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Bri Watson

Assistant Professor

Information and Media Studies

Orcid identifier0000-0001-5151-0471
  • Assistant Professor
    Information and Media Studies

BIO

I am a disabled, white, queer & nonbinary settler hailing from unceeded N'dakina in Aln8ba8dwaw8gan. I am now an uninvited guest on the traditional lands of the ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ (Anishinaabek), Haudenosaunee, Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lūnaapéewak) & Chonnonton nations. I live on lands between the London Township, Treaty 6 & McKee Treaty 2, 1790, and I work on lands connected with the Sombra Treaties of 1796 & the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum.

As a Vanier Scholar at the University of British Columbia's iSchool, I focused on the (multiple) histories of information and on the practice of equitable cataloguing in cultural heritage institutions, or GLAMS (aka Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Special Collections). I also serve as an Organizer on the Homosaurus Collective; the Homosaurus is a widely-used linked data vocabulary for queer terminology developed by and for the queer communities for use in GLAMS. I support equitable knowledge work through CritCat.org, a database of literature on the topic, prepared as part of my doctoral program, along with more than thirty peer-reviewed publications during the same time period.

I received my MLIS and training as a knowledge worker and an archivist from Indiana University Bloomington and I continue my work as a community archivist on behalf of polyamorous and asexual communities. I am the Archivist-Historian of American Psychological Association's Consensual Nonmonogamy Committee and I contribute to the Haslam Collection on Polyamory at the Kinsey Institute and the ArQuives, the largest independent LGBTQ2+ Archives in the world and currently Canada's only national LGBTQ2+ archives.

I also trained as a historian at Drew University, where I focused on the history of the book and the history of sexuality. My work in these areas has continued, and they are the central focus of my first book (Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad) and my third, tentatively titled: The Kinseys and the Myth of the Sexual Revolution. My second book was a co-edited collection called Ethics in Linked Data, published while I was a doctoral student. I also direct HistSex.org, a free and open access resource for the history of sexuality.

In 2022-23 I was one of UBC Library’s EDI Scholars-in-Residence; I was also an awardee of UBC’s Public Scholar Initiative in 2021 and again in 2025, when I also received a fellowship in Applied Ethics from the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics.

I was a cofounder and the coordinator for both the Trans Metadata Collective and the Queer Metadata Collective, which were organizations of ~100 (TMDC) and ~1000 (QMDC) knowledge workers with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of queer, trans and gender diverse people in GLAMS and other sociotechnical systems. The TMDC received the Nancy DeLaurier Award from the Visual Resources Association in recognition of our achievement. Finally, my work on the Name Change Policy Working Group to allow married, Indigenous, queer, trans, and gender diverse authors to change their publication names has affected the policies of tens of thousands of academic journals.