Research Initiative
Preserving, Mapping, and Describing The Black Web
So'Phelia Morrow
So’Phelia is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. Her research broadly concerns exploring the relationship between social conditions and Black women’s health. Specifically, exploring the relationship between wealth (debt) and Black women’s mental and physical health. Her research also focuses on the cultural explanations of intra-racial violence against Black women as they relate to Black women’s resiliency.
Project Description:
Using the shooting of rapper Megan Thee Stallion as a case study, I employ Critical Discourse Studies/Analysis as a methodological framework to explore how racial loyalty and Black women’s resiliency are mediated and negotiated among Black Twitter. I critically examine the ways in which racial loyalty and resiliency shape the IPV discourse, contributing to the violence Black women experience.
Zari A. Taylor
Zari Taylor is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the department of Communication studying cultural studies and media studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, digital technology, beauty, and popular culture. Her academic research has been published in Social Media + Society and Information, Communication & Society. Zari will be a 2024-2026 Provost Postdoctoral fellow at New York University and is affiliated with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) and the TikTok Cultures Research Network (TCRN).
Project Description:
This project examines how #blackgirltiktok functions as an online community built around a racial and gendered identity by Black women and girls on Tik Tok. This community is constructed through racialized hashtags that can be used to sort and search content on the platform. I am currently working on two co-authored papers that explore this topic. The first explores how the inclusion of “girl” in the hashtag is not indicative of age, but an inter-generational community of black women and girls. The second offers #blackgirlpilates as a case study wherein racial qualifiers operate to additionally filter content on niche topics such as Pilates for Black women to be visible within the TikTok search engine that centers content by white women. Future research includes ethnographic work with Black women on their ideas about racialized hashtags for visibility and community building on social media.
Sakyra Abbitt
Sakyra Abbitt holds a Bachelor’s degree in Media Studies and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Media, Culture, and Technology at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on archiving instances of Black Technoculture and how Black folk utilize media to create community and discourse centered around Black joy. In her work, she explores Black spaces on the internet such as #BlackBookTok as well as Black-owned streaming platforms and the affordances they offer Black audiences. When Sakyra is not studying, Sakyra can be found doing yoga, watching anime, or enjoying a good book!
Project Description:
#BlackBookTok : Made by Black Readers for Black Readers
My project investigates the need for the preservation and collection of examples of affective labor by Black women within digital spaces and how this labor ultimately translates into ‘counter narrative’ spaces as a means for making Black culture visible within digital niche spaces. I focus on #BlackBookTok, as it became a space for Black readers to congregate and engage in numerous practices of literary analysis that focus on Black storytelling. I combine the literature of Black literary studies, Black feminist studies, and Black media studies to understand the way in which Black women are creating and participating within these types of spaces.
Jennifer Otionno
Jennifer Otiono is a Ph.D. student in Information Science broadly interested in Human-AI Interaction. She is a member of the Citizen’s and Technology (CAT)🐾 Lab, where she’s advised by J. Nathan Matias. She graduated with a BA in Biological Sciences from Wellesley College. Four years in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Wellesley College, first as a Student Researcher(2017) and then as a Research Fellow(2018) advised by Orit Shaer, bore a design practice grounded in collaboration, multidisciplinary perspectives, and the iterative design process in the creation of novel user interfaces. Currently, she is pursuing new skills in HCI Research & Design, Data Science, and Software Engineering. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and raised in Boston, MA. In her spare time, she metalsmiths jewelry, travels, and writes (blogging, poetry, and a speculative fiction novella). Her work has been supported by the National GEM Consortium and the Mellon Foundation.
Project Description:
This project examines how black queer online individuals construct their goals for identity management on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.; how they achieve those goals through platform features and tools and what might interfere with them (for example, algorithmic interference of social media feeds). My contribution is to characterize the motivations and needs of black queer people and draw attention to the need to further analyze how self-representation arises from platform affordances, particularly as it impacts historically-vulnerable people online.
Sinnamon Love
Sinnamon Love is a visual artist, writer, community organizer, Black Feminist Pornographer, and Executive Director of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Collective, an organization providing financial assistance and increased access to mental health and wellness resources to Black and Brown sex workers in the legal and criminalized sex trades. For 30 years, Sinnamon has used her lived experiences to create media that shift narratives around sex work, BDSM, disability, and motherhood.
Project Description:
The Sinnamon Love Erotic Archives is a multimedia project exploring Black pleasure, sexuality, and Ethical Non-Monogamy. The project is producing a self-curated digital archive of photographs, videos, interviews, social media posts, blogs, and other self-produced media. This project will serve as a memoir site designed specifically for the purpose of theory building through the exploration of ethical non-monogamy as a tool for Black women’s growth, healing, and liberation.
Ashleigh Wade
Ashleigh Greene Wade is Assistant Professor Media Studies and African American Studies. Broadly speaking, her work traverses the fields of Black girlhood studies, digital and visual media studies, Black Feminist theory, and digital humanities. Wade has a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and is an alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Fellowship Program. Her work on digital Blackness appears in The Black Scholar, National Political Science Review, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Visual Arts Research, and Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Wade’s monograph, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press), explores the role of Black girls’ digital practices in documenting and preserving everyday Black life.
Project Description:
Through archiving videos from social media, this project considers what young Black girls’(under 10) content reveals about generational shifts in parenting practices among Black Americans and what the digital brings to bear on contemporary Black parenting styles. This project builds on scholarship about the impact of social media on children’s development through intersectional analysis of Black parent-child social media content.