Abstracts

Keynote

'From Watching Race to Making Race: Notes on the Journey of an Idea’

Herman Gray

Using three primary texts, Watching Race (1995) Cultural Moves (2005) and “Subjected to Recognition” (2013), I reflect on the ‘durability’ of ideas in my work, how I arrived at them and their impact in shaping my approach to television race and culture in the US. Among the touchstones I consider are ideas like ‘watching race’, ‘struggles over race’, ‘race making’, ‘subjection and recognition’, ‘media as a technology of race’, and ‘television as a technology of Blackness’. I aim to contribute to the intellectual history (at least in the US) of an emerging formation from the vantage point of American scholarship and cultural politics in media race and culture.  This history cannot be understood without probing the link between the formation of a field and the affective, political, historical and cultural points of struggle, belonging, and identification; But equally this history cannot be engaged and appreciated without the critique and struggle against anti-Black racism and considering the limits of the politics of representation.

Panel 1A – Commodification of Race in Popular Culture

Almost Racistly White’: Decolonising Humour in Man Like Mobeen

Sarah Ilott (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Humour has a colonising or decolonising potential because it is premised upon knowledge of the world that is upheld or upturned depending on the structure of the joke. As Homi Bhabha (1994) has demonstrated, colonial discourse was dependent on the stereotype as a system of knowledge of the Other, while he suggests that the slippage from mimicry to mockery of the colonisers was an inevitable effect of a colonial discourse. Humour mechanisms, in other words, have been central to colonial systems of knowledge that produce and attempt to fix racialised Others in order to exercise power over them. Renewed calls for racial justice in the cultural and political spheres following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have created the conditions for productions that take as their starting point the continued inequalities of a world still marked by the wielding of racialised colonial power in its multiple and related forms: economic, epistemic, military and political. This has involved an increased production of comedy that engages with racism in systemic terms by focusing on the institutions through which white supremacy is maintained: the police, educational establishments, workplaces and governments. This chapter engages contemporary screen comedy that is working in a decolonising way to interrogate British institutions, using Guz Khan’s Man Like Mobeen (BBC 2017-2025) as a central case study. This comedy employs humour as a means of decentring dominant racial ‘knowledges’ that have their roots in the wielding of colonial power; registers the absurdity produced through a structurally racist society for those whose lived experience fails to match up with the stories that explain it; engenders affective alliances across racial divides to create new avenues for solidarity; and operates pedagogically to centre peripheralized knowledges.

The Cultural Politics of Afrosurrealism: Race, Media and (Commercial) Cultural Production

Wooshy Koroye (University of Leeds)

Afrosurrealism is an aesthetic, philosophical and literary movement that places black subjectivity at the forefront -- afrosurrealism takes the conceit of the Eurocentric surrealist movement of the 20th century -- that surrealism is anti-establishment, that it disrupts dominant narratives and bucks convention in favour of dreamlike imagery and post-modern sensibilities -- and proposes an alternative canon to white supremacist and Eurocentric (constructions) of Blackness itself as Other, presenting that otherness as inherently disruptive to the reality and the rationality of a white supremacist imagination. Afrosurrealism is an aesthetic movement of juxtaposition, of intertextuality, holding up pieces of cultural ephemera as is, "full of signs difficult to decipher or overwritten with messages that obscure meaning" (Francis, 96) -- weaving together threads (or, "codes") of blackness from across the diaspora, from literature to television to contemporary art, from jazz to hip-hop, Toni Morrison to Childish Gambino, from horror to sketch comedy to bodycam footage to Solange as Sun-Ra.

And yet afrosurrealist expression seems to have found its strongest foothold within the machine of mass culture and popular media -- and specifically within popular music and network television. Within the popular imagination, and particularly in the last decade, Afrosurrealism is largely associated with television shows such as FX's "Atlanta" (created by rapper and actor Donald Glover, popularly known as Childish Gambino), films such as Boots Riley's 2018 leftist black comedy "Sorry to Bother You", and even Beyonce's visual album Lemonade. The inherent tension of afrosurrealism in theory (as an anti-establishment “no theory shout” (Miler), as “an imaginary, magnetizing loosely related sensibilities” (Francis)) and the space that it occupies within mass culture, as a commodity within the landscape of commercialized cultural production is the foundation of my research.

