Dr. André Brock on Distributed Blackness

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Author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, Dr. André Brock will speak to how social media platforms impacts Black communities. Brock's book asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, Brock will employ Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture's practices of "race-as- technology" (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as "things." Hence, Black technoculture.

André L. Brock joined the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as an associate professor. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His 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.

This event is part of the 4th Season of the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series, organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum.

This event is co-hosted by the DIGS Lab of Concordia (under the direction of Dr. Stefanie Duguay).

Our series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the DIGS Lab, Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, MILA, and more (see our website!)

There is no fee required to attend this event. We will provide captions in English. This event will be recorded and made available on our website after the event.