Graduate Scholar Lightning Talks 2022
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Lisa Nakamura: [00:00:00] Recording in progress. Okay, I think there's a lot of people here. Can everybody hear me? Okay. All right. Good. Well, I am just going to start talking but I won't talk for very long because the reason we're here is to celebrate the launch of the DISCO network. DISCO stands [00:01:00] for digital inquiry, speculation, collaboration, optimism, and we are thrilled to be here and I'm going to talk a little bit about what we are doing here today and a little bit what the network is for. So first I'd like to thank our co sponsors of which we have many obviously the Mellon Foundation is our biggest sponsor as the funder of the project, which is a three year project, and we have partners and fellow travelers both on our campus at University of Michigan and within the network of other groups within Mellon that are being funded to do work on race, diaspora, identity, and digital. preservation technology. 

The DISCO Network came into being as a collaborative that integrates critical humanistic, social science, and artistic approaches to digital studies and foregrounds questions about the cultural implications of technology to envision a new [00:02:00] anti racist, anti ableist digital future.

We're a collaborative made up of labs. We're a lab of labs. So, the Michigan University of Michigan is the organizational home for the grant and we're at the university cited on the Ojibwe lands, unceded territory. It's also the home of Remi Yergeau's Digital Accessible Futures Lab, also known as Digital AF. Stephanie Dinkins lab, Future History Studio at Stony Brook University. Rayvon Fouche's Humanities and Technoscience Lab at Purdue. Catherine Knight Steeles, BCAT Lab, Black Communication and Technology Lab. and Andre Brock's lab at the Georgia Tech University Preach Lab. 

The first part of our program today is going to focus on our graduate scholars.

It's a program that is designed to help grad students committed to developing [00:03:00] interdisciplinary work in collaboration with our co PIs and other fellows. We have some exciting announcements that we're going to make soon about fellows we have hired to develop each of our labs and to lead publishing projects. Organized around tech wins and fails from a critical race, disability and technology point of view.

So the first half of our morning is going to be spent with the DISCO fellows on the left hand side, and the next is on fellows on the right hand side. If you can't see this, you will quickly hear because we will introduce everybody too.

If you are interested in the kind of work that we are doing, which is more as I mentioned before, critical, more humanistic we're going to be writing two books together over the time of our grant, but also doing programming within labs and also here at the Hub. If you'd like to receive our newsletter, get invitations to public events like our Summer Institute, learn about opportunities to do collaborative research with us [00:04:00] to engage in working groups and projects, you're welcome to become a member. And if you go to our website, there's a link in order for you to fill out a form to do that. If you want to be a research affiliate and do more with the network, whatever form that would take in things that you would want to do, things that we would want to do, there's a different form to fill that out.

So there's the link for that. 

So our program is going to conclude today with a super panel. It's all of our PIs giving quick talks on what they regard as the future of race, gender, disability, and technology. So please come to that and recommend other people come to it. We're going to be taking questions from the audience, both on zoom chat, but also on social media too.

And if you have a question or, you know, somebody who has a question who can't be there, feel free to ask it. So our agenda today is we're going to start with lightning talks by Sarah Hughes and Lisa Lao, Brienne [00:05:00] Adams, Judy Fisher, and Cassidy Campbell. And me, Catherine, and Remi are going to respond to them briefly.

Then we'll have a short break and pick up more lightning talks. So that's, that's a B. Let's get started then.

I'll stop sharing my screen.

So first up, we have Sarah Hughes and Lise Lao.

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Hello. Can y'all hear me?

Okay, awesome. All right, let me go ahead and am I allowed to paste things in the chat? [00:06:00] 

Jessica Hill Riggs: Yes, you should be able to. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Okay, cool. All right, so let me go ahead and, because, okay, right now it's saying that, okay, right now it's only letting me paste things as direct messages to Eric for some, Eric oh, now it can, now it can send it to everyone.

Awesome. Okay. Okay, and now to all right now to share the share the slideshow. 

Jessica Hill Riggs: And just a quick note Sarah and Cynthia, we're going to keep time on our end I'll just let you know when the time is up so you both have 14 minutes total since you're presenting together. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. All right. Can y'all see the slides? Are they displaying? [00:07:00] Okay. Great. Okay. So hi, everyone. Our presentation is called Crip Time Travel Reflections on Technical Ableism in the Academy. Thank you to Jessica, Eric, Veronica, and Lisa for setting up and running these lightning talks, and thank you to Remi who co wrote the web text with us that we'll be presenting and provided us with guidance for this presentation.

We want to drop our contact info before we started. As this project is still a work in progress and we are eager for dialogue on where to take it in the future. I'm Cindy or Lise, either is fine. I appear in feed as a Chinese femme with chin length hair wearing glasses and a flannel shirt.

If you can't see the slide you can reach me at liselao@umich.edu

Sarah Hughes: okay. I'm Sarah Hughes and I appear in the feed as a white woman with wavy brown hair and glasses, wearing a brick red [00:08:00] cardigan with a gray shirt. And you can reach me at sbhghs@umich.edu. We are excited to be sharing with you today our web text project that we created as part of the Digital Accesible Futures digital AF lab, and we plan on expanding it into an article in the coming weeks.

Yes.

Thank you. Okay. To begin, I'd like to share a bit about our project's exigence. After that, we'll walk you through a portion of our web text before turning toward discussing some of the themes that the project works to address. We'll spend some time thinking through how documentation has functioned in relation to disability in general, and COVID 19 in particular, as well as how we might engage gamefully with documentation and produce pedagogical practices that are responsive to documentary pressures.

As you will [00:09:00] see, our web text in many ways functions as a game, intertwining tropes Like the second person you various choices to click through and even some pixel arts with scholarly discourse. It's an exercise in role playing intended to reflect the winding disorienting pressured processes of navigating the bureaucracies of institutional disability services.

Our gameful metaphor here is multivalent, and at times the game is the unwinnable game of disability services bureaucracy, while at other times the disabled person is the player gaming the system. The metaphor is malleable, shifting and changing, but it affirms the experiences of multiply marginalized folks working creatively and exhaustively against accommodationist logics and attendant techno medical enterprises.

Now I'll pass the mic to Cindy to walk us through part of our web text. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: I've just switched over to the web text. Just checking. Is it visible? [00:10:00] Okay, cool. Thank you, Sarah. So I'm so here we are at the landing page for what text trip time travel. There's a link here that says enter, which I'm going to go ahead and click on.

So like Sarah said, this WebText is meant to be engaged as a kind of pedagogical game and that you progress through it by playing throughout the text engages with you the player reader by describing events that are having happening to you and asking you to make choices. Each choice you make is a link that will take you to another page in our web text, and there are also non diegetic hyperlinks sprinkled into the main text of some of our pages, as well as the back button and forward button.

I'm going to do a quick little let's play now. Before we start, I want to note that I'm going to gloss over most of the text on each page. In the interest of time, I'll mostly be paying attention to the choices at the bottom of each page for this introductory page. 

You can choose what you wanna be for this game. You can be overburdened or you can be blissfully unaware. To be clear, you don't have [00:11:00] to be honest about this. You can totally, you can totally just pick whatever you want to do for the day. So today I want to be blissfully unaware, so that's the link that I will click on and the web text x. Asks me if I want to join a committee and volunteer myself as a narrating exhibit of disabled personhood.

I'm going to change my mind. I don't want to be blissfully unaware anymore. So I click the back button and I decide I'm going to be overburdened instead. Here I'm prompted to think about time and to identify how I am located in diagnosis time. I'm to choose one of the following. 

I was diagnosed a while ago. I hope to be diagnosed in the future. And the third option we offer is to reject the question because intrusive. In the future iteration of this project, we'd like to add more answer choices, but for now I'm going to choose that I hope to be diagnosed in the future. As I'm thinking through some of my, some of my hopes and anxieties around diagnosis, I, as the player reader character, realize that diagnosis [00:12:00] might allow medical providers to claim that I'm not competent enough to make my own medical decisions.

So I have another choice to make now. I don't have time to look at all the options, but I'm going to decide to pursue my diagnosis despite the risks. Okay. Which takes me to a page where it goes through the process of getting diagnosed. I'm either overwhelmed to the point that I give up on getting diagnosed, or I'm not.

I'm going to choose to get overwhelmed. So I have a couple options now. If I'm exhausted, I can languish. If I'm somewhat less exhausted, I can either try to figure out how to make things work in the meantime, or I can join a committee. I'm feeling really exhausted, So I'm going to languish, and now I'm at a page where I can acknowledge how exhausted I feel, I can sit in that exhaustion, or if I want to, I can exercise my middle fingers, since I don't feel like doing either of these things, so I'm going to go back, and I'm going to give this committee another try.

Of course, it's the same committee as the page wants me to either accept or reject my committee invitation since I [00:13:00] went here on purpose, I'm going to accept it which takes me back to doing exhaustive languishing again. So what we're trying to highlight with our role playing elements here in this little playthrough is how disability documentation is a losing game.

That is, a losing game has become only more clear in the wake of the pandemic. COVID 19 pandemic and institutional insistence on maintaining systems of disability documentation, which is what I will be returning the mic to Sarah to talk about. And all right.

Here we go. 

Sarah Hughes: Okay. Thanks, Lise. This slide is titled, join a committee with many exclamation points and some butterfly emojis. The long COVID workbook that our tech, the long COVID workbook that our web text engages with is a 57 page document written by a task force of disability services professionals in a variety of higher education settings, cognizant of the many students experiencing COVID symptoms coming to University [00:14:00] Disability Services offices, often for the first time, and perhaps without access to consistent documentation, or even diagnosis to support accommodation needs.

