Social Media Strategies for Addressing Racism and Sexism - a talk by Lisa Nakamura
American Culture and Digital Studies Professor Lisa Nakamura will be speaking at the Meaningful Play Conference in East Lansing, Michigan.
Reception at 6:00, followed by talk at 6:30.
Abstract: Racism and sexism flourish online, licensed in part by a post-feminist and post-racial dynamic that allows this discourse to present itself under cover of humor. This is especially true of video game culture. However, social media platforms such as Tumblr.com, a site that is particularly popular with women, have been successfully deployed to bring awareness to this problem by publicizing egregious examples of sexist and racist harassment suffered by contributors. The popularity of sites like Fatuglyorslutty.tumblr.com and StraightWhiteBoysTexting.tumblr.com force us to consider how we must balance privacy and accountability in a pseudonymous social media ecosystem.
Bio: Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Cultures and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press: winner of the Asian American Studies Association 2010 book award in cultural studies), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, 2011). She is writing a monograph on social inequality in digital media history and culture entitled Workers Without Bodies: Race, Gender, and Digital Labor. She is a co-facilitator for FemTechNet, an experiment in open feminist education (femtechnet.newschool.edu).