Cringe Aesthetics, Gender, and Emotion Work in Ramy

Sarah Lahm (University of Leeds)

Ramy (Hulu, 2019-2022), a half-hour comedy drama created by Ramy Youssef, Ari Katcher, and Ryan Welch, has run for three seasons and received critical acclaim for its complex portrayal of Muslim Americans. The programme centres on Ramy Hassan (Ramy Youssef), whose navigation of work, romance, and family life is frequently articulated via cringe aesthetics, balancing discomfort and levity. Recent scholarship has focused on the series’ potential to “de-westernize the perception of Arab Americans” and to portray “immigrants’ narratives in a cosmopolitan environment” (Bourenane 2024, p.28). While Ramy and his sister Dena (May Calamawy) have grown up in the US, their parents’ experience of everyday life as immigrants living within an Egyptian community in New Jersey is markedly different from that of their millennial children. Much of the show’s humour stems from different and ever-shifting cultural dynamics, and as a young woman, Dena is frequently frustrated by being subjected to more intense judgment and scrutiny than her brother. This paper will focus on Dena, whose familial relationships and romantic encounters often require her to educate men (love interests and her own family members alike), though she crucially often refuses to do this emotion work (Hochschild, 1983). Moreover, Dena’s relationship with her and Ramy’s mother, Maysa (Hiam Abbass), and the differences in their individual everyday experiences as well as the ways in which they relate to one another are dramatised—sometimes more, sometimes less humorously—within the context of accelerating cultural anxieties and (racial) tensions in the US. In this paper, I will examine Ramy’s use of cringe humour and serial and episodic televisual affordances to unfold the triangulation of cringe aesthetics, gender, and emotion work.

Panel 1B – Islamophobia and Media

Death of a Platform for Mediated Activism? Contesting Islamophobia on Twitter/X

Elizabeth Poole (Keele University)

This paper explores the declining relevance of Twitter/X as a site for mediated activism, a trend that has exacerbated following its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. Drawing on our large-scale study of how Twitter was used to contest Islamophobic hate speech between 2019 and 2020, we situate our analysis within the broader context of the platform’s shifting governance, evolving media environment, and wider political landscape. We begin by outlining the major challenges our research identified in countering Islamophobia online, and consider how these problems speak to current criticism of X. By revisiting key moments in our case studies, including the Christchurch attacks, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, we draw out insights from the longitudinal perspective offered by our data to ask what they reveal about the ongoing capacity of the platform to sustain counter-narratives. Our findings suggest that recent changes have intensified long-standing structural problems with Twitter/X, undermining its capacity to support networked counter-publics capable of effectively contesting racism and Islamophobia. The paper concludes by inviting responses/discussion on the changing role of X for progressive mediated activism.

Suspicion, Emotion, and Resistance: Mediatising Muslim Mothers in the War on Terror

Amani Braa (University of Montreal)

This paper examines how Muslim mothers are mediated within the racialised logics of the “War on Terror”, and how their lived experiences reveal alternative narratives that resist securitised framings. Across news coverage and public discourse, Muslim motherhood has been positioned as a site of suspicion and surveillance: mothers of radicalised or terrorist sons appear either as complicit, passive victims, or in need of rehabilitation (Ahdash, 2024). Such representations reproduce Orientalist and gendered Islamophobic tropes (Wadud, 2013), while contributing to broader architectures of racial hierarchy in democratic and authoritarian contexts alike (Roberts, 2014).

Drawing on 131 life narratives collected through doctoral ethnographic research in Québec, Italy, and Tunisia, the paper foregrounds how families, and especially mothers, navigate the intimate consequences of being assigned the role of “mother of a radicalised or terrorist child”. While institutional approaches vary—prevention in Québec, securitisation in Italy, repression in Tunisia—the narratives show shared logics of how suspicion permeates everyday life: through gestures, silences, emotions, and strained family relationships.

By analysing both media representations and women’s own testimonies, I focus on the emotional labour produced by this racialised securitisation—grief, fear, anger, and shame—but also on the strategies of resistance mothers deploy. These range from reframing their experiences through storytelling, mobilising maternal authority in public and community spaces, to cultivating solidarity networks that contest the silencing effects of counter-terrorism discourse (Braa, 2023).

Theoretically, the paper brings together intersectional feminist research, postcolonial media studies, and critical security studies (Roberts, 1990). It contributes to conference themes by showing how race, religion, and gender intersect in mediated narratives of terrorism; how affect and emotion become key sites of racial governance; and how Muslim women articulate counter-discourses that complicate authoritarian and democratic framings alike.

Ultimately, the figure of the Muslim mother provides a crucial lens to interrogate how racialised suspicion is mediated, lived, and resisted across diverse geopolitical contexts.

