The wayfinder

Jessa Lingel—feminist, landline-user, and associate professor of communication—is firmly in the skinny jeans camp. She makes this known as she dances in front of her Penn classroom, teaching Critical Approaches to Popular Culture on an autumn morning, hopping from one leg to another. Those legs are encased in slim-fitting, ankle-hugging jeans, decidedly out of fashion to her students in this era of wide-leg, hip-slung, skater-inspired denim.

Lingel doesn’t care. She’s seen this all before: how trends come and go, how commodities are used to control, how popular culture is seen as omnipresent yet vapid. On this day she’s giving a lecture on jeans. “How does a single cultural artifact open up broader questions?” she asks the class. Ultimately, Lingel is going to study what she wants to study and wear what she wants to wear. “And if that’s a problem, that’s a problem,” she says.

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Lingel researches digital culture. She’s published work about Craigslist, the #freeBritney movement, and feminized “AI secretaries” like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, writing about how human relationships to technology can show gaps in power or possibilities for social change.

In July she took on a new assignment, as director of both the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) and the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT). It’s a three-year appointment, and Lingel is the first professor at the Annenberg School for Communication to take on this role.

Gender and feminism are central to Lingel’s scholarship, she says. As a young college student, reading feminist theory felt like a revelation, cracking something open in Lingel. “I did not know women could sound like this,” she says.

Feminism informs Lingel’s writing. It also informs her actions: the way she has charted a course from punk-loving teen to MTV librarian to professor, the way she advocates for colleagues, the way she makes herself accessible to students, and the way she creates community. For Lingel, it wasn’t a question of if she would take on the directorship of GSWS and FQT but when.

A feminist lens

“GSWS and FQT have been a huge source of community for me on campus,” Lingel says. Since Lingel arrived at Penn, the program has offered her friendship, professional collaboration, and meaningful events, she says. “It’s given so much to me.”

Lingel wants to continue the program’s work of providing academic resources and interpersonal connections, in partnership with the Penn Women’s Center and the LGBT Center. GSWS and FQT have been working to deepen connections with Philadelphia-based social justice organizations, collaborating with Philadelphia’s William Way Center for the Trans Oral History Project and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships to develop a Penn Academically Based Community Service course supporting LGBTQ+ youth in West Philadelphia high schools, says Gwendolyn Beetham, associate director of GSWS. 

“Jessa’s commitment to this kind of work is exciting and points to the interdisciplinary nature of gender studies,” Beetham says. “Studying gender can tell us a lot, not only about history, health outcomes, and the economy but also how we experience the world. Jessa’s appointment is an official recognition of the importance of studying gender at this critical political moment.”

Feminism, Lingel says, “shapes who I talk to and what questions I ask.” While she researches technology, Lingel is less interested in top-down initiatives like company culture or venture capital investments. Instead, she’s interested in how ordinary people access technology. Talking to people is at the root of her work, and feminist methods help her engage “in the most ethical way possible,” she says. “There’s always power dynamics to be negotiated.”

Lingel herself has an almost ambivalent relationship with technology. While continuously curious about new platforms—including AI—she is wary of technology as surveillance. She’s currently researching the history of polygraph tests, which used to be used for workplace screening, the way drug tests are today, she says. Until 1988, 2 million people a year were taking polygraph tests, Lingel says. “The polygraph has normalized issues of privacy.”

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Lingel still has a landline and resisted smart phones for a long time, finally capitulating in 2020, and then only because after having a child she wanted to be more easily reachable. “I hate having a smartphone,” she says. “I don’t like any technology that makes it easier to surveil me, and I don’t like any technology that makes me think I have to have it with me at all times.”

In other words, don’t expect Lingel to text you back right away, says Whitney Trettien, associate professor of English and faculty director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. “She never has her phone on her.” Lingel works to support other women on campus through the Penn Forum for Women Faculty & Gender Equity and by advocating for family leave for non-tenure track faculty, Trettien says.

Wayfinding

In her professional life, Lingel wants to “be a wayfinder,” she says. In navigational terms, wayfinding is the process of orienting oneself as a means of journeying from place to place. In navigational cultures, a wayfinder sleeps with the currents and studies the stars. The wayfinder guides the vessel, but more importantly, the wayfinder is a teacher. Their purpose is to steer the ship, yes, but also to perpetuate knowledge.

Lingel wants to decipher the puzzle, figure out how it works, and then share that knowledge whether it pertains to polysemic artifacts, the internet, or the academy. “I am a person who likes to work within existing structures,” Lingel says. “I see my role as a faculty member as helping other people navigate within this structure.”

Shane Ferrer-Sheehy, a sixth-year doctoral candidate at Annenberg, has worked with Lingel since he arrived at Penn. Lingel is currently Ferrer-Sheehy’s thesis advisor, and he’s also worked with her as a research assistant and a teaching assistant. Ferrer-Sheehy gives an annual guest lecture on memes in Lingel’s pop culture class, a topic they figured out together, thinking about how his expertise could best fit with the course syllabus.

“She is so supportive and encouraging,” Ferrer-Sheehy says of Lingel, “in the way that she has very closely mentored me but also the way that she engages with her work and with the department and with undergraduate students and with the academic community as a whole; she is very invested in ensuring that her work and her service and her mentorship are part of that broader picture. She always has those bigger questions in mind.”

Creating ‘a better world’ 

By bigger questions, Ferrer-Sheehy refers to the why of it all. What does it mean for internet culture to exist in the myriad facets of this particular moment? How does that intersect with society?

But it also applies to how Lingel intersects with students and colleagues, Ferrer-Sheehy says. How can educators cultivate a classroom of critical thinkers? How can she encourage students to be conscious media consumers and participants? Having those bigger questions in mind means navigating power dynamics, trying to be a good actor in a complicated world, he says. Lingel is bold and fearless in her pursuit of her scholarly curiosity, Ferrer-Sheehy says, but wants to bring others with her.

But before Lingel was an academic, she was a librarian, putting herself through night school while working as a secretary at a law firm, both interesting positions from which to look at gender studies. In 2007, she took a job as a digital media librarian, digitizing and cataloging online content for MTV in the New York City Times Square office. She loved punk rock music, which she characterizes as “a soundtrack for wanting a better world.”

The job “was really fun, or at least, fun as librarianship goes,” Lingel says. But she couldn’t see the next step to chart a path to a sustainable future, so she went back to graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in communication and information from Rutgers University.

Lingel continued using her skills as a librarian as a volunteer for a Philadelphia prison library, connecting incarcerated writers with a wider audience through PO Box 34, a collaborative project that provides feedback and publishes work online.

But as much as she loves words and writing, it has never been just about the books themselves. “Books are easy to come by,” Lingel wrote in a Medium blog post about running a prison book club. “What I cared about was having helped to build something important, at least to a few people, and having tried to make a space where people who wanted to read had the books they wanted.”

Supportive is a word that Ferrer-Sheey and Trettien use to describe Lingel. It’s also one that Lingel herself uses. In her 2020 book “An Internet for the People,” Lingel places her acknowledgements up front, thanking her support system of family, friends, and colleagues as “the berms and beams of my life.”

Community is important to Lingel. So she builds it, here at Penn and out in the world, volunteering, serving on committees, and, as program director, turning on one light and then another to show the way.

“She’s someone who doesn’t take anything for granted,” Trettien says. “She works to make the world a better place. She really commits to it, in principle and practice, in all times, in all ways.”