Colloquium Series: Methods for Digital and Social Media: Online Communities, Protests, and Narrative
Colloquium Series: Methods for Digital and Social Media: Online Communities, Protests, and Narrative
Date and Time:
Monday, November 16, 2020 - 15:30 to 17:30
Location:
Department of Anthropology
Via Zoom
Abstract:
Dr. Melissa Brown
Melissa C. Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Brown's current project centers on how Black women exotic dancers based in the urban South use social networking smartphone applications for advertising and networking. Brown uses a mixed methods analysis to examine how Black women exotic dancers perform erotic labor, how the landscape of contemporary strip club industry maps on twentieth century Jim Crow segregation, and how the self-definition and self-valuation of the erotic labor of Black women contrasts with popular culture depictions. This work received funding from the University of Maryland's Behavioral and Social Sciences College Dean's Research Initiative and the University of Maryland Department of Sociology's William H. Form Summer Research Fellowship.
Dr. Karem Said
Karem Said is a recent PhD graduate of Stanford's Department of Anthropology. Her research explores the gendered intersection of digital infrastructure and urban change. In her dissertation, "Gendering Digital Infrastructure and Peripheral Urban Formation," she calls for a methodological approach to digital infrastructure that investigates both the particular hardware and the digital mediation at play in a particular area. Her dissertation research in the low-income area of Hay Ettadhamon in Tunis, Tunisia found that online chat -- particularly on Facebook/Messenger -- dominated local internet use. These findings demonstrate that digitally-mediated relationships serve as a crucial component of digital infrastructure in Hay Ettadhamon, even as these relationships help bolster neighborhood development and growth.
Dr. Meredith Clark
Meredith D. Clark, PhD (@MeredithDClark) is a recovering journalist and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, media, and power. She explores the relationships between Black communities and the news on social media. Clark’s academic analysis of Black Twitter landed her on the Root 100 list of most influential African Americans. Now evolved into a theoretical framework of black digital resistance, her book is under contract with Oxford University Press. Clark’s research looks at how people use Twitter in strategic ways to draw attention to issues of concern to Black communities. She’s presented at SXSW three times. Clark is the author of “White Folks’ Work: Digital Allyship Praxis in the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Social Movement Studies (2019). Her research has been published in Electronic News, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Journal of Social Media in Society, and New Media & Society. Clark is Academic Lead for Documenting the Now II, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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