About

I’m Evelyn (she/her), a writer and graduate student interested in how people make meaning in ancient religions, online fandoms, open source communities, and everywhere in between.

My academic background is in anthropology and information science, which has given me a taste for close reading and a suspicion of tidy narratives. I’ve spent enough time on the edges of various historical, cultural, personal categories to know that the driving forces of culture and society are located in the margins. Most of what I write here sits at the intersection of cultural analysis and everyday life: why a piece of media resonates the way it does, what a community’s norms reveal about its values, how the infrastructure we build reflects the world we want or are afraid of losing.

I’ve been a FOSS user for fifteen years. What started as teenage rebellion against the status quo increasingly became something closer to conviction. Studying how people organized labor, knowledge, and resources in pre-modern societies makes it difficult to accept our current state of affairs as inevitable. Technology has created some tremendous results, but that social benefit is not evenly distributed; rather it is almost entirely concentrated in the very highest echelons of society. I believe technology should be legible, accountable, and useful to all people, not just the oligarchs, and I’m skeptical of any system, technical or otherwise, that mistakes scale for progress.

I work in nonprofit administration and am currently finishing a Master’s in Information and Library Science. If you’re hiring in the Detroit area, let me know!