Dr. Roark is an applied cultural anthropologist who engages in ethnographic fieldwork and anthrodesign projects in Canada and the United States. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTQ community volunteers in the American Southwest and health science researchers in Canada’s western provinces, and has recently led a participatory prototyping project for maternal child health digital research infrastructure. Dr. Roark’s broader research and teaching interests include feminist and decolonial approaches to science and technology studies, participatory and speculative research methodologies, new materialist theory and posthuman ethics, and critical data studies.
Dr. Roark is currently an Assistant Professor of Library Science (Research Data Specialist & Anthropology Liaison) with the Purdue University Libraries and active affiliate teaching faculty with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program at Purdue. As part of her role as a research data specialist, she seeks to better understand researcher practices, workflows, data, and information needs. Recent projects have involved collaboratively developing privacy-aware protocols, workflows, and other tools that help facilitate ethical data-sharing practices. As the Libraries-Anthropology Liaison, she coordinates anthropology collection development requests (monographs, journals, etc.), consults one-on-one with students and faculty, and provides information and data literacy instruction.
More information about Research Data services at Purdue can be found at www.lib.purdue.edu/researchdata.
Recent grant-funded projects:
Purdue Mellon Global Grand Challenges Grant for Big Data Ethics: Detecting Bias in Data Collection, Algorithmic Discrimination and ‘Informed Refusal'. Chris Clifton (PI), Dan Kelly (co-PI) and Kendall Roark (co-PI), 2017 – 2018
CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections & Archives Grant for Bridging the Research Data Divide: Rethinking Long-term Value and Access for Historical and Contemporary Maternal, Infant and Child Health Research. K. Hammond-Baker/Emily Gustainis (Harvard, PI); Sharon Farnel (University of Alberta, co-PI); Kendall Roark (co-PI), 2015 - 2017