The task force created this document for Disability Services staff. We acknowledge the good faith effort this committee made in creating this workbook and are also grateful for their efforts in bringing conversations around students with long COVID and how they might interact with disability services offices into the spotlight.

We offer commentary on this workbook in the spirit of identifying how ableist systems permeate even the best intended resources to invite further discussion on two violences these systems perpetuate. First, how accommodation is supported. logics and attendant techno medical enterprises constrain what our colleagues in disability services offices can actually do.

For example, this workbook does not consider virtual or digital pedagogies as a possibility and only names them in reference to the early pandemic days. And second, how [00:15:00] disability services offices ensnare multiply marginalized community members in a never ending game of provability. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to the conversation on how disability services offices can work to resist these constraints in order to support students liberation through universal design thinking, through unpacking entrenched practices, like the need for diagnosis and documentation.

So as you explore both the long COVID workbook and our web text project, we invite you to contemplate the following questions. What is your embodied experience? And what do you feel stressed out by?

Here we will share some of the questions that arose for us as we engaged with the long COVID workbook. This slide is titled logic of centering documentation. The heart of our argument is that the workbook engages and extends institutional histories of requiring and centering documentation. [00:16:00] Then is the document historicizes long COVID is yet another manifestation of an influx of students seeking the support of disability services offices without diagnosis or documentation.

They fail to name the race and gendered intersections of those contexts. They compare students experience. covid to students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, or those experiencing the lingering effects of concussion syndrome. Without naming that the vast majority of those students were black and that covid in itself impacts BIPOC communities in ways that are relentlessly disproportionate to their impact on white communities.

The document also fails to acknowledge universities responsibility in creating and perpetuating long covid through the bureaucratic structures that socially construct disability. And also literally through their swift and forced return to in person teaching and learning, which contributed to the continued spread of the mutating uncontrolled virus through campus communities all across the country.

Universities are the reason so many [00:17:00] students are now experiencing long COVID and universities are the reason they are unable to access their coursework in classrooms in the way they need to because they have long COVID. Institutions don't care who lives and who dies. But rather than resisting the systems of oppression universities inhabit and uphold, the long COVID workbook seeks to accommodate, to shift responsibility from structures to students and faculty struggling to navigate the systems while staying alive.

Countless university community members have been Have been and continue to be forced to risk their lives on campus. The choice the university gave them was to either come to campus and risk their lives or to leave their jobs or programs to lose their educational progress. Their access to the degree degrees they were earning, the insurance benefits they had accrued and the paychecks they relied on to live, passing to lease.

Lise/Cynthia Lao: All right. Because the stakes Sarah just mentioned are so high, students and instructors need [00:18:00] accommodations, not have no choice but to treat the system as a game to play through to, to strategically play up or play down their disability as much as necessary in order to navigate a bureaucracy that often feels like an absurd, unfair game.

In the words of Alan Samuels, when for benefits and accommodations of any kind, it is best to appear ill groomed, unattractive, and generally impoverished. One might, for example, wear a wrinkled shirt or eat a piece of smelly garlic. And on our slide, we have a little icon of a wrinkled green shirt for you to equip and a low poly render of a piece of garlic along with a tomato bell pepper and onion, which you can pick up and eat.

I guess this theme of gainfulness is a major part of why we chose to use a game called pedagogy to develop our web text, which often works to illustrate pedagogy, I suppose. the frustration of shuffling back and forth and getting stuck. Hopefully in a way that facilitates script levity. We also encourage you to game the web text as you go through it, to game your way to what you want to get out of the web text more specifically.

If you have any thoughts on how to make our web text more gainful, we [00:19:00] would love your feedback. We also want to attend to some of the ways in which a gainful pedagogy might fall short. There is a risk of reenacting the violence we are trying to shed light on. While we frequently link to languishing as a landing point for our readers who need to escape from our web text, we are open to the possibility that this might not be sufficient.

Another potential problem is our usage of the you pronoun. While we hope that this you provides space for readers of varying intersectional positions to engage with our text in different ways, we are also wary of how our you can instead collapse these positions. Feedback on the shortcomings of our pedagogy is also welcome.

Jessica Hill Riggs: We're at two minutes left. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Okay, thank you. Oh, wait. Are my slides still blocked?

Jessica Hill Riggs: So I think that the challenge is you have your notes up over your slides, and so we're seeing both of them at the same time. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Oh, okay. Okay. Let me stop screen sharing and try again. [00:20:00] Okay. Does my, do my notes still block the slide this way? 

Jessica Hill Riggs: Yeah, they do. I think you only have one screen that you're working from, like a laptop. I think that might be the challenge. 

Lise/Cynthia Lao: Okay. Okay.

Okay, well, okay, we have a copy of your slide, so yeah, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just leave it like this then. Okay, so in thinking about how to game the system, we often turn to thinking about how we can use this gaming to produce a pedagogy that is responsive to how access is gated behind documentation.

One of the most common problems with accessibility is that it is often turned into a checklist, a series of bolt on features to be added to the classroom that nevertheless still centers the learning of the quote, normal student. The problem is hardly surprising, however, given the limitations imposed by the institution.

Let us consider the digital classroom. [00:21:00] When remote classrooms were implemented in response to the pandemic, many accommodations were made freely available without need for documentation, as they now provide for needs that the university consider universal, rather than specific to disabled students and instructors.

However, as we gradually enter what has been granted as the post pandemic world, many institutions have returned to in person and blended modalities, and fully online teaching has once again become gated behind accommodation. and when it is offered at all. As such, many instructors have turned to ad hoc accommodation.

When students and superiors are amenable, instructors might make some or all of their classes online anyways, regardless of the wishes of the university or fashion ways for students to attend the in person classroom remotely. Often, Biowire has now been coined zooming in. While useful as a harm reduction practice, ad hoc accommodation is often a prime example of bolt on insufficient accessibility practice.

If you've ever zoomed into a classroom, you'll know that the audio quality is often poor and difficult to understand, and that it is similarly difficult to make your voice heard. [00:22:00] Yet the, yet the possibility of access that isn't bolt on is foreclosed when the institution demands that we teach in person when attempts to make the classroom accessible are often unsanctioned and therefore lacking technological support Something that this demand illustrates is how institution presumes that online teaching is so inferior that no student can the best certified classes entirely online, even if that student needs to spend their entire semester online anyways.

One of the goals of our project is to think about the potentialities of online modalities that don't regard the in person classroom as a gold standard to be replicated. We would like to invite you to do the same.

And I will pass the mic to Sarah. 

Jessica Hill Riggs: We're at time, but if you just want to quickly wrap up. 

Sarah Hughes: No problem. I was just I'm just going to share a link to our survey here in the chat. Thank you so much for listening. The survey is at tiny. cc slash time travel, and it [00:23:00] invites, it has space for you to respond to all those questions that we shared in our slides.

And because like we've mentioned, this is, it's still a work in progress. We are updating and revising the project itself and also working on an article that's going to come from it. We would really, truly appreciate your thoughts, your feedback, your suggestions, your insight, your expertise. Thank you so much.

Jessica Hill Riggs: And thank you, Sarah and Lise. And thank you for sharing all of those links in the chat. I will definitely be looking at them later. And next up we have Judy Fisher. 

Judy Fisher: Cool. Can everyone hear me? So first I want to say, excuse me if I have some like cough or like weird thing. I'm recovering from COVID right now. But I'll just jump right in. So, [INTRODUCTION IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE]. Hello everyone, I'm [00:24:00] Judy Fisher, and I'm a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. My talk is called German Indianthusiasm and Settler Colonialism, German Perceptions of Indians, and this is based on my dissertation research, which is still really in the preliminary proposal stages, so definitely a work in progress.

So to begin, I'm going to talk a little bit about what is German Indian Enthusiasm. So, inidianertumelei is a yearning for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a supposed Indian essence, or for want of a better translation that captures the ironic ambiguities of the term, an Indian enthusiasm.

And this term was coined by Dr. Hartman Lutz when he was considering the connections between this phenomenon and anti Semitism in Germany. Arguing that these two are two sides of the same coin, both involving racism, dehumanization, and othering, although Indians are put on this pedestal and romanticized and Jewish [00:25:00] people have more negative connotations associated with them.

And this, this work is foundational for my dissertation project, where I hope to understand the connections between German Indian enthusiasm and German settler colonialism in Southwest Africa, what is now Namibia, With a focus on cultural tourist festivals, Wild West theme parks, and museums. So this picture on the right is kind of my first introduction to German Indian enthusiasm when I was taking a course in Berlin about underrepresented communities and histories.

And I came face to face with the statue of an Indian man wearing a headdress And at the same time, I was learning about the lack of discussion about German colonialism in broad German society. So even in the beginning stages of my project, I was trying to put these two histories of settler colonialism in conversation.

One of the central research questions of my dissertation is asking what are the implications of German [00:26:00] Indian enthusiasm on the lives of Germans, Native Americans, and Nama and Herero people who are the victims of German colonial violence in what is now Namibia. And I chose this picture to go along with this slide because I think it really represents some of the implications that I'm talking about.

So I took this picture in 2019 at the Carl May Festival on the route of Beale, Germany. Which is an annual festival to celebrate the legacy of Carl May, who was a German adventure novelist in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and his work really focused on the American Wild West, as well as the Orient and in this picture you can see you know, white German audience watching the performance of a Tsimshian man who is from the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States.

You can see families and you can see these two people in the front row who may be seen more as Indian hobbyists or as people who want to embody the role of the Indian. So [00:27:00] I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the implications of Indian enthusiasm and spaces like these cultural tourist festivals.

