Education/News/March 2020/Featured education community member of March 2020

Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Amber Berson

Summary: Starting November 2019, we are highlighting a Wikimedian who is impacting or who has been impacted by Wikimedia & Education work. For March, In this article meet Amber Berson. Amber is incorporating Wikimedia projects in the classroom to foster learning with a feminist perspective.

This month's nomination comes from Jacqueline Mabey, who introduces us to Amber Berson:

Amber is a writer, curator, researcher, and SSHRC-funded Ph.D. candidate in Art History, conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She is 2019-2020 Wikipedian-in-Residence at Concordia University, Co-lead Organizer of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon project and Programming Coordinator at articule, an artist-run center in Montreal.

She has worked together with Jaccqueline (Co-founder of Art+Feminisim) on the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon project since 2015. Re: Art+Feminism, Amber started as an event organizer. She went into the role with a deep understanding of art and culture but was new to Wikimedia projects. However, she quickly absorbed the technical, procedural, and cultural aspects of the wiki world. She was brought into the A+F leadership first as Regional Organizer of Canada and this year as a Lead Co-organizer. She has also become an Officer of Wikimedia Canada and, is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at Concordia University.

In her work with Art+Feminism, Amber reached out to arts organizations across the country, created and nurtured relationships, and built a cross country infrastructure where none existed before. Further, she expanded the scope of the project by proposing related, large-scale Wikisource initiatives that focus on making accessible the archives of artist-run centers across Canada. The proposal refers to her Ph.D. research; as with the best Wiki scholars, her scholarship informs her editing and vice versa. As Wikipedian-in-Residence at Concordia University, she has lead edit-a-thons, Wiki, and WikiData 101 workshops for the general public and Concordia staff and student.

Read more about their Wikipedia-in-residence work here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/wikipedia-in-residence-concordia-montreal-1.5200247

Do you know of a great member of the Wikimedia education community that we should meet? Nominate them for a feature by following this! For more information contact spatnaikwikimedia.org

Social Media channels or hashtags: #EduWikiLeaderSeries