Building beautiful bridges: Indigenous womxn artists using social networking sites to address violence

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.Using Indigenous aesthetics, critical technocultural discourse analysis, and Indigenous storyworks, this study explores how Indigenous womxn's art practices challenge settler-colonizing visual and media representations of Indigenous peoples that feed violence against womxn, girls and two-spirits; and in the digital realm, how sharing their art-stories is testimony to the unique voices of Indigenous womxn's leadership. A critical technocultural discourse analysis of in-depth interviews and social networking site (SNS) posts reveals underlying settler-colonial discourses. Through their art-storytelling, artist-participants use technocultural discourses of generosity, collaboration/reciprocity, calling in/calling out, creating and respecting boundaries and fierceness to shift dominating discourses. In a real sense they are building bridges between on and offline realms, strengthening community networks, and bringing together past, present and future to prevent violence

Critical informatics: New methods and practices

While social informatics (SI) is uniquely positioned to examine the technical and organizational properties of information and communication technology (ICT) and associated user practices, it often ignores the cultural mediation of design, use, and meaning of ICTs. Critical informatics, more so than normative and analytic orientations to ICT, offers possibilities to foreground culture as a sensitizing context for studying information and technology in society. This paper articulates a new critical informatics approach: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) as an analysis employing critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) to jointly interrogate culture and technology. CTDA (Brock ) is a bifurcated approach for studying Internet phenomena integrating interface analysis with user discourse analysis. This paper outlines CTDA, providing examples of how its methodological flexibility applies to examining varied ICT artifacts, such as twitter and search engine phenomena, while maintaining a critical perspective on design and use. CTDA is an important tool for critical informaticists that contributes to building understanding of technology as culture, grounded in user perspectives and real‐world practices.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111201/1/meet14505101032.pd

Tailored for the gram: a technocultural analysis of Nigerian Igbo women fashion designers' self-presentation on Instagram

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.Using African Technocultural Feminist Theory, this study uncovered the ways Nigerian Igbo women fashion designers use Instagram and its affordances to perform digital identities online as well as examined their negotiation of patriarchal ideologies within Igbo culture. The Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) of Instagram posts and interview data revealed Nigerian Igbo women fashion designers employed self-promotion and cultural digitization of Igbo-centric fashion in their self-presentation online. Instagram's affordance of photos allowed them post visually appealing pictures which showcased the intricacies of their designs as well as facilitated the designers' cultural digitalization of Igbo-centric fashion while creating space to challenge patriarchal structures within Igbo culture. The analysis also showed Nigerian Igbo women fashion designers value building and maintaining professional relationships with their clients as they embodied visual aesthetics, relatability, and authenticity in their self-presentation online. Implications, recommendations, and limitations were discussed

Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.Keywords: genomics, biodigital, bodies, spectacle, everyda

Black Feminist Thought, Interrupted: Dissecting the Voice of Black Feminists in the Blogosphere and their Engagement with Platform Affordances

ABSTRACT BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT, INTERRUPTED DISSECTING THE VOICE OF BLACK FEMINISTS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE AND THEIR ENGAGEMENT WITH PLATFORM AFFORDANCES By Dawn G. Johnson, Ph.D A dissertation submitted to the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Media, Art, and Text Department in the College of Humanities and Sciences Virginia Commonwealth University, 2021 Dissertation Chair: Dr. Archana Pathak, Associate Professor, Dept. of Gender, Sexuality & Women\u27s Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University Black women that have long searched for spaces to be creative and have voice due to their constant exclusion from mainstream media. In response to this exclusion, black feminists actively formed spaces outside of traditional media by developing black feminist blogs designed to empower the black feminist community and further the advancement of Black Feminist Thought and liberatory theory. This research examined the problem of whether the blogosphere has lived up to its promise of allowing black feminist engagement and dissemination of information, or whether the online arena (platform) represented a microcosm of societal dominant power structures and furthered white oppression and marginalization of black women. Applying Andre’ Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as methodology, this research explored whether online platforms afford or constrain black feminist voice. Brock’s CTDA insisted on a multi-layered approach to theories of technology, one that captured diversity in culture and demographics and how these moments of diversity intersected with the technological hardware and code. Through examining a purposive sample of 30 blogs from three black feminist blog sites, Crunk Feminist Collective, For Harriet and The Feminist Wire, the results provided that the blog spaces provided a location for the empowerment of black womanhood and did not directly constrain black feminist voice. But rather, black feminist blog writers actively resisted white discourse and focused on self-love and the act of healing the black community, and thus the blog platforms served as a true space of refuge. Yet, voice was indirectly impacted, because black feminist bloggers resisted addressing white oppression, and thus represented a missed opportunity and an attempt to play it safe

An ‘exemplary contemporary technical object’: thinking cinema between Hansen and Stiegler

This article explores the work of Mark B.N. Hansen and Bernard Stiegler in relation to technology, experience and cinema. It highlights the differences between their positions and evaluates their ongoing usefulness for ‘technocultural’ studies. The article starts by describing and evaluating Hansen’s critique of Stiegler on cinematic temporality. Here it argues that their very different reading of Gilbert Simondon’s work (and especially his concept of individuation) are crucial to understanding the difference between Hansen and Stiegler. The article then moves on to look directly at Stiegler’s approach to cinema through an analysis of his reading of Alain Resnais’s film On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song). It shows here how the frequent citation of popular French song in this film underlines Stiegler’s concept of the ‘industrialisation of memory’. The economic and cultural problematic that Stiegler locates in the film is contrasted with the seemingly positive reappropriation of culture industry which Lawrence Lessig describes as ‘remix culture’. The article then concludes by discussing what is at stake, theoretically and politically, in Stiegler and Hansen’s different ways of thinking about cinema