So first for Germans spaces like this festival allow them to critique U. S. settler colonialism and allow, align themselves with the victims of U. S. settler colonial violence without reflecting on their own histories of settler colonialism. Participating in these spaces also perpetuates and affirms stereotypes of American Indians although it allows educational opportunities and people, for people to interact with actual Native American people and learn about actual Native American history and issues. For Native Americans, some of the implications include opportunities for international travel, employment and performing at these kinds of places, it allows them to educate people about Native American issues and garner international support although they are still forced to work within particular scripts of Indian ness when they [00:28:00] themselves are not the people that are creating these spaces. 

And then finally for Nama and Herero people, who again were the victims of German Southern colonial violence they're completely absent in these physical spaces.

And that can be said about many victims of German violence with anti Semitism, anti Blackness these really carve out spaces for Germans to just critique U. S. settler colonialism, align themselves with Indians, and not reflect on their own history. And I'll end this presentation talking about future directions for my work, because in my dissertation so far, it's really been kind of a taken for granted assumption that these physical spaces where, Native Americans and Germans are interacting at these festivals, Wild West theme parks that these interactions have been going on for decades, and even the resulting artifacts like travel narratives or museum exhibitions and those kinds of things I've kind of taken for granted that those are the spaces where these, where the information and misinformation [00:29:00] about Indians is really taking root in Germany.

And I think it would be important to think more about the contemporary moment and the way that the internet has changed, allowed images of Indians to spread but also allowed the resistance of Native American people to reach far spaces. So I'm going to leave with this large quote from Dr. Renee Watchman, who is a Navajo and Cherokee scholar who has done a lot of work in German studies, and she says that scholars of German Indian enthusiasm need to engage in critical discourse about tribal fantasies, and why it is important that Native Americans are actively present in the constructions that are not limited to Europe, but can be found worldwide thanks to globalization and the World Wide Web. Yes, tribal fantasies say nothing about the indigenous experience. Nor of critical issues that contemporary natives face on a daily basis, but to leave the discussion of that simply reinforces and encourages the fantasies to flourish.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank [00:30:00] you. Judy.

And next we have Brienne Adams. Thank you so much, Judy.

Brienne Adams: Good morning, everyone.

Is it sharing? Oh, no. Okay. There we go. All righty. Good morning. Thank you all for coming with special thanks to the DISCO researchers, staff, and my fellow graduate student colleagues. And giving a special shout out and thank you to Dr. Catherine Knight Steele in the BCAT lab. This lightning talk will highlight my research on black [00:31:00] digital fandoms, specifically how and why black fans engage in their fandom practices. We can understand more about black popular culture and media through examining digital fandom communities and expressions on social media platforms. I titled this talk quote, We Needed This, unquote from Candace Benbow's thank you to Beyonce in the physical version of the hashtag Beyonce syllabus or lemonade syllabus, excuse me. 

My research explores Black fan responses from Black creative cultural productions that center romantic friend and familial relationships. I explore the Black lesbian web series Between Women, the Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, the television show Insecure, and the albums and visuals for Beyonce's Lemonade, Solange's a seat at the table and Jay Z's 444, Candace Benbow's We Needed This, necessitates the importance of examining how Black fans [00:32:00] process and encounter their fandom objects by first discussing the we or collective identity and the needed this of what can be described as an intimate space to process and ultimately archive the rollercoaster of emotions that relationships can express.

I research these emotions in digital spaces and their life implications for black fans and black digital practices. I study intimacy and the narratives of the cultural productions because we need to continue to theorize black relationships and how they survive and thrive. 

I came to this project with two central research questions.

One, how does, how do black fans grapple with the intimate aspects of their friendships, family and romantic lives through engaging with their fandom objects on social media? And two, how does social media provide a platform to build community through creating new discourse about the romantic and intimate lives of black people?

I claim that [00:33:00] the Beyonce or the lemonade syllabus and other black digital fandom practices can note affirmative transformative fandom that borrows from the fan studies definition of affirmative and transformative fandom. Affirmative fandom is I like this fan object, while transformative fandom takes the the fandom and turns it into something new, like cosplay or fan flick.

Due to black fans positionality, their fandom and at times their expression of anti fandom is an identity affirmative project where they are centering their own knowledge production. First, fans affirm the fandom object by liking it, but it also affirms an interior worldview. It is also transformative as black fans take it and do something different with it, i. e. the black, the lemonade syllabus, while also using these works to transform something within themselves and are revealing something about themselves. My research [00:34:00] is an intervention by which we can study how Black fans negotiate and challenge their hegemonic ideas about how they believe relationships should go, and or how they can grow and be different within them.

I demonstrate how fans use the digital to do so by using Black feminists realization of interiority, through Kevin Quashie, Joe Morgan, and Elizabeth Alexander, and Queer Feminist Theorization of Intimacy and Intimate Publics from Lauren Berlant. Digitally framing these intimate publics through Andre Brock's libidinal economy, specifically as Black digital fandom practices are centric to digital meaning making strategies and Jessica Marie Johnson's notion of Black people as always taking themselves up as their own subjects of study.

And I am invested in Black feminist ethics of care and methodology from Dr. Steele and how [INAUDIBLE] [00:35:00] approaches Black social media practices with sample signal and stroke to describe the cultural events and fandom responses.

Two of the aspects that I was really impressed with, with the DISCO network programming and conceptualization are the speculation and optimism, optimism portion of both the work being done about the injustices of the digital, but also the possibilities. One way I'm hoping to address this in my work is through thinking about black digital intimacies. Digital intimacies has been researched and institutionalized and internationally even and has been based on Berlant's notion of the public and public intimacy. And theorizing around black rocks, what do we gain from looking at the everyday as it isn't tethered to our consistent questions around institutions and systems. 

Essentially, my research hopes to answer what are we missing. As I revise this project into the book I will add other recent [00:36:00] cultural productions and their fandoms also want to think about this from a creator and fan standpoint, and in the future this project will evolve to pay special attention to social media and how it fosters a connection between digital creators and fans or cultural creators and fans. Because debates around representation and resonance continue, I am interested in what is gained and lost through social media and how we produce and consume popular culture.

Please stay tuned. Thank you and I look forward to the rest of the presentations and our conversation.

Jessica Hill Riggs: And next we have Cassidy Campbell.

Cassidy Campbell: Hello everyone.[00:37:00] 

Okay, hopefully everyone can see that so my talk today is titled. Oh, importing it into Google Drive changed up a little bit. My talk is titled The Black Digital Record and Sakia's Bounded Frame of Identity, and this is a very small section of a chapter within my dissertation where I'm playing around with some ideas. I'm not necessarily playing around, but I have more That might not necessarily make it into the chapter.

So I'm really interested to hear what folks have to say today.

Okay. On May 11, 2003, a straight [00:38:00] cisgender black man named Richard McCullough fatally stabbed Sakia Gunn, a 15 year old black lesbian, as she was returning home from an LGBTQ party or hangout spot in New York City with friends. Because she was a masculine presenting lesbian and young black girl, Sakia's death caused a considerable, considerable ripple in the black queer community. Unlike the colorblind democratizing tech utopian culture and rhetoric that was prevalent in the early 2000s which are also, you know, systemically encoded within the infrastructure of the internet itself as a mode of suppression, the personal blogs of several black LGBTQ figures tell a different story. Blogs provided general coverage on Black and non white LGBTQ life, culture, and news. And as it pertains to Sakia's death, Keith Boykin, a prominent activist and blogger, blogger shared his angry and crestfallen perspectives about the meaning of Sakia's death for [00:39:00] homophobic violence within the Black community, as well as the the lack of national media coverage.

His blog provided a community where other readers and other Black queer bloggers could publicly process and mourn.

So as you can see there, there's a little screenshot of his his blog his personal website. So that being said he created a virtual memorial on his website to produce a detailed report of Sakia's last moments in which I find that he does that to shoo any misgivings about the night of her death and highlight the glaring absence of police protection that should have prevented or intervened in the, in her final moments.

The pictures, in fact, serve to slow the viewer down and they invite the viewer to take stock of the activity in each picture to place themselves in Sakia's [00:40:00] shoes and to feel the gradual conclusion of her life. The purpose of the memorial was to create space for an online community to mourn and digest the reality of Sakia's home being the very place that harbored the conditions poised to end her life.

To click through the images is to perform the act of witnessing, where the mundane and the anticipation of death and violence would soon collide. The memorial and other strategies by which activists like Boykin were seeking to make Sakia's death and life meaningful, emphasize her identities as Black lesbian. Sorry, emphasize her identities as black, lesbian, and youth and their strategies for the most part worked and that these identities receive the most attention when the media did report on secure. In addition, the strategies also included focusing on her death. and its remembrance. And through her death, Sakia then became a symbol.

The distilling of Sakia's life into these discrete [00:41:00] identity categories suggests that the value of Black life can be calculated modes of expression and such, which are modes of expression that are privileged on the internet. Although activists were employing the strategies that they were familiar with to get justice for Sakia and protect other Black queer youth from her fate, asserting harm based on a category of identity to gain recognition in the national media landscape further objectifies Sakia.

Even as Sakia gets remembered later in the collective black queer memory in a multiplicity of gendered ways, the activism in the wake of her death sometimes flattened her life. It affected a historical production of Sakiya's narrative situated only in death, or violence, and the extension of gender possibility in her life.

And by that, I mean, there is a minimal focus on Sakia's gender presentation as a black masculine girl.[00:42:00] 

So my work seeks to reveal the effects of tech utopianism, which contributes to the progression of new racial and gender paradigms, and vice versa. In the early 2000s and its recursive relationship to political movements. The ethos of tech utopianism is not only embedded in code or the function of digital technology, but also is transcoded into the political aspirations of its users.

