Communication 431 - The Intersectional Internet

This course explores the intersectional impacts of race and gender on digital media, and, in turn, how digital media impact contemporary race and gender identities, politics, and formations in an increasingly global and networked society. What, we ask, do race and gender as well as sexuality and class mean within digital media spaces? How do histories of racism and sexism shape and inform new patterns of online hate and violence? How do digital media enable profoundly raced and gendered practices of surveillance, silence, and exploitation, and, in turn, how do they provide opportunities for women, queers, and communities of color to trouble these practices and patterns? Centering intersectional approaches to digital media studies that emphasize critical race, feminist, and queer-of-color critiques, the course invites students to engage with their own digital selves and experiences to understand how networked affordances configure digital identities, spaces, and politics, and how raced and gendered differences shape social networking sites, gaming communities, mobile applications, and other emerging media. Course readings focus primarily on racial and gender formations in a US context, introducing ways that race has shaped aspects of our digital world?from the infrastructures and policies that support technological development, to algorithms and the collection of data, to the interfaces that shape engagement. The course also highlights scholarship on how communities of color have deployed new media in ways that expand the public sphere, contest the status quo, and give voice to their creativity, passion, and desires. Imagining a digital future free from racism, misogyny, hate, and exploitation, the course invites students to offer thoughtful and carefully researched critiques of the ways that digital media help or hinder us in crafting and presenting our identities, how they enable or weaken our access to and participation within public spheres, and how they empower or disempower us to create and effect antiracist and feminist social change.