PhD Candidate: Allie Riggs

Title: Tangible Archival Queering: Designing with Ephemera towards Embodied Information Practices

Date: Tuesday, March 31st, 2026

Time: 10:00 AM — 12:00 PM

Location (in-person): Price Gilbert 4222

[Parking directions: https://pts.gatech.edu/visitors#l3]      

Committee:  Dr. Noura Howell (chair), Dr. Richmond Wong, Dr. Heidi Biggs, Dr. Anne Sullivan, Dr. André Brock, Dr. Daniela Rosner

Summary:

Amid efforts to diminish queer identities from public society (e.g. book banning, anti-trans and anti-queer legislation), access to LGBTQIA+ knowledge is vital. Understanding queer histories in particular challenges this erasure, calls for critical reflection on what counts as recorded information, and shapes how queer individuals and their allies build communities in the present. In queer archives, ephemera---or, material traces not traditionally collected in institutions, such as flyers, buttons and pins, T-shirts, or zines---can invite powerful, affective links to queer pasts and experiences. My research, which I term tangible archival queering, involves these ephemera in designing tangible interactive experiences that prompt embodied, critical reflections on archival knowledge and the information practices that maintain it. My work expands queering, or leveraging queer theory, in Design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as a critical methodological strategy that energizes alternative, material ways of working against normalizing information systems and algorithmic biases. I attune queering towards archives, or information structures, to reflect on how we record, index, and retrieve records. Doing so allows Design and HCI practitioners to not only understand how histories are recorded but also how information practices shape present realities. I emphasize tangible dimensions of queering archives to express ephemeral and embodied experiences that are often lost in institutional archives. By refocusing attention on these experiences, my work finds gaps in what information structures, such as Generative AI, cannot represent, towards reconfiguring and resisting such systems. Through tangible archival queering, I foreground embodied, collective record-keeping that challenges normalizing influences on archival information structures and evokes complex, queer connections between bodies, feelings, and histories in a time of epistemic erasure.