And thus, I show that these highly visible justice seeking projects, such as the virtual memorial that Boykin created in collaboration with other Black career bloggers, into a bounded frame of identity. In conversation with scholars such as C. Riley Snorton and Jen Harita Warren, I locate and call into question an essentialist identity politics, or bounded frame of identity, unfolded in, on, and offline activist discourses and visions of justice for Sakia.

Although both Boykin's memorial presented a more comprehensive view of Sakia than [00:43:00] local and alternative news media, the central focus of the conversations remained limited to her existence as Black, lesbian, and even girl. Her death became not an end, but a counterfeit opening. Death then became the only reliable way that the state recognized Black LGBTQ life as a category, assigned value, and recorded queer life. This approach is seductive, even for activists, and Boykin and others hoped that naming and repeating Sakia's name would bring visibility to the marginalized and awareness of the conditions that sanction their death and vulnerability. 

And I'm not saying that these conversations or actions aren't necessary.

I think they serve a very important purpose. However, what I am trying to highlight is that maybe there's a way in which more visibility reinforces structures and technologies of capture as the sole authorities on what or whose death and life counts. This outcome is a reproduction of the power [00:44:00] dynamics inherent in the historical representations of Black female life and the logics of code as well.

Sakia's visibility relies on the the quote, logic of white colonial patriarchal and capitalist functions, end quote. Meaning in order to gain recognition by the state, her identities as Black, girl, and lesbian must be appropriable and recognizable through the vector of death, mutilation, and violence.

When Black queer life becomes more visible for criminalization and management by the state, it maintains an inattentiveness to Black life and instead adds to the repertoire of capture. These aren't more ways to see Sakia, but more ways to qualify her death and ignore her existence. And something that I'm trying to work through in my own, as I revisit this work, is whether or not I'm fully convinced that this violence is reproduced through [00:45:00] the re because it's reproduced through the sort of logics of digitality, is it always necessarily complicit or a full on counter to that logic?

I am not convinced it's, it could be both, it could be neither but I think it's just important to, to investigate and so I'm open to I'm looking forward to feedback from others and I want to thank Lisa Nakamura the DISCO Network, my dissertation community, and my my dissertation committee, my community, and peers for their help in supporting me through writing this dissertation and doing the great work that we've been able to do in the DISCO Network.

Thank you.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank you so much, Cassidy. 

Lisa Nakamura: Yeah, so me and Catherine and Remi are going to give very brief responses and they're not going to be questions because there isn't really even time to ask questions. I think we'll do those but more responsive. I mean, these papers, to me, exemplify a new perspective that pushes [00:46:00] against received ideas about how marginalized people are living their lives.

How gaming, how social media, how black social movements are conceived as more nuanced and more complicated than has been previously thought. I think there's as Brienne put so well, what are we missing? This kind of research focuses exactly on that question. So going through in order, looking at the gameful approach to the circularity of disability accommodations, these kinds of games reproduce the frustration of recursive thinking, which goes exactly in a circle and proceeds nowhere. It gives the impression of movement. The way that new forms of digital power through platforms that, that manage accommodations while opening and closing possibilities in ways that are not visible to users. I love this presentation for the way it, It moves black and disability studies together, right?

The acknowledgement that black students [00:47:00] and disabled students and black students becoming disabled students through long COVID shows the intersectionality between race and disability in a way that's playable and experience-able. 

Judy Fisher's work really does an amazing job. I think with Indianthusiasm showing how identity tourism is made possible and attractive by the internet as a space for racial fantasy, it also a space for education.

So I'm really curious to think about how can we use that interest or obsession to get pedagogical energy in ways that are not about enacting your own fantasy. And I think U. S. settler colonialism is not the same thing as German settler colonialism. But there's clearly something going on around the infectiousness of U. S. formations about acquisition of identity, which seems so much worth watching. 

Brienne's presentation on social media as a platform for the romantic and emotional lives of Black people, to me, pushes against the moral panic against social media, which [00:48:00] I see, which really makes me angry because it seems that social media becomes a problem, especially when it becomes political.

So 2020, BLM, now social media is what's destroying our youth. When I think about the problems youth encounter, social media, especially youth of color, social media is not the biggest problem. It's clearly racism, it's clearly poverty, it's clearly long COVID, right? So it becomes a kind of red herring for why we need to look at the everyday in a different way, what is gained and lost.

Cassidy Campbell's presentation, which I feel I know well as, as, the person who has been reading her work throughout really does a counterintuitive move, which is to say that focus and attention, which are all visual metaphors for Black life. And you know, the idea that you can use social media to attend more to Black death is, is a little too fast as a movement, right?

It needs to be unpacked a little bit. Visibility is not always a commodity that can be leveraged for anti capitalist or anti racist purposes. It depends [00:49:00] entirely on who, how, and when. So I'm hoping this focus on blogs as well can continue. Catherine's groundbreaking work on blogs, I think, really needs to be look, you know, really needs to be centered because that was a moment in time where so much productivity, so much joy, so much interest in racialized communities was happening.

So I'll pass it on to Catherine. Thank you all presenters. Those were amazing. 

Catherine Knight Steele: Thanks, Lisa. This is fantastic. Such a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of this and to hear about your amazing work. And I, I'll say that the, the through thread for me with these presentations, all who are tackling different topics in very different ways, is this, there's two parts.

It's one, the need to recenter conversations or, or move from margins to center conversations that are historically pushed out of the middle for lots of very different reasons. And the other reason, the other kind of through thread I saw in these presentations was this notion of duality, complexity, and complicated narratives.

That there is not one simple or easy [00:50:00] solution or answer to so many of the challenges, questions, problems, and histories that we're wrestling with. And so in the first presentation, I love this notion of how gameplay allows us to simultaneously work through ideas of this cyclical problematic that continues to come up in our lives or to extricate ourselves from it, even for the moment of the game and to imagine this universe outside of it.

But that even in that gameplay, we find the challenges of folks who are trying to place themselves into the shoes of, or into the problematic of society. So we're going to talk a little bit about how we can create solutions for someone else's life and what that does for us as users of the game. What that does for folks who actually experience these things in real time and how we might complicate how gameplay can simultaneously help us work through some of these challenges, but also raise new concerns about our ability to empathize or to be a part of or to feel we empathize without actually creating solutions.

So I love this notion of gameplay that really creative mechanism that you're using for us to as researchers think through this, but also to offer a serious experience, [00:51:00] challenge for institutions to work through this collectively as well. 

Judy, I love this talk that really opened my eyes to something a student had brought up last week about this idea of Indianthusiasm in Germany.

Because again, I think what you're doing for us is drawing connections between places that we may have thought of as being disparate, antisemitism and Indianthusiasm and showing us how these things are actually working together, but showing us once again how social media technology can simultaneously be a place of reprieve, but also a place of violence for so many folks, how those things exist at the same time and how marginalized populations have and continually do the work of wrestling through that duality while encountering both in the same mechanism and the same social media experience in the same real experience.

As Lisa just pointed out, this can simultaneously be educational and an act of violence on communities. We don't actually have to name it as one or the other in order to have a Productive research project. It's actually in that messiness that it becomes much more interesting and much more truthful to our experience and how we how we [00:52:00] experience that in real time.

Brienne, you know, I love this project and I'm so enthusiastic about the next stages of it, particularly because what Brienne's doing in this project is refocusing our attention on spaces of love and affect in ways that I think are so important in this moment is refusing to allow the interworkings of black communal spaces to be relegated to notions of marginality and violence only right that our bodies experience all of these emotions, all of these ways of encountering the world.

And what's more that we do something with it, that world is not just happening to black folks, that black folks are happening to the world, and the way that we happen to the world we're actually making cognizant changes to the kind of material that's usually spoon fed to us or representations that we typically thought of as not being able to challenge and encounter.

So I love this, again, focus on the complexities of Blackness. You read more of Brienne's work, you'll see even more of that complexity in her writing about these different kinds of fandom communities, who again, we might [00:53:00] have a tendency to flatten into one grouping of a homogenous Black community who's experiencing fandom in one way, and Breanne is pointing us out. That no, in fact, we're experiencing this so differently. 

Cassidy, I love this notion of visual, visual memorial and how you're thinking through how visual culture is really so important for us to consider. Because so many people have pointed out how visual actually allows us to have more of a sense of what is true about people's identity and more of a sense of what the reality is of either violence that experience or love that's experienced or the fullness of our totality of what's experienced.

But I'm really interested in how we might take up or complicate this notion of visuality in our own work as researchers as well. You know that Lisa brought up this notion of blogging and writing in long form, which we're more focused on in academia. But I'm really interested in how you're complicating what's been a new move toward us making our work more visually accessible.

And this notion that that will intensify people's understanding of what we're producing. And you're complicating that for us and saying, no, let's wait, let's think through what it means to actually make that [00:54:00] kind of visuality accessible. Accessible and how that might actually cause more harm than good in many instances.

So I'm really grateful for getting the chance to respond and to be a part of this. Thank you for your work. I can't wait to see what you all do next.

Remi Yergeau: And this is Remi speaking. I will just begin by echoing Catherine and Lisa in terms of just how fundamentally amazing and important all of these projects are. And hearing each of you speak, it seemed like each one had a really distinct sort of key organizing term that also interwoven with everyone else's.

And so Cindy and Sarah, I've been just thinking about the way that gamification is signaling myriad things in the construction of the web text and how you're thinking through problematic notions of verification and surveillance and documentation. And then Judy, the way that reflection angles itself into how you're thinking through all of these contours of German and [00:55:00] Indianthusiasm, as well as settler colonialism, and the way in which misinformation also gets tacked onto this concerted lack of reflection and these differing levels of ultimately racism and also hierarchy that are finding themselves embedded in the exhibit like rhetoric that's being pursued.

