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Associate Professor

T: 778-782-7143
E: cait_mckinney@sfu.ca
Room: K9666

Cait McKinney is an associate professor in the School Communication specializing in sexuality studies, media history, and activist media. Their research focuses on the mediated conditions in which queer people, especially activists, have taken up new computing and information technologies to serve their communities and movements. This work surfaces queer modes of technological use that show us alternative ways of understanding technologies and their politics, and offers new media theories and methodologies that emerge from and can account for the knowledges of queer people. Cait is the author of I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (Minnesota 2024) and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020), which won the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. They are working on a new book, tentatively titled The Sex Lives of Data, which surfaces an original media history of queer digital disruption, a conceptual framework that describes how queer political values such as free sexual expression or justice for HIV+ people distill in specific formal, aesthetic, and technical practices online. 

Cait is also an artist whose collaborations with Hazel Meyer explore shared attachments to queer histories through writing, performance, video, and other archival interventions. Recent activations of their collaborative work include Glasgow International Art Biennial (SCT) 2018, VIVO Media Arts Centre (CA) 2022, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (CA) 2023, Tale of Tub (NL) 2024, and The Mitchell Art Gallery (CA), 2024. 

Cait’s scholarly publications and artwork can be found at 

• PhD York University (Communication and Culture)
• MA York University (Communication and Culture)
• BA Hons. University of British Columbia (English Literature and Critical Studies in Sexuality)