[Air-L] André Brock to speak at ICA in Washington, D.C.

[Jones, Steve]

It is my pleasure and honor to announce that André Brock, associate professor of Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech, will speak at the 2019 International Communication Association (ICA) meeting in Washington, D.C., as the next speaker in the Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture series sponsored by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research, ICA and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The title of his talk is "On Race and Technoculture,” and a brief abstract is below. The talk will take place Sunday, May 26, at 2pm, at the Washington Hilton. I hope many of you are able to join us and attend. As always my thanks to Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, Laura Sawyer and the ICA staff, and Zizi Papacharissi and Mamie Gray at UIC for their continued support.

Steve Jones

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Abstract: Technology is the American mythos: a belief system powering the relations between—and politics of—culture and technology.  In the Western context, technoculture incorporates Whiteness, White racial ideology, and modernist technological beliefs. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to incorporate Blackness as technological subjects as opposed to technical objects. Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis , Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic; it concludes by suggesting possibilities for similarly understanding White Twitter.