Events

Upcoming visiting scholars

André Brock, University of Iowa
Public talk: "The new ‘stop snitchin’: Sexism, technoculture, and Twitter: Twitter as a medium and catalyst for evocations of technoculturally oriented sexism and racism"
Thursday, April 25, 4:00pm
2080 Grainger

In March, developer Adria Richards published a photo to her Twitter feed, showing two white males seated in proximity to her at PyCon, a programmers conference. She captioned the photo “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me.” Over the next few days, one of the men was fired by his employer—as was Richards by her own employer. Much of the blame for the incident was attributed to Richard’s use of Twitter to ‘publicly shame’ the men, and Twitter in turn served as warrants for denunciations of Richards character, the deliverer of her termination notice, and a facilitator of uncivil discourse towards Richards based on her race and gender.

In previous work, I argued that Twitter serves as a cultural conversation, both forming and encapsulating the worldview of its users. While it is tempting to assume that the incivility towards Richards is symptomatic of only a small, deviant minority of Twitter users, I instead argue that Whiteness, technoculture, and masculinity serve as a baseline for this Twitter discourse, as do beliefs about Twitter-as-a-medium. To support this argument, I present a pilot Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis of several hundred tweets addressed to Richards three days after the incident. Preliminary findings indicate that the interactants describe ‘appropriate’ use of Twitter based upon articulations of male privilege, technocultural ideologies of ‘appropriate’ women’s conduct in male-dominated tech spaces, the normalization of sex terms as technocultural discourse, and as an enabler of hate speech.

Past visiting scholars

Spring 2013:

Patricia Loughran, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, English, "Provincializing Print Capitalism: The History of the Book and the Problem of Empire"

Lisa Gitelman, New York University, English and Media, Culture, and Communication, ""Amateurs and their Discontents, 1870-2000"

Spring 2012:

Rachael Z. DeLue, Princeton University, Art and Archeology, "Arthur Dove's Meteorology"

Peter Godfrey-Smith, City University of New York, Philosophy, "In the Beginning there was Information?"
Jake Kosek, University of California, Berkeley, Geography

Spring 2011:

Jacques Rancière, University of Paris VIII, Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics
Kathryn Sparling, Carlton College, Asian Languages and Literatures
Ara Wilson, Duke University, Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology, "NGOs as Erotic Sites"