Please join us for the September DBLAC Reading Series Author Chat--Monday, September 12, 2022 at 6 pm EST.
Bria Paige will be in conversation with Dr. Catherine Knight Steelr. They will discuss Black Digital Feminism.
About Digital Black Feminism: Winner, 2022 Nancy Baym Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers
Traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist thought
Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline.
Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. She makes connections among the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. Linking narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that are not always in conversation. As the work of Black feminist writers now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.
Purchase Digital Black Feminism here: https://nyupress.org/9781479808380/digital-black-feminism/ |
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 | Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park and was the Founding Director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). She now directs the Black Communication and Technology lab (BCaT) as a part of the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism Network funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She also directs the Digital Studies in Art & Humanities graduate certificate at the University of Maryland.
Her research focuses on race, gender, and media, specifically focusing on Black culture and discourse in new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and practice joy using online technology to create spaces of community.
Catherine’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), which examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S, and was the 2022 winner of the Association of Internet Research Nancy Baym Book Award.
Twitter: @SteeleCat717 |
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