And then Brienne, I've just been thinking really intently about what you were noting about transformation in particular, and what I so appreciated was your turn to the optimistic and the possible and the speculative in terms of thinking about black digital fandom. And more than this, I'm, I'm really thinking intentionally also about how you're engaging questions of interiority and intimacy and the ways in which these are also threaded through, I think in what other folks have shared here today and the possibilities that we've been taking. Your presentation is kind of a set of organizing questions that help us think through some of the injustices that are being narrated. 

And then Cassidy the way that you're thinking through identity [00:56:00] seems so deeply important and identification just kind of kept popping up as a through line here in terms of complicity and how it circulates throughout memorialization practices and also what you're noting, especially about flattening.

And I, I feel like it's I'm thinking about everybody's projects in tandem other themes here that emerge. So Cassidy flowing through from yours this question of legibility, how legibility intersects with complicity, how to, how does one become known, right, the ways in which Sakia's lesbianness, masculinity, right, are all deeply undersold or underplayed. 

But then also this question of provability so thinking, especially Judy, right, how you're thinking through rubrics of Indian ness and the ways in which then Native Americans get caught up in these cycles, like when you were mentioning the possibilities for jobs and hiring.

It also made me think to Cindy and Sarah, the join a committee, right, like how one becomes that sucked into these [00:57:00] never ending processes. So I'll pause here, but I just want to just utter my deep thanks to everyone. These were just so truly amazing and to see them in conversation. The threads are so distinct.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank you, everyone. And we're going to take a quick break and resume at 1115 for our second round of lightning talks. So we'll see you soon. Thank you everybody for this first exciting round of presentations.[00:58:00] [00:59:00] [01:00:00] [01:01:00] 

Lisa Nakamura: Hi everyone. This is Lisa Nakamura I realized I neglected to even say who I [01:02:00] was when we started this event and I'm sorry I'm at the University of Michigan and I teach in the American culture and digital studies unit so. We have our second half of presentations from these amazing scholars, and we are going to be hearing from Janelle Grant talking about dark surveillance at school, black high schoolers using social media to address racism. Austin Peale Across Time, Mobile Applications of Civil Rights Education, Parker Miles, Embodied Digital Literacy Practices Framework for a Dissertation, and Ariel Smith, Redefining What it Means to be Black Owned, with responses from Andre Brock, Rayvon Fouche, and Stephanie Dinkins.[01:03:00] 

Janelle Grant: All right. Is it my turn to go ahead and start just making sure? Yes. Perfect. All right. I will share my screen. It's not letting me share my, oh wait, here we go.

All right. Thank you. Good morning. It's still morning. My name is Janelle Grant. I'm a PhD candidate in curriculum studies at Purdue University, and I changed my title a little bit. I'm going to be talking about Black High Schoolers [01:04:00] Using Social Media and becoming activists. 

So my research goal. This is my dissertation work.

What I'll be talking about today is a proposed study. I'm doing a three article dissertation and this one didn't quite make it into the three articles, but I'm still really excited about it. So I thought this would be a good space to just throw some ideas around, but my overarching goal for my dissertation work is using Simone Brown's theoretical framework of dark surveillance from her book, Dark Matters.

To understand black student activism. So I'm working with around six black high schoolers from a high school and what they call or what they term as out there. It's, I guess it's very, a rural vibe but it's close to a college town too. And I really want to operationalize and understand how they're enacting dark surveillance.

I like how Simone Brown, Simone Brown breaks it down. So dark is the racialized black bodies and surveillance is kind of like the opposite of surveillance. So using those French prefixes. [01:05:00] So surveillance is, you know, from the top down and surveillance is watching from below. So what Brown is talking about there is specific to United, United States context.

Unfortunately, due to our status social status black students, black people are figuring out how to deal with white supremacy and figuring out ways to outmaneuver white supremacy by watching from below. So specifically for my proposed study, I would be looking at how black students outmaneuver white supremacy present within their high school.

So again, I would like to use dark surveillance as my grounding theory. And I was interested in using the method critical technocultural discourse analysis, because when I talked to the students, they talked about how they initially got together. By looking at social media posts that their peers, I'm sorry, I have a cat and she gets excited when I talk.

But they were looking at social media posts and they were seeing, you know, a lot of frankly, racist things being said about the black students in their [01:06:00] school. They, the six students that I work with, they have received Snapchats of other peers in blackface saying, you know, let's be black buddies.

So they kind of rallied around what is happening on social media. And then they saw that as like a precursor to what then happened after George Floyd and the response to Black Lives Matter. They said they felt like they saw it coming with based how their peers were acting on social media.

So I'm interested in analyzing their social media content from the six students that I'm working with. They have, they do a lot with, TikToks. They kind of like go through different TikToks from people from their school and they post informational videos or they'll post responses of like, you shouldn't say that. Here's why. And they do a lot of work on Instagram. And so I'm looking at that again, from a theoretical lens of dark surveillance, kind of operationalizing what they're doing there. And then I also want to understand the responses from the other black peers as well as white peers.[01:07:00] 

So I'm going to talk a little bit about some insights. Again, I haven't really analyzed the data. I have started collecting data and working with them. But I'll tell you a little bit about their school and about the six students that I'm working with. So they go to again, like I said, more of a rural type school and they, I work with five of them are seniors, one of them is a junior, and the senior is, or the seniors are talking about, you know, there's about 420 kids in our graduating class and they're like, and I can think of 15 other students. 

And so they're saying, you know, I, I know we're not friends with everyone, but I want them to feel like they can come to us. I want them to feel like there's a safe space to deal with what's happening on social media and then to be able to come to school and have a safe place to know that, you know, It's okay, there's other people who understand what they're going through. So they started a chapter of African American leaders of tomorrow at their school, and I've been going there, hang out with them before class, and [01:08:00] they're very much the six students the six core group, as they call themselves. They want to invite other black students to come. They're saying, you know, you don't have to be loud. You don't have to see yourself as an activist or an advocate. We just want you to be able to come here and feel like other people understand what you're going through.

So interestingly through the students use, so the six students use of social media, they've become seen as woke activists. And I have that in my book. Direct quotes, because that's what the students said that other white and black peers have called them. And that's not really what they called themselves.

They said they were more interested in just sticking up for each other, you know, their friend group. And they wanted the school to be a better environment for them. So even though they didn't initially call themselves that they said that they've taken to that role. And I was thinking from the CDTA reading, how does the tech hail people into being as users?

So I was thinking kind of like, you know, how it happens in real life versus what's, you know, you're doing on social media and how that [01:09:00] affects, you know, who you are in both spaces. So I see the Black students that I'm working with, the six of them, in direct conflict with appropriate or white uses of social media.

The black students use social media to confront white supremacy. So the dark surveillance component and show other black peers that they aren't alone. When I talk to them, they're very much like, it's not just all about resistance. They said that they love the protest side of it and they, they have, you know, again, taken to that, but it's more so about community for them.

They said it really started when the six of them were hanging out. And seeing all these posts about black peers and about themselves going through the school, and they wanted to create a space where they felt safe and they felt like other people were heard and knew what they were going through. So I think that it's also interesting to extend dark surveillance in that it's a group activity that it, it's hard to do dark surveillance if you don't have [01:10:00] some, some group knowledge about how to do it if you don't have a safe area to try out these things because I know they said they said at first, they would do TikToks kind of, you know, rebutting or really challenging what was being said. And they said that ended up not being safe for them at all.

You know, different teachers would see it and talk bad about them during school, call them again, something similar to woke activists, as they said. So they said they've tried to do different things. So I think that's an interesting component of dark surveillance too, is that group aspect and trying things out.

And now they have cause they're graduating their seniors. They have one junior who's kind of joined their core group as they call it. And they're passing that knowledge. Down to him. So I have really enjoyed my time with them. I know Ariel is here too. And she opened a space for us to talk to collect some more data yesterday.

And they're just a really great group of high school students. And I appreciate them letting me share their story and hear their story. [01:11:00] So that is all I have. Thank you. And I do want to bring attention to my references.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thanks, Janelle.. And next we have Austin.

Austin Peete: Hey, what's up everybody? Good morning. Hope you're having a lovely day. Just a sec.

Can you all see this?

Yes, looks good. So, yeah, I changed my title just a little bit, but today I'll be talking to you about my final project for the Masters of Human Computer Interaction program at Georgia Tech. And I'll be talking about mobile applications of American history [01:12:00] education, and specifically, I'll be talking about some events that happened on Georgia Tech's campus and they relate to a restaurant called the Picker Cafeteria.

So, going into this project the problem space that I entered focused on educating the Georgia Tech community about our campus relationship to Atlanta's civil rights history. And just to give a bit of background information. The restaurant I mentioned earlier, the Picker Cafeteria is located, it was, it was a site located on current day Georgia Tech's campus. So it was not a part of campus, but at some point throughout the events that I'm about to describe Georgia Tech bought this location and it is now integrated into its campus as a memorial site to commemorate commemorate the events. 

So, really, it all started around the time that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the day after it was passed, a group of [01:13:00] demonstrators that are part of the NAACP, they were all reverends, Lewis, Dunn, Willis, they all went to demonstrate and try to try to eat at the restaurant, racially integrated, but the restaurant owner, Lester Maddox, wasn't having it. They continue to come back, demonstrate, protest. They keep violently getting denied service. And over the course of a few attempts, what ends up happening is the, the events go to a Supreme Court case, comes back, Lester Maddox lets go of control of a cafeteria, sells it to Georgia Tech, and then goes on to host his own privates rights protests, and then become governor of Georgia for 40 years.

So. Throughout all of this, I was trying to figure out, okay, how do I tell this story? What are the foundations, theoretically, conceptually, and practically, applicably, within the space of a mobile phone? I was put on a team for this project through Georgia Tech's [01:14:00] Literature, Media, and Culture Department, and they already had a prototype in order that That was giving people information and background information on the historic events through text, through archival footage and video.

