I’ve been working around books and reading and libraries for over thirty years, longer if I were to consider my undergraduate degree in English from the University of Toronto. For a decade after that degree, I was a bookseller, working for independents, chains, used and new stores. I loved handselling books, learning about authors, consulting with publishers’ reps, and the camaraderie of the bookselling community, but I wasn’t making much of a dent in my student loans. When I was rejected for teacher’s college, I began casting about for something else. And like many, many people who come to do an MLIS degree, I knew some people who had already done one, and with their insights and encouragement I applied to Western’s MLIS graduate program. And the degree kind of blew my mind. Even all these years later, I’m struck by the intensity of the program (and I did it part-time), the depth and breadth of what I was able to learn, the people I’ve met, and just how perfectly I was able to find a place in this surprisingly interdisciplinary field of practice and scholarship. An aside: If you are considering the MLIS degree program at Western, I invite you to contact me. I’m happy to chat about it!
My primary research activities cohere around study of the meanings of reading from readers’ perspectives, considering the role that the everyday practice of reading takes up in people’s lives, in their memories, in the ways they imagine their futures. Libraries of all kinds (e.g., public, school, college and university, grassroots, personal) are caught up in everyday reading practices in ways that are often unexamined, sometimes even by readers themselves. So strong has been the emphasis on the books that the ecologies of access can be quite invisible.
Right now, I'm collaborating with Dr. Lynne McKechnie and Dr. Lucia Cediera Serantes on a research monograph, Reading Disrupted: Reimagining Libraries, Reading, and Communities in a Post-Pandemic World (under contract with Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited). Two undergraduate students are working with us on this project over the summer as part of Western's Undergraduate Summer Research Internship program.
I’m involved in some other great projects too:
It is a privilege to have been part of the amazing team working to digitize recorded episodes of Smoke Signals, the long-running Radio Western show by Dan Smoke and Mary Lou Smoke. The project has slowed down, however, work continues as we seek to shift the project to Western Libraries Special Collections. With prior funding from FIMS, Social Sciences.
I have been involved in facilitating the inaugural FIMS MLIS course “Introduction to Decolonizing and Indigenizing LIS”. This work has been supported by funding from FIMS, Western’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, and Western’s Office for Indigenous Initiatives.
For another project, ""Palaces for the People: Mapping Public Libraries' Capacity for Social Connection and Inclusion", funded by a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis grant, and with an international team of researchers and librarians led by Dr. Nicole Dalmer (McMaster) and with co-PI Dr. Pam McKenzie, and a great team of collaborators, we’ve mapping public libraries’ capacity to foster social connection and inclusion. The first report is available, and Kevin Oswald (LIS PhD student) and Eben Martin-Yeboah (HIS PhD candidate), who worked on the project with us, presented a paper at the Canadian Association for Information Science 2023 annual conference.
You can find a list of publications on my Google
Scholar profile and in Western's institutional repository Scholarship@Western.
You are welcome to connect with me via email or through my LinkedIn
profile.
Supervision
I work with doctoral colleagues in the Library & Information Science program who are conducting a variety of qualitative research projects. Current doctoral colleagues with whom I work as chief supervisor include Sodiq Onaolapo (co-supervisor, Dr. Heather Hill), Mark Ambrogio, Zana Coltman, and Belonwu Ezenwa. A list of dissertation projects that I have supervised is available on my profile.
Each year, I also supervise a number of MLIS student research projects. Hanna Dodd and I will be presenting some preliminary research from her qualitative study with online gaming communities at CAIS-ACSI 2024. This summer I'm working with Alicia Hois who is investigated the case of tarot cards as a kind of deep reading experience.