Jen Jack Gieseking
Personal Information
Jack Gieseking is an urban cultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, and environmental psychologist. He is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments. His work pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice in regard to gender and sexuality. He is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches courses on digital studies and queer geographies.
Jack is finishing my second book project, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008, which is under contract with NYU Press. His mixed ethnographic / archival approach resulted in his rethinking the construction of “data” to produce a series of LGBTQ data visualizations about queer history, a project of visualizing the invisible, which will be available on the complementary A Queer New York website.
He is conducting research on trans people’s use of Tumblr as a site of cultural production, and a hub for co-produced medical knowledge. He is also interested in theorizing the meanings and role of private space, namely through the lens of gender, sexuality, race, and disability.
Jack's work appears in a range of journals, including American Quarterly, Professional Geographer, Area, Antipode, Radical History Review, and Qualitative Inquiry. His first book is The People, Place, and Space Reader, co-edited with William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert, out with Routledge.
Jack has held fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as German Chancellor Fellow; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellows Program. He is proud to have contributed to writing and reviewing the National Parks Service’s LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, the 1,400+-page document that serves at the basis to create LGBTQ historic monuments in the US.
Jack identifies as a woman, and uses he/him/his pronouns.