And then a big part of this application was that it utilizes augmented reality technologies to immerse community members within the events of the Picker cafeteria, the protests, all of that. So it was really interesting to step into that zone and start to figure out, okay, how do I craft a narrative that actually upholds some sort of integrity and also honors like the efforts, the bodies of these people that were involved.

So I'll say just as this claim, I didn't really focus on the augmented reality interfacing for this project. I focused more on things like, how do I scaffold that information and that knowledge with other forms of media. So like I said before, a couple of [01:15:00] footage, text, narration, all of that stuff. And so these are a few of the leading questions that I have throughout the process.

How are people currently engaging American history through mobile technologies and why how do orientations of time and media interface with black storytelling? And then what do mixed reality technologies offer to the dynamics of learning experiences? It's like, what is it off actually giving the people in that moment that.

Text doesn't or that video doesn't that photography doesn't. And I did a series of interviews. I sent out a survey. I had people, sorry. I had people who who tested the app for me go in and do a meaning map, which is essentially a mind map to a focus on details of a specific topic to know how much they associated with the space and what they knew about the history and some of the feedback that I got from people, it was, it was pretty engaging and made me think a lot and it was very critical in terms of like how I started to think about interfacing and all of these ways [01:16:00] across the narrative and interactive documentary.

So, some of the feedback I got was. Integrating a timeline overview rather than first compartmentalizing all of the information so that there was more of a flow pacing out information at each point of the story so that people could actually engage the narrative and not feel overwhelmed By the amount of text or just really the moment because it was a lot of emotional information as well and Someone even told me that after seeing the AR port since they had no interest in reading all of the information and the first version of the app that you see here was very text heavy so people were not into it at all.

And what I'll show you now. This video wasn't really working on the slides earlier, but this is a demo of my project. Let me know if you can hear the sound.

Okay, cool.[01:17:00] 

Thank you for visiting the Eagle Commons and protesting Picker. Please be sure to be mindful of your safety as you move throughout the space and please maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect and sensitivity. You are entering a space that commemorates aspects of Atlanta's history of activists and their fight to end segregation.

The following experience is based on true events guided by historical research. It contains descriptive audio and video from the civil rights era that might be triggering to some audiences. Your discretion is advised. So these are different panels that present different Highlight presents the activists.

Who are the activists that protested the illegal segregationist tactics of Lester Maddox. After the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, activists in Atlanta knew that they had to make [01:18:00] sure that the law was being upheld. And so on the evening of July 3rd, 1964 And there are different ways to present information in each of these.

Yeah.

There are different videos that are being narrated, photos. This is an example of augmented reality with some sound integration. And so you could actually walk around the memorial site and my team placed the restaurant, some of the people, some of these mobs into the virtual space that was, that the audience was engaged with along the way you also find hyperlinks to more information about specific people and events that happen throughout. And I did my best to actually connect the main storyline to branches of, of narratives throughout the entire thing. So going all the way from 1964 when this was all happening to present day where they've converted this site into the Eco Commons on Georgia Tech's [01:19:00] campus.

So yeah, this is, this is my presentation. This is my project. And I want to, there's so much more to it, but I want to say thanks to Andre. And thanks to Brandy who narrated that, all those sections. And if there are any questions, then yeah, save those for later. Thank you.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank you so much, Austin. And next we have Parker.

Parker Miles: Good morning, y'all. Just a second as I get clipped up. Can everybody see my screen okay?

Jessica Hill Riggs: Yes, it looks like it's loading. 

Parker Miles: Thanks. Good morning. I'm Parker. I'm a PhD. And I got to say what a privilege it is to share the screen with y'all this morning. I felt like I said, wow, out loud to myself like a dozen times already today. So I'm really grateful to be here. Today I'm going to [01:20:00] share really briefly a snapshot of the constructs I'm using in my to be proposed dissertation.

You may notice that this title is slightly different from the one in the program. As I worked on my proposal this semester, I experimented with the arguments I'll need to make, and there's been some movement there. In this lightning talk, I'll tell some of that story and what it means for data collection for me.

Okay, so boom. There are three constructs that undergird my inquiry into Black kids digital practices, digital dualism, third and maker spaces, and critical digital literacies. They're depicted here somewhat arbitrarily, so I'll just start at the top of the pyramid and work my way counterclockwise.

So I'm going to start by summarizing how each construct contributes to my argument, the first one, digital disrupting digital dualisms establishes the ontological stakes of the inquiry are proposing. I'll argue essentially that our online lives and our offline lives are mutually constitutive or overlapping or imbricated.

This argument was counter to traditional narratives and education research with. [01:21:00] A few exceptions tends to diminish the digital to merely the virtual, mistaking its immateriality for a non matter. While there's a lot, there's been a lot more recent research that explores the ways in which Black kids sociality is distributed across online and offline, networks how affinity groups and activism happens across online and offline networks, I'm still working to read across disciplines to map the ways in which scholars are theorizing this distribution of the self, including theories and figures like on life, life worlds, cyborg lish, networked publics, ditch entities, re embodiment, among others. I'll argue that this process or phenomena of imbrication takes place irrespective of Black kids penchant for curating their own online presence because institutional practices of datification and surveillance are only intensifying. After all, as Legacy Russell suggests, we're never not online.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Parker, I don't think your slides are advancing. 

Parker Miles: For real? Did y'all just see like a fade in kind of situation? Wow, [01:22:00] [INAUDIBLE]. Does that look better if I just show-

Jessica Hill Riggs: I don't see your screen at all now. 

Parker Miles: Okay, then let's do it this way. I have some transitions, they were cute. We don't need them.

Can you see anything now? 

Jessica Hill Riggs: It's taking time to load on my end. 

There we go. That's better. 

Parker Miles: Let me zoom in a little bit. Sorry about that y'all. 

Lisa Nakamura: Looks great! 

Parker Miles: Thank you.

My zoom just broke out for a second. So let me share my screen again. I'm so sorry about this y'all.

Can you see my slides? Okay.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Yes, we can see them. They're not in presenting presentation mode, but I think that's okay. 

Parker Miles: Yeah, we'll we'll just wing it. I'll say that's the second construct I'm using in the bottom left corner [01:23:00] of the pyramid maker spaces, third spaces. Youth are able to use these spaces use resources of their schools, but normally, sorry, well, now I'm flustered, hold on a sec, we'll do, youth are able to use the resources of their schools and other institutions can bring to bear, but in these third and maker spaces, they don't have the same restrictions that schools often impose during their traditional hours.

Contemporary research in afterschool and third spaces suggests that the para educational environment they provide has great potential for transformative education. They can be a space of safe enclosure for Black youth, where they can develop and enact practices of freedom. Within these spaces, quote, students begin to reconceive who they are and what they might be able to accomplish academically and beyond. The third construct I'm going to use in the bottom right is critical digital literacies. Or as, like, I like to think of them as world making literacies. Fundamentally, I take literacy not only to mean reading and writing skills, but a set of socially situated meaning making processes. Practices through which Black kids, like all of us, since make, create, and recreate ourselves and our identities. If you're engaging with discourses about what is [01:24:00] possible or not, decide how much of the world we want to change or how little. After so many radical and fugitive pedagogues who also [INAUDIBLE] Freire, I imagine these literacies are processes of being and of reading the world.

This of course includes developing a keen eye for anti Blackness as experienced interpersonally and as a blueprint for the structures that surround youth. Given the multiple modalities which Black kids engage with media, these literacies include things like data privacy, navigating myths and disinformation, and healthy social media habits.

However, they also include a reorientation towards digital technologies writ large, what they do, and for whose benefit. Fluid practitioners of critical digital literacies begin to ask, how can I use this tool differently? So we get to the crux of the argument cyborg literacies. I'll argue that when afforded the resources and support to engage freely, Black kids use digital technologies to practice cyborg literacies or embody processes of co creation, self determination, and refusal.

To me, these practices qualify as cyborg in two ways. The first pertains to the ways that, for many people who have [01:25:00] access, technology use has become sedimented and transparent. The smartphone, like the eyeglasses or the cane, can be understood as a prosthetic, through which we experience our distributed self.

I invoke Haraway's figure to describe the relationship between the body and technology, but also to invoke a certain fugitive orientation, a positioning against the logic of domination and abstraction that organize so much of contemporary life. This serves as a segue to another cyborg, George James Black cyborg, a rebel intellectual at the end of humanity equipped to unify, quote, against the divine, mechanical, and biological terror of the colonizer.

Through these fugitive digital literacies, these cyborg literacies, Black kids create opportunities for and predispositions toward freedom, Black joy, Black futurity, online and offline, that would otherwise be stifled by schooling or smothered by anti Blackness. I think it's the case that cyborg literacies offer an interdisciplinary approach to education, research, and practice that accounts for the vastness of Black youth technology practices, but and the omnipresence of the digital without succumbing to utopic techno determinism.[01:26:00] 

And that brings me to a pretty simple research question. I guess my, under the advisement of my mentor, I've limited myself to one research question for my dissertation. How do black kids practice cyber literacy in an afterschool maker space? There are a lot of sub questions that are helping me stay organized. and help guide my thinking right now. Questions about how, how youth conceptualize their technology, how they would characterize their own practices, how they imagine their futures, as well as a whole host of questions about maker spaces that I'll talk about on the next slide, which is, I guess, right now.

I I'm very- I'm only in the proposal stage. I'm still working to develop relationships and research sites that are due the kind of making that I'm interested in. So I want to continue those relationships and think more about what it means for a makerspace to be a site where my research takes place versus a construct that undergirds my argument.

