Previous Co(lab)s
est. 2021
Discover the BCaT Lab’s past collaborations, research initiatives, and creative projects. From interdisciplinary partnerships to community-engaged scholarship, our work brings together researchers, artists, and community members to critically examine the intersections of race, technology, culture, and society. Explore how our previous initiatives have fostered collaboration, advanced Black feminist inquiry, and imagined new possibilities for more equitable technological futures.
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By Catherine Knight Steele (UMD) and Alisa Hardy (UMD)
Authors interrogate how Black networks online potentially produce a rhetorical commons and whether the theory and practice of ‘the commons’ adequately make space for the particular historical reality of Black America. To do so, we turn our attention to three social media platforms wherein Black digital praxis meets the possibility of the commons: TikTok, Twitter, and Black Planet considering the affordances of these digital platforms, Black digital praxes, and rhetorical traditions. We argue that contending with a long history of commodification, theft, and misuse on and offline fundamentally changes the utility of a potential Black digital commons.
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By Catherine Knight Steele (UMD) and Alex Thomas (UMD)
The authors conduct a critical technocultural discourse analysis of TikTok content creators whose work blurs the lines between appropriation, cosplay, and drag arguing that the affordances of the app make this blurring both possible and profitable.
