Liz E. (Introduction)

Hey y'all. I'm Liz, and saying "y'all" is a persistent habit that this northern girl picked up living in DC for six years. I did my undergrad at Georgetown, majoring in something called "Culture and Politics" and women's studies. Then, I stuck around working as a web developer for Feminist Majority/Ms. Magazine for a couple years. I liked web work a lot, and I met tons of awesome nonprofit people, and I got to feel like a grown up professional person. But the schedule was exhausting, and I was ready to go back to school.

I came to UW in 2006, got my MA, and now I'm a PhD student in the Communication Arts department, the media and cultural studies track. This means that I spend half my time teaching undergrads about radio, television, and film, and the other half pursuing my own interests in online media content and platforms.

I'm particularly interested in media forms that are "native" to the Internet - blogs, wikis, social networking sites, IM software, etc. I like to explore how these media forms do and do not replicate the structures and means of communication that we see in older media and communication technology, and I'm especially curious about the social justice ramifications of access to these tools. As I mentioned, a lot of what I do is about disability studies and web content accessibility - how can sites be coded to be used by the widest range of people in the widest range of situations? Using the Internet always involves our bodies - can nonnormative bodies express themselves and their identities through tools designed for the norm?

As you might expect, I'm a voracious Internet user. My RSS reader is enormous, I think slash fanfic is fascinating, and I love Ravelry, a social networking site for knitters. I'm also a near-constant Twitterer (trilliz). It was hard to write this in more than 140 characters!