Because I think really quickly I just lose any semblance of scope and [01:27:00] start asking questions. about practices and about the space itself and the affordances of it. I think those are important things for me to note, but if I want to collect data on them is a whole other thing. I need to keep reading post phenomenology in this, in re embodiment literature, as I think through the body and technology.

I'm not quite sure I have the range to invoke that theory in my dissertation, but I think right now I'm just trying to expose myself to it and figure out where there are good leverage points as far as where I can trim down my thinking. And last, I need to just make some calls about data collection.

It seems, I think it's one of the more daunting parts of my summer, I think, is going to be making some calls about what I'm actually going to be collecting data on, what specific analysis methods I'm going to use in order for me to like actually measure the sideboard ness, if you will, of these literacies.

So any feedback to that would really be appreciated. Thanks for bearing with me as I had some technical [01:28:00] difficulties.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank you so much, Parker. And next we have Ariel. 

Ariel Smith: Alright, hello everyone. So happy to be here. Let's see if I can get my screen shared right.

Can everyone see that just fine? Yes. Perfect. All right. So hello everyone. So excited to be here today and thank you for all of your presentations. It's amazing to learn from all of you. So my dissertation research is on the experiences of African Americans in the food truck [01:29:00] industry, but my research for DISCO actually evolved out of a question that Ray asked me about my research.

He wanted to know, what makes Black food trucks black and what makes black businesses black, and for about four and a half years, I never had a question or answer for that question. And we got an answer a couple of months ago. So we're actually working through this right now. And that is understanding black business through the concept of call and response.

So here's his fundamental question that Ray asked me, what makes black anything black. And so when I thought about it, when we think about black dance, when we think about the church, when we think about our music, particularly jazz there's a call and response nature to it. Everything that we do as black people, when you think about it, it's centered around call and response is very much [01:30:00] participatory, is not something that you just idly sit by.

You are engaging in it, whether it is the music, the dance, the church, whether it is food, even everything is centered around call and response. So I wanted to take that concept of call and response and apply it to business.

One, because I'm an entrepreneur and two, because that's where my research actually sits in. And then three, because we haven't taken the nature of call and response and have applied it more broadly. We've done it in religion. We've done it in dance. We've done it in music. We've even done it in literature, but we have not done it in the realm of business. And so that is where the work that we're doing with DISCO is going to sit within.

So why use call and response to identify what makes a black business black? Well, let's take, for example, the nature of Shea Moisture, which was [01:31:00] a black owned now become a black founded hair care company is usually created in response to inequity or the need or need that black people specifically experienced.

In the case with Shea Moisture, black women were going natural more and more, and they needed products that responded and took care of their hair. Black consumers actually carry out different expectations of Black business owners than non Black business owners. We have this expectation that they're going to be not just by the people, but of the people, and for the people, and about the people.

We don't necessarily have that expectation for other companies because, honestly, we kind of expect other companies to not do that. But when it comes to a black business, there is these heavier expectations that come with that black business of not just providing the product, but providing the product for the black community.

And then there's the way the actual support is generated. So black [01:32:00] business owners put out the call to support by identifying as black owned. And then that support comes as a response. So now we're seeing more and more the case to say buy black or to identify as a black owned business apps are now being created to help find and support black owned business.

I'm actually the creator and co founder of a new app that's on the way to do just that. My work with the Food Truck Scholar was all about answering the call to support more black food truck owners in that space. And it's kind of like a refrain. It said, Hey, I'm identifying as a black owned business. I have these needs. I have ways to address those needs that you have, but I need your support, whether it's financially or bringing more awareness to what we do.

And then finally, here's where things get a little complicated in the case of Shea Moisture. When a business is no longer black owned, there's, [01:33:00] where I will argue that the call is dropped and the response changes.

So let's take a look at some case studies where we studied that. 

So in this framework that I'm currently building out, I use three different case studies. The first one is Shade Moisture about how Shade Moisture was really successful. within the black community, especially among black women. But then when it shifted and it was no longer black owned and the ingredients started changing and it no longer started working for black hair, the call changed.

Why? Because the need that they originally had was no longer being met. We can take this same framework and take a look at honey pot, which is currently the one that's been trending on social media. And I will be using social media to delve into these topics is when Honey Pot started changing some of their ingredients recently.

Many people compared Honey Pot to Shea [01:34:00] Moisture when and that led the owner to get on and respond and say actually this is not the same situation. Let me try to explain to you what's happening with the company. Let me try to explain to you what's happening with the ingredients and how this actually makes it better.

But because people have been burned by Shea Moisture, it was still not really being trusted by a lot of people. And so now we see another call arise, which is the call to understand what the ingredients actually mean and what do they do. So I actually pulled the screenshots and for the sake of time, couldn't do it today, where there is a black woman chemist that entered into the conversation and said, hey, let me break down each of the ingredients within honey, but in honey pot, piece by piece so that you understand what these ingredients actually do. And that seemed to help the public a little bit more. 

And then finally, I look at my own entrepreneurial journey, which is heavily [01:35:00] dependent upon call and response. Every company that I've created has been in response to a call that I noticed, whether it was the need to highlight and support more black food truck owners, whether it's through the food truck scholar, whether it's through buy broccoli, where we're helping black owned CBD and cannabis businesses and so on and so forth.

It's all about call and response. So we're very much in the intro, the three phases of this, I'm building out the conceptual framework with it. So there's a lot of work to be done, but if you do want to follow some of the communities that I have built around call and response in some form of fashion, here are some of my brands.

Most people probably know me for the food truck scholar, but there are a couple of others as well. And I'm pretty sure I'm over time. So I apologize and I'm going to end right there.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Ariel. And now we're going to [01:36:00] move on to our co PI's response by Andre Brock, Rayvon Fouche, and Stephanie Dinkins.

Rayvon Fouche: Morning, everyone. I hope folks can hear me just fine. Great. I guess, I don't know what order we're going in. But I guess I'll, I think I'm jumping in to go first because I'm sure Andre and Stephanie will have more brilliant things to say and by the time you get through [01:37:00] there are great things, don't forget anything I said.

So again, I would like to thank everyone for being able to participate in this wonderful activity. I'm really excited to hear everyone's papers, all the work that they're doing and, you know, no worries, Parker. You can't imagine the technical difficulties I've been having this morning from, you know, my National Science Foundation computer and card locked me out where I have all my stuff.

So I've been living in partial world. So I'm glad that's not sorted, but I'm glad at least I was able to spend some time here talking with you all. One of the things that I heard throughout the series of papers, and of course I wish I could say that I'm not going to think through things that are circulating through my mind.

One of the things I heard through all the papers is I'm intrigued with the idea of narrative. [01:38:00] And I'm intrigued with the ideas in which how narrative works and the power of different narratives. Right. So, Janelle, I was fascinated with the idea of how you're looking at young black folks and how they're using social media to, in a sense, narrate their, their reality existence into, into life.

They're using it as a way to undermine the, the power and authority of an adversarial school system and racialized school system, which as part of the world, I know fairly well, to, to create a space. And I think what did you, you said a safe zone, right? And safe zone is a powerful word. You know, I've got a safe zone card on my, my, my office door, but, but I think it's an interesting thing to think about.

So what does it mean to have a digital space, a non, right, non material physical space that you inhabit that creates a safe place for you to experience and exchange and Participate and [01:39:00] community and identity making and I like the idea. You know, this kind of connects to some of the work that a lot of the folks in the chat from Andre to Lisa talking about the question of what does it mean to create a welcoming, vibrant digital space that's affirming that Is all your own innocence.

It allows you to create the space and experience that I think this is what I think connects from my in my mind like Ariel, Parker, and Austin. It's all this question about what does it mean to create an affirming space of blackness. And I'm intrigued with this idea. Right. 

So, moving on to Austin's work about this mobile interactive documentary right. I love the idea of having your documentary experience of black of black life in your hand. It's public yet private, right? So you're able to walk through these very different [01:40:00] spaces with your airpods on or some mobile device and narrate it. And part of what I like about it's like you're narrating this experience and at multiple different levels from the augmented reality to actually putting someone in that physical space.

So I love the idea of taking these new tools and figuring out new ways to narrate the past. And, and right, as a person who does historical work, sometimes the past gets stale. And Austin, you're saying, well, okay, let's, let's make the past less stale and more relevant and more interactive and more immersive.

And I think that's the, the future of really interesting historical work. So I'm excited about the potentiality of that. 

And then Parker pulling out this whole kind of narrative of cyborg literacies. You know, I love the cyborg narrative about what that means. And I'm interested to see how this works can move forward [01:41:00] and develop. Right. So right. What? What? What merit is are you going to see out of this experience? How does how do we narrate black technological experience in a new way? Right. Often the narration of black technological experience is always looking in the past. This is how this technology used to work, but right.

You're trying to move that in different way. And I think this is the most stuff I love about Stephanie's work. It's like, how do we think about the future of black technological experience? That's not so embedded in it. Problematic narratives of the past. So, I mean, and opening up the kind of discussion to the understanding of the ideas about cyborg literacies as, as bringing together a, a way of narrating a a cyborg experience is, is really amazing and awesome.

And then finally, I think, you know, I, I've talked to Ariel about this and part of the piece that Ariel didn't speak about is about the question about how does call and response and function [01:42:00] in a digital world? How do we maintain these in a sense, traditionally embodied experience, right, you know, talking about dance singing other ways, which this call and response has happened in a very visual first person way. And so how do we understand those evolving call and response in a black entrepreneur space back in the world and digital space? So I'll leave it at that. I've got plenty of questions for everyone, but you know, I don't want to talk the time. So just really amazed and excited about the work.

So I'll pass the mic to whoever would like to jump in. 

