EVENT DETAILS

Leveraging Twitter in African diasporic communities: two talks by Professor Anna Everett

11am - 1pm     | Seminar "Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs" - HG 3341 RSVP (lunch will be provided)
4:30 - 6:30pm  | "Hashtag activism in the African diaspora: the revolution will be tweeted out” - HG1030 RSVP



Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective this October for our inaugural event featuring Professor Anna Everett who will present a multimedia talk on how African diasporic communities persistently leverage Twitter to challenge endemic racial biases and disparities affecting black peoples in America and across the globe. What is the existential power and the limitations of Black Twitter specifically, and hashtag activism more broadly?

With the advent of revolutionary social media technologies, and the ubiquity of smart phone videos, Twitter has become a powerful digital panopticon in the hands of tech savvy black Millennials and their 21st century global communities of practice (#BringBackOurGirls, #BlackLivesMatter, #JusticeforTrayvon). In this way black digital natives on black Twitter turn Gil Scott-Heron's maxim on its head by uploading videotaped acts of racial oppression and aggression, thereby ensuring, the revolution will be live-tweeted.

Anna Everett is a professor of film, television and new media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide, and Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. She is finishing a new book on President Obama, social media culture and the "Where U @ Generation."

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work.

Free and open to the public. For more information visit www.cvgc-uci.edu. 

Event made possible by a grant from the Humanities Commons and co-sponsored by the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI.