Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is is an educator, researcher, award-winning author, and sought-after speaker whose research focuses on race and media, specifically emphasizing Black discourse and culture, technology, and social media. She moves beyond examinations of representation in the media to consider the relationship between resistance and joy as technologies of liberation. Much of her work is situated in creating spaces of care, community and collaboration for a more just digital future.
Dr. Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network.
Her first book, Digital Black Feminism (winner of the AoIR Nancy Baym Book Award and the Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association) builds on her decade-long research into the Black blogosphere of the early 2000s as sites which replicated features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. Digital Black Feminism considers the ‘magic’ of Black women, operating in digital spaces in ways that far surpass the possibilities that were imagined for them. Black women's technological capability and intentional discourses of resistance drafted online are predicated upon their historically unique position of having to exist in multiple worlds, manipulate multiple technologies, and maximize their resources for survival in a system created to keep them from thriving. Through close readings of texts on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram and in analysis of content and form, she demonstrates how the use of online technology by Black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome of Black feminist writing and simultaneously has changed the technologies themselves. More recently she has explored the interwoven concepts of resistance, joy, and death as found in discourses of Black communities on TikTok and Instagram. Her work has appeared such journals as Social Media + Society, Television and New Media, Information, Communication and Society and Feminist Media Studies.
Dr. Steele was the founding director of the first African American Digital Humanities Initiative (Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum 1 fostered research, education and training at the intersections of digital humanities and African American studies, and prepared a diverse community of scholars and students whose work has broadened the reach of the digital humanities in African American history and cultural studies, and enriched humanities research with new methods, archives and tools. With her co-authors Drs. Jessica Lu and Kevin Winstead, Dr. Steele's work with AADHum is chronicled in her co-authored book Doing Black Digital Humanities: Radical Intentionality and the Praxis of Care (Routledge, 2023).
Her third book, Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press, 2025) is a collaborative project with the DISCO Network. The DISCO Network convenes a national network of scholars who conduct cutting-edge research, offer critical analysis, and develop optimistic solutions about the cultural implications of technology, racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, techno-ableism, and digital racial politics. As scholars, we integrate critical humanistic, social scientific, and technoscientific methodologies to address current issues within the academy, the technology industry, and beyond. We are committed to making our work free and available to the public. Our first book Technoskepticism, is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
Catherine is a 2024-26 Just Tech Fellow as part of the Social Science Research Council. As a Just Tech Fellow, she is working on Automating Black Joy- a cross generational collaborative project that reimagines the role of Black youth, culture, and history in shaping our digital future. By viewing Black youth as leaders and emphasizing joy as a form of resistance, the project looks to create a collaborative educational model from high school to graduate school. It focuses on accessible research, both highlighting Black culture, history, and resistance methods, and addressing critical questions about automation, AI its implications on our liberation.
Dr. Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network.
Her first book, Digital Black Feminism (winner of the AoIR Nancy Baym Book Award and the Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association) builds on her decade-long research into the Black blogosphere of the early 2000s as sites which replicated features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. Digital Black Feminism considers the ‘magic’ of Black women, operating in digital spaces in ways that far surpass the possibilities that were imagined for them. Black women's technological capability and intentional discourses of resistance drafted online are predicated upon their historically unique position of having to exist in multiple worlds, manipulate multiple technologies, and maximize their resources for survival in a system created to keep them from thriving. Through close readings of texts on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram and in analysis of content and form, she demonstrates how the use of online technology by Black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome of Black feminist writing and simultaneously has changed the technologies themselves. More recently she has explored the interwoven concepts of resistance, joy, and death as found in discourses of Black communities on TikTok and Instagram. Her work has appeared such journals as Social Media + Society, Television and New Media, Information, Communication and Society and Feminist Media Studies.
Dr. Steele was the founding director of the first African American Digital Humanities Initiative (Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum 1 fostered research, education and training at the intersections of digital humanities and African American studies, and prepared a diverse community of scholars and students whose work has broadened the reach of the digital humanities in African American history and cultural studies, and enriched humanities research with new methods, archives and tools. With her co-authors Drs. Jessica Lu and Kevin Winstead, Dr. Steele's work with AADHum is chronicled in her co-authored book Doing Black Digital Humanities: Radical Intentionality and the Praxis of Care (Routledge, 2023).
Her third book, Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press, 2025) is a collaborative project with the DISCO Network. The DISCO Network convenes a national network of scholars who conduct cutting-edge research, offer critical analysis, and develop optimistic solutions about the cultural implications of technology, racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, techno-ableism, and digital racial politics. As scholars, we integrate critical humanistic, social scientific, and technoscientific methodologies to address current issues within the academy, the technology industry, and beyond. We are committed to making our work free and available to the public. Our first book Technoskepticism, is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
Catherine is a 2024-26 Just Tech Fellow as part of the Social Science Research Council. As a Just Tech Fellow, she is working on Automating Black Joy- a cross generational collaborative project that reimagines the role of Black youth, culture, and history in shaping our digital future. By viewing Black youth as leaders and emphasizing joy as a form of resistance, the project looks to create a collaborative educational model from high school to graduate school. It focuses on accessible research, both highlighting Black culture, history, and resistance methods, and addressing critical questions about automation, AI its implications on our liberation.
