It is with gratitude that I share with you the news that I am one of 31 recipients of the 2018 Carnegie Fellowship. This is a career-defining honor for which I am supremely grateful and by which I am deeply humbled. I was able to respond to the news this morning on Twitter, and then stepped away from email and other online activity for much of the day, as Wednesdays are my heavy advising and teaching day (and also a lot of fun; one three-hour class on Libraries and Their Social Role(s) that is driven by an incredible group of smart and energized students, and the UCLA iteration of Analog Gaming in Libraries, always an incredible way to end the day).
So I think the best way to share this news is by simply returning to my extemporaneous but deeply-felt words on Twitter from this morning.
I look forward to the next chapter.
“I am honored, humbled and profoundly grateful to announce that I have been named a 2018 Carnegie Fellow. This is a life-changing award ; I am in awe of the entire class. My deepest thanks to the esteemed jurors and to the UCLA community for my nomination.
It is deep validation of my past decade of work and life, and my commitment to the importance of commercial content moderation at a time when many weren’t ready to see that yet. Indeed, I was told more than once along the way that it was a non-issue.
I’d also like to acknowledge the power and importance of the incredible family of friends who have been at my side for the years of this work. A couple of them – @ryanpadserias and @safiyanoble – were there at the genesis, at the germination of seed of the idea, and are still.
And now I have incredible colleagues across the globe – those at home like @professorcaz and @miriamkp, those further afield like @mel_hogan and @AntonioCasilli, those who are academe-adjacent but who mean so much and have great impact of their own, like @Rochelle. The list is nowhere near exhaustive but just meant to illustrate that building community out of the loneliness and isolation of the work has been critical and powerful to me. If you are reading this you are a part of that network.
And of course I am so very lucky to have a supportive family of origin in the form of an incredible spouse, a brilliant emerging scholar in her own right who blows me away every day, and with a mother and step-father who might be my biggest fans. This last isn’t something all LGBTQ people can count on – not even close. I don’t take it for granted. It’s also been a long journey from the time when my young single mom shoveled the snow from the sidewalks outside the Montessori school she enrolled me in, for a tuition break.
She did that because she was deeply committed to my education, no matter what it cost her and what she had to forego. So she is likely having some breakfast right now, looking at the paper, and talking aaaalllll the credit she should for this and more. Good for her.
Lastly I’ll say that this goes back to my grandparents, who worked their whole lives so that I could have some opportunities that they didn’t have. My grandfather spent 45 years on the line at the same factory so that I wouldn’t have to. I miss them every single day.”
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