Reel Queer: Emergent Discourses and Contexts of Queer Youth Identity Constructions and Experiences in Digital Video Projects

My thesis examines the discourses present in digital video projects created by queer youth, ages 13-20, who participated in The Reel Queer Youth video mentorship program between 2009 and 2012. I used textual analysis, specifically discourse and critical technocultural discourse analysis to explore constructions of identity in youth and experiences present in digital video projects and the contexts these discourses were produced within. I identified three overarching discursive themes: (a) call for more complex understandings of queer youth identities and experiences; (b) concern regarding gender binaries; and (c) change and self-responsibility. In addition to the discursive themes, I identified and discussed four contextualizing elements. The elements consist of: (a) culture, the larger media discourses concerning the experiences of queer youth; (b) environment, the RQY video production workshop where the videos were produced; (c) production, the actual production process needed to produce a digital video project; and (d) platform, Vimeo, the video sharing site that hosts the RQY videos. I placed the themes and contextualizing elements identified into conversation with each other. I was able to identify four conversations: (a) sexual and gender identity labels; (b) unspoken discourses: reinforcing queer universality; (c) cyberqueer materiality and technolcultural space; and (d) queer technological progress. These conversations reveal that culture and environment had an impact on what how the youth conceptualize and construct gender and sexual identities, as well as what discourses are silenced. Production and platform influence what is actually able to be captured and shared through the use of digital video, while platform affects who can access the videos and the potential negative ramifications of making the RQY videos public

Virtual YouTubers’ Self-Representation Between Extended and Divided Self

Virtual and Artificial YouTubers (VTubers) show us how the body becomes technologically embedded. They reveal arising complexities within the interface of digital and analog assemblies, bodies, and virtual environments. Thus, VTubers raise questions that are crucial to the core debate about personhood and the human subject in anthropology as well as critical posthumanism. By reading Feminist Anthropology and Critical Posthumanism dos-à-dos, the thesis engages with the three VTubers AI Angelica, CodeMiko, and Miquela Sousa. To answer the questions (1) how personhood unfolds in the VTubers’ self-representation(s), (2) how personhood is negotiated with the recipients, and (3) which aspects of the human subject (e.g., gender, race) are reproduced a methodological framework of Netnography and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis is applied. The thesis reveals that VTubers’ show a form of personhood in which the reflective self appears and speaks apart from the ‘I.’ This division reflects practices of self-designation in order to navigate between the extended self and the divided self; the content creator and the avatar; between the platform and the VTuber. This way, the self manifests itself simultaneously in the form of overlaps and displacements. Within this form of relationality, the notion of the glitch is reviewed to consider the VTuber’s personhood in respect of the discussion between critical posthumanist and humanist perspectives

Internet Dwelling, Cyborgs, and the Matrix of Modernity: An Empirical Inquiry with Critical-Hermeneutic Features

Amidst modernity\u27s expanding electronic social matrix, this cultural-historical inquiry explores the technological construction of human being (e.g., cyborgs) and sociality in the America Online cyberscape. A two-tiered critical-hermeneutic method enables exploration of the broad rationalizing historical narrative and the localized play of virtual discursive practices impacting human meaning construction, selfhood, and social practice. A third and fourth tier of inquiry occasions integration of psychological meanings found in research participant experiential descriptions and interviews. This four-tier interplay reveals a bodily ethic enabling participants to modify subjectifying Internet practices toward meaningful social ends. Otherwise, eclipsed interpretive bodily powers contribute to undecidability about meaning constructions and identities. Despite multiple identity solicitations, normalization of objectified and schizoid being, and panoptic e-surveillance, participants pursued genuine and personally satisfying encounters

TikTok, Twitter, and Platform-Specific Technocultural Discourse in Response to Taylor Swift’s LGBTQ+ Allyship in ‘You Need to Calm Down’

For most of her career thus far, Taylor Swift’s cultural outputs have remained apolitical, often addressing heteronormative notions of romance, young adult life, and heartbreak. In 2019, Swift broke her politicised silence with ‘You Need to Calm Down’, a track which self-proclaims the artist as an ally to LGBTQ+ communities through her co-option of language historically used to silence marginalised voices, and the inclusion of LGBTQ+-identified celebrities in the accompanying music video. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) approach, and incorporating digital ethnography, this article examines and compares the multimodal response to ‘You Need to Calm Down’ on TikTok and Twitter. CTDA multimodal analysis is utilised as a method to ascertain both the cultural situatedness of the track, its reception through digital spaces, and also how that reception is connected to the conventions of each platform. Through an analysis of over 20,000 tweets utilising the #YouNeedToCalmDown hashtag, and over 100 TikTok videos based on the track, I examine platform-specific discourse: the de-politicised mimetic creativity of TikTok in comparison to the more hegemonic interpretations found on Twitter. Discussion is organised around three themes of response to ‘You Need to Calm Down’: online communities and ambient affiliations, performative allyship, and cancel culture