BCaT on Winter Term: Reflections of the Fall Semester
by Tynesha McCullers, cross-posted from the BCaT Lab Blog
BCaT’s fall was busy – filled with collaborative learning and research opportunities, scholarship presentations, and fellowship and bonding through our weekly and monthly events. Although the lab (and UMD) is on Winter break, it seemed like an appropriate time to share more about and reflect on all that the fall semester offered us which included: conference attendance and presentations, further developed research by our Black Digital Migration team, BCaT Lunch & Learns, BCaT Eats, and a multi-authored book panel with scholars from the DISCO Network.
The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) hosted their 24th annual conference in Philadelphia, PA, with the theme, Revolution. The BCaT Lab had great representation from our scholars of digital humanities throughout AoIR’s annual meeting. Our Director, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, chaired a Critical Race Internet Studies panel which included research from scholars on racial politics within digital culture in Mexico, Korean identity-based content on TikTok, and Asian-Australian beauty vlogs. Assistant Professor of Communication and former BCaT Graduate Fellow, Dr. Briana Barner, shared her research titled “Making Bread from Crumbs: The Digital Alchemy of Black Podcasts” which discussed Black podcasters ability to transform the podcast media landscape, exceeding platform’s original capacities which Moya Bailey terms digital alchemy. Our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Rianna Walcott, served on a panel discussing the impact of Dr. André Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis on digital research, ten years since its development. Alisa Hardy, one of BCaT’s Graduate Fellows, presented “Breonna’s Garden: A Liminal Homeplace in Virtual Reality Applications”, a research project examining Breonna’s Garden, a digital memorial space dedicated to honoring the life of Breonna Taylor. BCaT Graduate Fellow, S. Nisa Asgarali-Hoffman, discussed her research “Ambiguously Brown: The Myth of Racial Authenticity in Genetic Ancestry Testing” which showcased the flaws of genetic ancestry testing as a means to assign racial authenticity. We’re proud of the work our scholars presented and how well they represented BCaT!
Over the course of the fall semester, the Black Digital Migration (BDM) collaborative research team continued working diligently on our project examining Black Twitter users migration practices over the course of Musk’s acquisition of the platform. We finished cleaning up our tweet data and created visualizations for some of the data using Tableau – those visualizations can be found here. Members of the BDM research team recorded and edited content discussing the project for the BCaT Lab podcast which is set to be released later this semester. We’re excited to share the acceptance of our proposal for the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture Conference; we look forward to discussing our work with a larger audience and getting feedback next month. Our team developed and submitted a conference proposal about our research and we’re excited to share that it was accepted. We will present our scholarship at the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture Conference next month and are looking forward to discussing our work with a larger audience and getting feedback. Dr. Rianna Walcott, the BDM project lead, will also be sharing her research which examines the conditions of Black social media platform migration. The Black Digital Migration research team plans to spend the spring semester developing publications about our project for Reviews in Digital Humanities and preparing for our upcoming presentations.
During the last lunch and learn of the semester, we hosted Dr. André Brock, Co-PI of the DISCO Network and Director of the Projects of Rhetorics of Equity, Access, Computation & Humanities (PREACH) Lab. At this workshop, Dr. Brock discussed Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), his theoretical and methodological approach which holistically examines the hardware and software of media technologies, the users of said technology, users’ discourse about/within the technology, as well as the roles that power and oppression play in facilitating the usage of media technologies. Lunch and learn participants shared research they were working on and received feedback from Dr. Brock and other workshop participants on how to incorporate CTDA in their scholarship. Later that day, we had a BCaT Eats event complete with pizza and gingerbread house making.
Both our lab director, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele and our postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Rianna Walcott, discussed their book project, Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, which they co-authored with twelve DISCO Network researchers during summer 2023. Their virtual panel took place on December 14th and provided insights not only about the book's dive into examining the technology uses of oppressed groups but into the collaborative writing process as well as the benefits and challenges of week long intensive writing retreats. There’s just a couple more weeks of winter classes and the spring term will be in full swing. Be on the lookout for our calendar of BCaT events for the semester which is expected to be released via our newsletter.