Media scholar examines the racial politics in technoculture

The UO’s New Media & Culture Certificate (NMCC) Program will host André L. Brock giving a talk titled “The Illumination of Blackness: Afro-optimism and Digital Cultures” on Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 4 p.m., venue TBA. 

According to organizer Colin Koopman, Philosophy and affiliated faculty member in NMCC, “André Brock’s scholarship examines the racial politics of technoculture and how bias, exclusion, underrepresentation, and racism inform our experience of social media and internet technologies more broadly. This event will be of great interest to a campus that’s positioned itself as a regional hub for technological innovation and industry partnership. It will also be invaluable to a number of faculty and graduate students in the humanities whose work is focused on critical data studies and the role of race in digital technologies.” 

André L. Brock is an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. He is the author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020). Brock’s interdisciplinary scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, Black women and weblogs, Whiteness, Blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

Brock’s talk, cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, is free and open to the public. For more information and updates go to newmediaculture.uoregon.edu