Racialised Emotions in French Media Coverage of the ‘Oppressed Muslim Woman’ early bestsellers

Elena Tadros (Université libre de Bruxelles)

This paper examines the emergence of the literary genre of the “oppressed Muslim woman” in France through the analysis of two bestsellers: Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody (1988) and Sold! by Zana Muhsen (1992). It shows how emotional registers are strategically mobilized in French media coverage of these books, revealing the gendered Islamophobic

logics of representation shaped by French colonial history and its enduring legacies. While existing research has shown how these autobiographies have functioned as Islamophobic propaganda, and contributed to the rise of femonationalism and securofeminism, few studies have focused specifically on their French reception despite their considerable commercial success. Grounded in cultural studies, this article draws on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concept of racialized emotions (2019) and Stuart Hall’s notion of the spectacle of the Other (1997). Through a critical analysis of French medias, with a focus on four episodes of the French TV show Sacrée soirée, which staged the “rescue” of Zana Muhsen’s sister, Nadia, in Yemen, I demonstrate how media coverage played a pivotal role in marketing these books while reinforcing the gendered figures of Muslim men as patriarchal, backward, and violent, and

Muslim women as oppressed and submissive. I argue that French media coverage operates through colonial and imperialist logics of racism and sexism, drawing on white tears and a narrative of White and Muslim women’s liberation from oppressive Muslim men. In doing so, it produces racialized emotions, associating suffering, empathy and freedom with the White

woman, and fear, anger and women’s oppression with the Muslim men. Finally, I show how selective empathy toward White women and Western values, is central both to the book’s commercial success and to the preservation of white feminism. Therefore, this research contributes to debates on postcoloniality, racialized emotions, and the entanglement of media and white nationalist feminism in France.

Panel 1C – New Directions in Critical Race Studies and Intellectual Property

Taking Indigenous Knowledge Seriously: The Role of Popular Media

Graham Dutfield (University of Leeds)

In 1991, Time Magazine ’s cover story was “Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge,” the front page image displaying a man from the New Guinea Highlands with a bone through his nose. Several months earlier, The New York Times carried a story with the title “Shamans’ Plant Lore May Dies with Forests.” There is a clear message from these articles that this knowledge has conservation value and practical utility in terms principally of medicinal applications, and that therefore the world is poorer for its loss: the subtitle of the Time article was “When native cultures disappear, so does a trove of scientific and medical wisdom.” Evidently, the public was ready for this messaging, and there are very good reasons why the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in places like the Amazon

and New Guinea - that few of the readership would ever travel to - was attracting attention then. In the years that followed up to the present day, the notion that Indigenous peoples have, or should have, legal rights in their knowledge has become mainstreamed. While one might balk at the often patronising and exoticising tone of the text and imagery in media coverage, there is no argument that quite a number of national laws are now in place, there is an international patent law treaty that seeks to protect it from unfair exploitation, and the entitlement of Indigenous peoples to intellectual property protection is proclaimed in a UN human rights declaration. None of this seemed likely 35 years ago. It is tempting to see all of this as connected consequentially. But is it? The question this presentation will consider is this: did popular media attention help to lay the ground for a change in the standing of Indigenous peoples and their cultures that enabled a transformation in their legal status, including in intellectual property law?

Purple Blerd in Cyberspace: Negotiating (Un)fair Competition While Black Through Technologies of Music

Anjali Vats (University of Pittsburgh)

This paper considers musical (un)fair competition as a function of race and/as technology. While relatively little has been written about this crossover area of intellectual property and tort law, it is an important space for both the dispossession and emancipation of people of color in US and musical history. The beginning of the paper builds on my first monograph’s historical investigation of unfair competition, considering how that cause of action has been weaponized against people of color over time, in England and the US. It then turns to the case study of the NPG Music Club, reading it as a technological innovation that aimed to produce fairness in a field of unfairness. By building a technological persona in cyberspace through the NPG Music Club before Blerds were visible in American society, Prince attempted to level the musical playing field. Drawing on Wendy Chun’s model of “race as technology,” the chapter explores how literal technology, i.e. the production of music videos centered on computers and an online music club, facilitated Prince’s use of race itself as a technology of fairness and equity. Building on a growing body of literature focused on the intersections of tort law and racial discrimination, it broadly considers how technological innovation and unfair competition, both of which were routinely used to minimize and dehumanize people of color, operated as tools for locating Black people in innovative technological spaces in which they were frequently erased.