Stephanie Dinkins: I'm going to jump in so I don't have the burden of cleanup. Right. We're gonna let Andre be, you know, cleanup slugger on the other end. You know, yeah, I'm going to thank each of you for your wonderful presentations. I'm really engaged and I'm going to jump on this idea that Ray is talking about right the idea of narrative that I do think runs through all of the [01:43:00] presentations.

And the other thing that comes to mind for me is these ideas of care. Or creating spaces of care for ourselves within digital space that might become something that's emanating from me I'm like super interested in how we start to posit spaces that are, you know, hours that hold us as opposed to surveil us, and that maybe we are right looking up through and using to do what we need to do, as Janelle was talking about. 

One of the things that comes to mind for me is that a lot of what I've heard, I feel like these are things that black folks have always done right that running around that running through that surfacing using whatever technology is both available to us readily and not at all right, like whether we have to take it mold it to what we need and then use it, or it's given and then we morph it to what we need it to do that is, is, you know, from my point of [01:44:00] view, that's, that's how we often act in the world and a real strength to kind of build on there.

Let's see if I can do a little like on, on on point for each of you. So, you know, I, I was really taken by this idea of the group activity toward a safe space right and interested in the fluidity of that like where the kids are trying to find a way but leaving it fluid and doing what they need to do to make that space and understanding that's the space.

I always worry a little bit about the rarity of the folks doing that and what that is like, who gets as who's the woke person, who's not and how, you know, we get others on board with trying to use those maneuvers and not just labeling something as, as a kind of trope. Right. 

Austin really love the, the, the way that you are connecting landscape to history. Right. Like you're allowing us to go out and really have that one on one experience with what is or may no longer be there [01:45:00] and kind of embody and envision that. I think a lot for you when you were talking, I was thinking a lot about what the experience is versus what the learning is, right? And I was, I was kind of like imagining and I loved your picture with the folks looking at the things.

Like folks, wandering around looking at this AR thing and wondering what that experience is and how you make it an embodied experience. That's more than the then holding the apparatus and seeing it right and and having the time to reflect on it and all that. But I really am loving the idea of using the XR technologies and making it dynamic, and I would argue or advocate for not only an intellectual experience, but also an embodied felt experience, like connecting that emotion, really and it looks, it looks really nice as well, austin. 

Parker yeah, with you, I was really thinking about where you thinking about the [01:46:00] ideas of self creation and refusal that folks are doing with, with the technologies and the makerspace.

Like, I love this idea of the makerspace as that space you get to be whatever it is you want and have the technologies or the things that you need available to you to recreate yourself or at least find yourself through those technologies, especially when we're often folks who are told, well, these technologies aren't for you, right?

And the idea of the fugitive and I wonder where the line between the kind of idea of fugitivity and the idea of institutionality come in right because maker spaces are usually spaces that are funded by something inside some other thing, sometimes in ways that are wonderful like I love the public library in Ann Arbor just because, you know, you go in there, there's DJ stuff, there's all this stuff that you can just take out and then find yourself through. And that's just a question that came up from me, like, where, how that works [01:47:00] and what's the difference between working in a space that is, I'm going to say, quote unquote, rented versus working in a space that is created by one's own folks in a certain way.

And then, Ariel, I think that you were where I came to the idea of care and this, this thought of care by the people for the people and about the people to me was really present, right? And, and I was wondering if you're going to get to the complicated question, and I'm so happy that you did.

This thing of like, well, okay, what happens when a founder has something then sells it and then it becomes something else. And how do you deal with that. And for you the question or the thing that comes to mind for me, my cat likes attention to I don't remember who said that before, is, is this idea of what the goals are.

Right? Like, so when we're doing these call and response, what makes something Black? And, and for me, that, that question, like, what makes something Black, becomes a big one, because the idea of what our goals are and [01:48:00] where they emanated from, and how we carry them out, become a really big question for me.

Right? Is, is that a question of community? Is it a question of wealth? Is it a question of both of those things? Or all of those things? And that's about all I, I have. I hope that was somewhat clear. For you all, and I will pass it on to Andre. Andre, please. 

Andre Brock: That's not fair. Why I gotta go after the two of them?

Y'all hear me good? Y'all good? So this was a great panel to be asked to respond to, in part because I felt super seen by all four of these presentations. And even if the students that I nominated as graduate scholars didn't cite me directly I'm, I'm teasing Parker and Austin, really, I'm teasing.

And I feel, I feel that because of conversations that I've had with my co PIs. And and I haven't, because I've not yet had the chance to deal with her and that I always want people [01:49:00] to pay, researchers to pay more attention to what the technology is and does to mediate the forms of cultural slash personal slash political expression.

And I still don't feel like we're at a place where we're seeing that. And in these four presentations, I'm seeing really promising signs that they're headed in that direction in a way that I find super exciting. Right. And so. The thing I want to focus on is literacies both the idea of literacy in terms of digital expertise, but also in terms of technique, right?

And so I see that, that thread linking all four of the presentations, where each one of you is talking about how these individuals and collectives, because I'm not going to call them a community because I'm mindful of Ray's question, right? How do you know something's black, right? They're a collective of folk who have decided to come together but thanks to a shared set of experiences and want to either enact or articulate those experiences in digital spaces and that's really fascinating to me, both in terms of my own research but also in terms [01:50:00] of what I see as necessary -look another cat- as necessary to make this field move forward.

So for Janelle, I really appreciate the ways that you're looking at TikTok and Wait, my notes, my notes. It's TikTok and something. My bad, Janelle. I forgot just that quick. I don't have a brain, right? Instagram, right? Right to understand why these technologies can and cannot do enough to serve the purposes of the students But using that frame of Dark surveillance is really interesting and important to me because it helps me to think through the ways people are much more explicit while articulating the ways that they feel is key as opposed to express themselves.

For Austin, I love that you are bringing design into this conversation. And your project stands out to me in that part but I also know a lot more about the shared history about the history that you had with this project because you're both my students. And so correct me if I'm wrong, Austin, but you were the only black folk on this project. [01:51:00] Right. And so, and so I, while I was watching your walkthrough of the app, I was really mindful of the idea that the instantiation of the technology as a way to tell a narrative does not yet do enough to interrogate why it was important for white folk at Georgia Tech to think that this was something to do.

Does that make sense? Right. What is the, what the app does and does not do? The app provides illustration of the possibilities that may have happened around a particular site and the people who were involved. As you and I have talked about, it doesn't necessarily allow us to interrogate what the university's role was in doing this type of work and what they hope to gain from it in life.

Right. It's virtue signaling is all well and good, but when you ask black folk to participate exercises that are designed to revisit sites of trauma there's something needs that needs to be said about those experiences that happen, right? And yet your design sensibilities enabled us to see elegantly what happened on those sites and introduce possibilities of thinking through what it means to have a [01:52:00] Black woman narrate this, what it means to have a Black man build this app.

Parker, although you hurt my head with post phenomenology, right, I love the idea of cyborg literacy, right in part because my original Ph. D. was supposed to be in language literacy and composition, right, and so the idea that Black students taking on technologies that are integrated with their offline lives in order to access the institution we know as education, right, is a fascinating enterprise, right, because as of yet those, I wouldn't, I don't want to call them ad hoc because that's not the right word, right, but those informal modes of learning are not clearly understood by educators and or internet researchers, right, so I see the potential of your work to do this being set up to get folk to understand that.

From a Freire-ian model these students are doing the work of incur of taking on technology to enhance their own learning, right? Which is I think, if I'm getting it right, right? What you're where you're headed with this project and I'm really excited to see how that happens.[01:53:00] 

Ariel, because Ariel and I have been fighting about this pronunciation forever.

I just want to say your curls are poppin And my ears perked up, as I'm pretty sure you knew they would when you started talking about call and response, right? Because one of the things that you mentioned, and I think is also present in the previous three presentations, is what happens when call and response fails?

Right. And that's super important to me because we often talk about the constituent properties of Blackness, but we don't talk about how we repair Blackness when those constituents, when we're, when those are trying to bring things together fall apart. Right. And so I'm very much familiar with the Shea Moisture saga in part because I've supposed to have been writing on hair care stuff.

Black natural hair blogs, I love that you point out an additional layer of techne to simply the social media constituency of a particular brand where actual chemists right or people who who want to do this shit are fun, right bring [01:54:00] that quality of validity and community recognition and to the discussions of what it means to be black.

Like, when's the last time you had a chemical discussion of what blackness means? How long has it been since we talked about co washing and propyl and sodium benzoates as things which are inimical to black experience slash hair, right? And so you're probably bringing those elements in to talk about what blackness is constituted as and reconstituted as in an environment that is separate from embodiment and deeply concerned with it is really fascinating to me. So all four of these talks were great. I hear echoes of black vernacular, technical technical I always forget the last part, Ray, my bad, but it's super important because I understand the vernacular is being deeply relevant to all four projects.

Stephanie, your future history, to me, make a lot of sense in the ways that these projects are situating themselves in the digital to look forward, not quite as St. Kupferberg, but to look forward and understand what blackness can be done, can do, and can be done with in terms of digital technologies. So thank all [01:55:00] four of you, plus my co respondents.

This was an awesome panel.

Oh, and feel free to reach out if y'all have questions, especially Parker and Austin, because you can cite me. I'm totally, I'm joking. I swear I'm joking.

Jessica Hill Riggs: Thank you, everyone. And so we're at time for our event. But we will be coming back together as a group at 1 p. m. for a super panel on the futures of race, gender, disability and technology with all of our co PIs. And I just dropped the registration link in the chat if you are able to join us. And thank you to our DISCO graduate scholars for all of their amazing comments and research and insights.

I am so impressed.[01:56:00] 

I feel like for those who may want to stay on, please feel free to stay on. But if you have to leave, please leave.