Talks with Anna Everett
Department: Culture and Theory
Date and Time: October 27, 2015 | 11:00 AM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 3341 and 1030
Event Details
Seminar
"Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs"
11:00am - 1:00pm
HG 3341
Lecture
"Hashtag Activism in the African Diaspora: The Revolution Will Be Tweeted Out"
4:30pm - 6:30pm
HG 1030
Professor Anna Everett 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.