Chapter 4
Information Communities
Karen E. Fisher and Crystal Fulton

Karen E. Fisher, PhD, is a professor at the Information School and adjunct professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington, specializing in public libraries, everyday life information behavior, and mixed methods research. Fisher is also a field design ethnographer with UNHCR Jordan, adjunct professor at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, FI, and visiting professor, Siegen University, DE. In 2020, she received a Google Inclusion Research Award to codesign social media/mobile privacy features and information literacy tools with Syrian girls in Jordan based on the Holy Quran and Arab culture, and an IMLS award to study the effects of workplace trauma on public library staff in the U.S.

Crystal Fulton, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Information & Communication Studies at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. Her research focuses on social participation in a range of everyday social settings, from information worlds in serious leisure contexts to the social margins and darker communities. She has held various grants for her research, recently from the Irish Research Council for Ireland’s first national project to examine the social impact of gambling addiction, which has been used to support new legislation in Ireland.