Jeana Jorgensen, PhD, is a college professor and sex educator. She has taught anthropology, folklore, and gender studies at Indiana University, the University of California Berkeley, Butler University, and Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis. In addition to presenting at academic conferences in her field, Jeana has presented at sexuality conferences such as the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists and the Positive Sexuality Conference and she helps run a local Sex Geekdom discussion group.

In her scholarly research, Jeana analyzes gender and sexuality in folklore, literary fairy tales, the history of sex education, body art, dance, and feminist and queer theory. Her more recent research examines the Joe Biden meme cycle and disability and desire in the film The Shape of Water. She has published in journals such as The Journal of American Folklore, Journal of History and Cultures, Marvels & Tales, Cultural Analysis, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and in books such as New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (ed. Christa C. Jones and Claudia Schwabe, 2016), Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translations and Texts from around the World, 2^nd edition (ed. Anne Duggan and Donald Haase with Helen Callow, 2016), Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television (ed. Pauline Greenhill and Jill Rudy, 2014), and Transgressive Tales: Queering the Brothers Grimm (ed. Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, 2012), among others. Her blog at Patheos.com also facilitates her mission of making scholarship more accessible to the general public.

With over a decade of teaching experience, Jeana guides students through learning about folklore and culture, both their own and others, with numerous techniques designed to awaken students to the multiple social worlds they navigate on a daily basis. Similarly, in her teaching on gender and sexuality topics, she aims to disrupt norms and invite students to interrogate the assumptions they have received from their socialization. She includes lectures on trauma, on kink and/or polyamory, on STIs, and on stigma in most of the college courses that she teaches, as part of her larger goal of ensuring that college students have accurate, destigmatizing information about not just alternative sexualities but about the cultural mechanism that marginalize certain experiences.

Her full CV is available on her website: www.jeanajorgensen.com

 

Keegan Mills is a scholar of sexuality and identity formation, as well as an activist on behalf of marginalized sex and gender groups.  He obtained his Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, and his ongoing Masters thesis focuses on mental healthcare access by stigmatized communities.  He has presented his research at conferences by the Popular Culture Association and the Center for Positive Sexuality, among others, in addition to guest lecturing at his own and other local universities.

In his presentations, Keegan maintains an emphasis on making academic knowledge about sexuality and mental health accessible to the general public, serving as a scholarly translator for lay and cross-disciplinary audiences.  Even outside of his core work to provide clinicians with better education about nonstandard relationships, community engagement and outreach have been the bedrock of his approach to socially responsible scholarship.  In the process, he has advised college students on racial self-awareness and institutional barriers to success, evaluated the effectiveness of LGBTQ+ sensitivity trainings, and compiled reports on integration and discrimination in the lives of international students.  His research has emphasized the uses of moralizing language to control the behavior of vulnerable populations, especially by mental health professionals and political thought-leaders.  His research and activism efforts range from hypersexuality to identity development, gender transition to family systems.

In his work as an intern for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, Keegan compiles peer-reviewed, empirical research on BDSM into instructional material for community organizers.  He brings this store of knowledge to the collaboration with Jeana for Kink Knowledgeable, aiming to strike a balance between making scholarly knowledge accessible to those for whom it is relevant, and advocating for the healthcare needs of populations that are often marginalized and misunderstood.