André Brock, Jr. - School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with André Brock, Jr., who teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. His scholarly work includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, Black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter in his book Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020). His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.