“Join us online for a talk with André Brock, author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, in conversation with Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute as part of Data & Society’s classic Databite series. Brock’s book asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this Databite employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.
Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. 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.
This talk will include closed captioning and Q&A. Please include accessibility requests with your RSVP.”