I am an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park. I received my Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. My area of research is race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. I examine representations of marginalized communities in the media and how traditionally marginalized populations resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community.
Some of my recent work engages with blogs as sites which replicate features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. I have also begun exploring the interwoven concepts of resistance, joy, and death as found in the discourses of black communities online. My work has appeared such journals as Social Media + Society, Television and New Media, Information, Communication and Society and The Howard Journal of Communication. My forthcoming book I 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, I demonstrate 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.
I previously served as the Director for the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture: An integrated research and training model). Funded by a $1.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum 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 will both broaden the reach of the digital humanities in African American history and cultural studies, and enrich humanities research with new methods, archives and tools.
Some of my recent work engages with blogs as sites which replicate features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. I have also begun exploring the interwoven concepts of resistance, joy, and death as found in the discourses of black communities online. My work has appeared such journals as Social Media + Society, Television and New Media, Information, Communication and Society and The Howard Journal of Communication. My forthcoming book I 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, I demonstrate 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.
I previously served as the Director for the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture: An integrated research and training model). Funded by a $1.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum 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 will both broaden the reach of the digital humanities in African American history and cultural studies, and enrich humanities research with new methods, archives and tools.