I receive a lot of inquiries about working with me on doctoral studies, and I’d love to. This page lays out the kind of work I can support and the logistics of how that might work — first my research, then the practical questions about advising, committees, and visiting positions.
What do you study and support?
My research asks a single question: what must librarians become for a just society to flourish? Librarians are knowledge professionals whose work shapes how communities learn, decide, and act together. The task ahead is to build the profession — its mission, its education, its institutions — equal to the democratic and moral demands of our time. That’s the agenda. Everything below is a strand of it.
I work across several lines of inquiry, and I’d advise doctoral work in any of them:
- Librarianship and democracy. How libraries function (or fail to function) as democratic institutions. The non-neutrality of professional practice. What it means to take a normative stance in a field that has long preferred to describe itself as neutral.
- Knowledge infrastructure and its histories. How the information systems we now take for granted were built, by whom, and for what ends. My book Forged in War traces the military and Cold War origins of much of our information infrastructure; that thread continues to shape how I think about the present.
- Community-based librarianship. The work I’m best known for, grounded in Participatory Action Research: librarians as builders of community knowledge, members rather than users, libraries as platforms for community agency. The Atlas of New Librarianship (currently being revised) is the long-form statement of this position.
- LIS education and the future of the profession. What we teach, who we credential, and whether the profession we’re preparing students for is the profession the moment requires.
- Institutions, neutrality, and the conditions for trust. Triptych and related work — how cultural heritage institutions hold (or lose) public trust, and what they owe their communities.
Underneath all of this is an information-science backbone: complexity and conversation theory, and a commitment to understanding participation — the active inclusion of people in systems where those people have agency.
I’m also interested in AI’s role in cultural heritage institutions and in librarianship more broadly, particularly the critical and institutional questions it raises. I write and teach on this, but it isn’t a doctoral recruiting area for me right now.
What I cannot supervise well: descriptive or historical projects without a clear normative or community stake — things like collection development surveys in a given region, or institutional histories without a critical edge. The work I can champion is innovative and treats communities as participants in the research, not just its subjects.
Can you be my advisor?
For doctoral work directly with me, you need to apply to the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/programs/phd-information-studies
Unlike the system in some other countries, I cannot accept doctoral students directly. On the positive side, students admitted to the Texas iSchool receive five years of funding.
If you’re going to apply, reach out to me first so we can find out whether there’s a fit and so I can champion your application from the inside.
Will you be on my committee?
Maybe. The criterion is the same as above: your work needs to align with one of the research strands I described. As an outside reader I generally limit my involvement to the proposal and final defense rather than ongoing advising.
Do you have any postdoc positions available?
Not at this time.
I have funding from my government / Fulbright / another source — will you host me at UT?
Maybe. The School of Information is the host institution, and they have a process for that: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/visiting-scholars
To sponsor a visiting position your work needs to align with the research areas above. I value international ties in the field, but a real host/visitor partnership requires aligned goals — not just shared geography.