Kendall Roark

Kendall Roark earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from Temple University in 2012. Prior to her appointment in the Libraries she served as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences at the University of Alberta 2013-2015.

Dr. Roark is an applied cultural anthropologist who engages in ethnographic fieldwork and anthrodesign projects in Canada and the United States. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTQ community volunteers in the American Southwest and health science researchers in Canada’s western provinces, and has recently led a participatory prototyping project for maternal child health digital research infrastructure. Dr. Roark’s broader research and teaching interests include feminist and decolonial approaches to science and technology studies, participatory and speculative research methodologies, new materialist theory and posthuman ethics, and critical data studies.

Dr. Roark is currently an Assistant Professor with the Libraries and School of Information Studies ,and courtesy faculty with the Department of Anthropology at Purdue. Recent research projects include the Queer Tech Futures project, an ongoing speculative design research collaboration which focuses on LGBTQ- inclusive community technology. Roark is a co-founder of the Critical Data Studies Collective at Purdue and faculty with the Critical Data Studies-Data Mine Learning Community.

Recent grant-funded projects:

Purdue Mellon Global Grand Challenges Grant for Big Data Ethics: Detecting Bias in Data Collection, Algorithmic Discrimination and ‘Informed Refusal'. Chris Clifton (PI), Dan Kelly (co-PI) and Kendall Roark (co-PI), 2017 – 2018

CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections & Archives Grant for Bridging the Research Data Divide: Rethinking Long-term Value and Access for Historical and Contemporary Maternal, Infant and Child Health Research. K. Hammond-Baker/Emily Gustainis (Harvard, PI); Sharon Farnel (University of Alberta, co-PI); Kendall Roark (co-PI), 2015 - 2017