Dr. Cynthia Wang was in Hong Kong looking for a gay bar in 2009. It wasn’t easy. She found herself scouring old Yahoo groups from the 1990s, going to places listed only to find they were gone.
An assistant professor of communication studies at California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA), she’s always been interested in the “integration of the physical world and the online world.” She wanted to create a platform where queer people could share “networks of knowledge,” marking meaningful or historically significant places to the LGBTQ community.
The idea for the Arqive was born.
“It was like how cool would it be if you were walking down the street and you can say, ‘Hey, that building right there, that used to be a really important location for LGBTQ communities, or a safehouse or whatever or a gathering place — oh and look, now it’s a Chipotle,’” she says.
“I’m really interested in looking at the way that digital platforms are able to make space, create opportunities for that elevation and eligibility of marginalized social groups because of the affordances of digital media,” she said. These spaces make people’s stories easy to share, and there’s no editor or “gatekeeper” deciding “your story matters and your story doesn’t.”
The project fits snugly into her research interest in social justice, but the breadth of her work within that framework is vast. Wang’s research spans everything from the racial dynamics in crafting communities on Etsy to the ways queer bodies are represented in fan fiction.
Those same social justice values manifest in her pedagogy. Every other semester, she teaches classes at the California State Prison in Lancaster.
