Digital studies scholars, building on Catherine Squires's (2002) work, have rightly noted that the verbiage of counterpublic does not adequately explain the complexity of spaces where marginalized groups gather to hide discourse from the dominant group. For example, scholars have written about the Black blogosphere (Steele, 2018) and Black Twitter (Brock, 2012; Florini, 2019; Kuo, 2016), at times taking on the characteristics of enclaves and satellite communities, using high context conversations or signifying practices to shelter organizing from hostile members of the public. However, in many fields, researchers have been beholden to methods of analysis that rely on publicly available text from which to make sense of how activists, friend groups, and communities build group cohesion or move smaller publics into action. In this project, I move beyond the linguistic maneuvers of Black users to explore their manipulation of medium affordances, highlighting three cases of the praxis of the shadow work of digital praxis. These include group chats, platform switching and paywalling content, leaving social media. Finally, I discuss the implications of a disappearing record of black digital organizing strategies both as archival amnesty (Sutherland, 2017) and as an intentional, strategic action by Black organizers.
Website: catherineknightsteele.com
Twitter: @steelecat717
Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, where she directs the Black Communication and Technology Lab, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Her first book, Digital Black Feminism, was the 2022 winner of the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Research and the Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association. Dr. Steele also directs the UMD's Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities graduate program. Her second book, co-authored with her former team at the African American Digital Humanities Initiative, Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, is a practical guide for scholars and administrators in Digital Humanities.
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/drhaltimo-com/home
Twitter: @drhaltimo
Dr. Talisha Haltiwanger is Director of the OU Writing Center and the Expository Writing Program and Assistant Professor of Writing at OU. Her research centers Black feminist and racial justice approaches to writing center administration and community engagement. Her work has appeared in venues such as the Writing Center Journal, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric, and her edited collection, Writing Centers and Racial Justice: A Guidebook for Critical Praxis.
