Locating social media in Black digital studies

Sobande, Francesca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4788-4099 2022. Locating social media in Black digital studies. Devan, Rosen, ed. The Social Media Debate: Unpacking the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Effects of Social Media, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 137-151.

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Abstract

Experiences of social media are often associated with an ability to transcend geo-cultural borders to connect and communicate with people in different parts of the world. However, social media encounters are shaped by various complex geographies, including Black geographies. Black digital studies and Black geographies work illuminates the (dis)located nature of Black people’s experiences, such as how the histories of places, politics, and violence affect the daily lives of Black people. Engaging with such work is essential to critically understanding and locating social media, including in ways that eschew harmful attempts to quantify, and instead turn to approaches such as those articulated by critical geographer, cultural worker, and practitioner-scholar Naya Jones (2019, p. 1079), who poignantly writes about how “[e]mbodied or somatic inquiry has become integral to my methodology and epistemology as a geographer, with close attention to how testifiers and I mutually feel, sense, and intuit”. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the burgeoning nature of Black digital studies in Britain, to consider how such scholarship meaningfully locates and unsettles social media, and examines how social media is, at once, both bordered and borderless. This chapter highlights the importance of work that deals with regional, national, and transnational dimensions of Black people’s digital and scholarly experiences. Highlighting the research of PhD and early career researchers, this work outlines how Black digital studies in Britain have been developing in ways distinctly affected by this specific geo-cultural context, as well as Black digital diasporic dynamics (e.g., discourse and delight between Black people in the US and Britain). In turn, this chapter contributes to ongoing work that explores and establishes the wide range of ways that Black digital studies are being undertaken with an attentiveness to the specifics of geo-cultural and sociopolitical contexts.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9780367767518
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 April 2022
Last Modified:	18 Aug 2023 01:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/148912

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