The School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University welcomes two new faculty members this fall, adding to its international diversity and expanding its research and expertise in cultural informatics, data sciences and analytics, and knowledge organization systems.
SLIS Assistant Professor Leisa Gibbons, Ph.D., joins Kent State from Melbourne, Australia, where she recently received a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne. Her research expertise is continuum informatics with specializations in recordkeeping, archival systems, cultural heritage, social media and theory building. Her recent research proposes a new continuum model, Mediated recordkeeping, to address the urgent need to adequately meet the complex and evolving memory and archival needs of an expanding, technologically savvy and actively participative society. She contends that cultural heritage institutions need to develop frameworks, technologies and tools that embrace the importance and value of process and context (memory-making) in order to recognize, facilitate and include the multiple contexts and narratives that play out in online communities and spaces. Gibbons also holds a Master of Information Management and Systems from Monash University, with specializations in library, archiving and records management. Her Bachelor of Arts degree is in contemporary fine art history with a minor in anthropology from the University of Western Australia. In addition to serving as a lecturer, tutor and teaching assistant at Monash and RMIT Universities, she has served as director and principal consultant for Rhizome Digital Community Archives and Records Consultancy, Melbourne.
SLIS Assistant Professor Emad Khazraee, Ph.D., a native of Iran, holds a doctorate in information studies from Drexel University, Philadelphia. His dissertation on “Archaeology of Archaeology: A study of the creation of archaeological knowledge in practice” uses the practice of archaeology as an example of a collective, data-intensive, multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to address questions such as how we reason when we are socially situated in the context of our practice, dealing with vagueness, uncertainty and lack of data; how we achieve competency in our social practice; and how we develop practical knowledge collectively. In another research trajectory, he is looking at the cultural differences in new media use and the relationship between social change and digital technologies. Relying on sociotechnical approaches to social media studies and conceptual frameworks developed in Science Technology Studies (STS), he is exploring the role of social media in social transformations. Khazraee also holds a M.Sc. in architecture from the University of Tehran, Iran. He recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He previously served as director of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department, Encyclopedia of Iranian Architectural History, Tehran, Iran.
The School already boasts a strong international faculty: Professors Marcia Lei Zeng, Ph.D., and Yin Zhang, Ph.D., are from China; Associate Professor Athena Salaba, Ph.D., is a native of Greece; Assistant Professor Marianne Martens, Ph.D., was born in Denmark; and Assistant Professor Lala Hajibayova, Ph.D., is from Azerbaijan.
