Marika Cifor

Marika Cifor is Assistant Professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves in archives and digital cultures.

Cifor is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). In Viral Cultures, she examines the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive. Her archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators utilize these records to build upon the cultural legacy of 1980s and 1990s American AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that undergird current AIDS crises. She analyzes the power structures through which these archives are mediated, positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, reanimating the past in the digital age.

Cifor has published widely in critical information studies, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies on topics including affect and archives, feminist data studies, and community-based information practices. Cifor co-edited a 2018 special issue of Archival Science on Affect and the Archive, a 2019 issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on Neoliberalism, and a 2020 special issue of First Monday on HIV/AIDS and Digital Media.

At the iSchool, Cifor is co-founder of AfterLab and affiliated with the DataLab and the Technology and Social Change (TASCHA) group. She is also a member of the interdisciplinary Border Quants: Feminist Approaches to Data, Bodies and Technologies Across Borders research team she is working to develop feminist data studies.