About Me

A portrait of Cait McKinney wearing a grey button-up shirt, orange wool beanie, holding a boston terrier who is wearing an orange fleece sweater. They are posted in front of a bookshelf, beside a large window.

I’m an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. You can reach me at: cait_mckinney@sfu.ca. I’m non binary and use They/Them pronouns. The picture is me with my terrier Regie Concordia.

I publish my research as books, articles, and essays, and I also have an art practice.

I work in queer media studies, by which I mean: 1) media studies that centres the work of queer people and their visions of justice; and 2) methodological and theoretical approaches to media studies that draw from queer theory. I focus on how queer social movements use digital technologies to share information, and consider how their work disrupts and reimagines digital infrastructures. Much of my work is historical and draws on archival research and interviews.

I am also the In Focus editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and I serve on the board of Grunt Gallery in Vancouver.

My current projects are focused on:
  • the relationship between HIV and computing in the 1980s and 90s
  • the ways concepts from sexuality have been used to explain data and databases since the 1960s
  • Experimental and speculative approaches to doing queer media history