this website in the MLIS Portfolio section, is mainly addressing issues of accessibility within the academic space and how often times the mental labor associated with using the library can be unconsciously made worse through things like layout, knowledge geography, and institutional hegemony.Beyond my excursions into the theoretical and textual analysis of librarianship, I have spent plenty of time practicing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the spaces that I inhabit. For instance, at UCLA I was the president of OUTReach, an LGBTQ+ organization that helped students invested in queer libraries and archives find resources on and off-campus.