About

Harris Kornstein is an assistant professor whose research and practice broadly focus on queer play through contemporary technologies and digital cultures, media art/activism, visual culture, disability, and queer and trans studies. Their current book project, Digital Enchantment: Drag, Play, and Other Queer Strategies Toward More Just and Joyful Technologies, considers what can be learned from drag performers to creatively counter harms associated with digital technologies, such as surveillance, artificial intelligence, online harassment, and disinformation, through playful techniques of misuse, obfuscation, and reinvention. They are also co-editing an anthology titled How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, analyzing the experiences of disabled New Yorkers during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Harris's research has been published in various journals and edited volumes, and their essays have appeared in prominent publications like The Guardian, Wired, and Salon. As a media artist, curator, and drag queen, they have presented work at notable venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and ONE Archives. Harris holds a PhD in Media, Culture & Communication from NYU, an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from UC Santa Cruz, and a BA from Swarthmore College.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Media studies
• Law
• Public relations
• Art
• Art history
• History
• Advertising
• Library science
• Business

Selected publications

• Strategic Legibility

  Routledge eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Computer Science

  This chapter considers three publicly engaged humanities projects connected to the Department of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona: LitLabs, Drag Story Hour, and the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The projects serve as case studies for a discussion of how publicly engaged humanities scholarship produces multiple meanings for those within and beyond academia, meanings that can be leveraged as different currencies at specific moments and over time. The chapter emphasizes the concept of strategic legibility, and explores the opportunities and challenges for thinking through publicly engaged humanities work as part of the everyday humanities experience in both higher education and community contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Querying Public Scholarship: An Unfinished List of Questions toward More Meaningful University–Community Partnerships

  Public humanities. · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, by Cait McKinney (Duke University Press, 2020)

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Art history
  • Art

  At a virtual event

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Drag Performance on Screen

  The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication · 2020-03-03 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  While common definitions tend to reduce drag to a gendered transformation, drag is a multifaceted queer/trans performance practice rooted in stylized representations of camp, exaggeration, and authenticity that highlight the constructed, contested, and contradictory natures of social categories more broadly. Beyond its legacy in live performance, drag also has a rich history on screen in myriad examples of narrative, documentary, and art cinemas, as well as television, and an emerging engagement with digital and social media platforms. However, drag must also be distinguished from other forms of gender transgression, notably cross‐gender casting, cross‐dressing, and people who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. Drawing on queer and other cultural theories, this entry focuses on the history of scholarship on drag as such, with attention to key media examples from classic films like Paris Is Burning and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert , to the television empire of RuPaul's Drag Race and drag performers' #MyNameIs campaign challenging Facebook's “real names” policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Under Her Eye: Digital Drag as Obfuscation and Countersurveillance

  Surveillance & Society · 2019-12-10 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Among drag queens, it is common to post screenshots comically highlighting moments in which Facebook incorrectly tags their photos as one another, suggesting that drag makeup offers a unique method for confusing facial recognition algorithms. Drawing on queer, trans, and new media theories, this article considers the ways in which drag serves as a form of informational obfuscation, by adding “noise” in the form of over-the-top makeup and social media profiles that feature semi-fictional names, histories, and personal information. Further, by performing identities that are highly visible, are constantly changing, and engage complex forms of authenticity through modes of camp and realness, drag queens disrupt many common understandings about the users and uses of popular technologies, assumptions of the integrity of data, and even approaches to ensuring privacy. In this way, drag offers both a culturally specific framework for conceptualizing queer and trans responses to surveillance and a potential toolkit for avoiding, thwarting, or mitigating digital observation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacqueline Jean Barrios

  2 shared

• Ken S. McAllister

  1 shared

• Judd Ethan Ruggill

  Arizona State University

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Media, Culture, and Communication

  New York University

• MFA, Digital Art & New Media

  University of California, Santa Cruz

• BA, Sociology & Anthropology

  Swarthmore College

Awards & honors

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
• Early Career Scholars Award from the University of Arizona O…
• Helen H. Chatfield Impact Award from the College of Humaniti…