Are Black Athletes for Sale? Digital Doppelgangers and Entrepreneurial Capitalism

Joseph Coppola (UC Berkeley)

The phenomena of deep fakes and digital avatars (i.e. the unauthorized use of an actor’s recognizable features) have increasingly acquired both mainstream and scholarly attention. A clone of Tom Hanks selling medical insurance and Taylor Swift involuntarily starring in pornography are a few prominent examples of artificial intelligence gone rogue. While disputes involving high-profile celebrities receive ample attention, media scholars rarely investigate how the images, likenesses, and voices of Black college athletes are systematically appropriated and licensed without consent or compensation. The presentation addresses this scholarly lacuna by highlighting how Black bodies and voices are routinely digitized and transformed into anonymous and playable characters for EA Sports video games. Building upon the work of Jennifer Rothman, the first part of the presentation charts how the doctrinal commitments of personality rights morphed away from social justice concerns to a neoliberal apparatus, which systematically perpetuates racial and economic injustice. More specifically, I trace the racialized logics of

O’Bannon v. NCAA (2015), negotiating how the United States’ intellectual property regime has historically denied Black athletes’ ownership over their personas due to their perceived “non-professional” status. Reading Black visual art as spaces for counter-public protest, the second part of the presentation foregrounds how artist Sondra Perry’s It’s in the Game (2017) uses virtual and augmented reality to counter hegemonic narratives about Black sporting experiences while simultaneously indexing the urgency to read the history of digital avatars as a history of racialized corporality and the extraction of value from racialized bodies. The presentation concludes by

problematizing the celebratory logics that often accompany National Collegiate Athletic Association v Alston (2021), which, I argue, exasperate the racialized logics of entrepreneurial capitalism. Ultimately, this talk bridges legal studies with media studies – all the while (re)assessing contemporary critical debates over synthetic “actors” and digital doppelgangers that permeate algorithmic culture.

Generative AI and Blacksound

Matthew Morrison (Stanford University)

Several studies have shown the severe impact that Generative AI has on our natural resources and environment, often first hitting the most marginalized communities of color throughout the US and the Global South. But fewer studies have interrogated the impact that Generative AI music and entertainment have throughout culture — particularly since so many of the AI “artists” are often represented as Black. This paper considers how these generative technologies are rooted in the same technologies that birthed the American pop music and entertainment in the nineteenth century during slavery and out of Blackface minstrelsy. The author will consider how the roots of these (mis)representations are grounded in the racialization of intellectual property from its roots in early American copyright law. Further consideration will be given to unpacking what is at stake for the people on which these digital musical avatars are based.

Panel 1D – Race and Promotional Culture

Martial Arts Aesthetics as a Form of Racialised Construction in Historical British Advertising

Sally Chan (University of Leeds)

This paper considers how martial arts tropes have been utilised in historical British advertising from the 1960s to the 1990s. It identifies key themes relating to how martial arts are deployed as a creative means of promoting brands within the context of race relations in Britain. Furthermore, the way cultural producers have shaped race and media representational discourse in the context of racial/colonial ideologies surrounding the Chinese in Britain. Television commercials featuring a mixed Chinese/non-Chinese cast will be discussed in the context of cultural capitalism and authentication of martial arts. The study utilises an interdisciplinary approach whereby ethical visual representational frameworks in advertising and martial arts aesthetics in film and television are used to understand the degree of exoticisation and exclusion of the Chinese during the period 1960s-1990s. In the case of advertising, both iconic and racialised imageries that were used to depict martial arts aesthetics have been considered as part of this study.

Through the paradigm of post-structuralist hermeneutics, and following Foucauldian ideology, the paper discusses critical visual analysis of TV and print advertisements, as well as of racial and martial arts discourse in documentaries and published media, to identify cases of martial arts tropes that either authenticate, mirror, or caricature the Chinese as ‘the Other’. These range from ‘yellow face’ with its negative connotations to ‘yellow mask’ with its nationalist Chinese references. Case studies of brands that have utilised a martial arts aesthetic, and its commodification by brands in their messages, form the basis of my analysis.

Furthermore, by focusing on how the Chinese have been depicted in film and television, it is hoped that further understanding of martial arts aesthetics and authenticity in martial arts depictions or the representational commodification of martial arts will fuel interest in future research in this area.

Technocustom Racism in AI-Personalised Advertising

Nessa Keddo (King’s College London)

Technological advances have inevitably changed the way that brands are able to both communicate with and target audiences, from the affordances of social media, search engine optimisation, digital advertising and, particularly, AI personalised advertising. Critical race, media and technology scholars over the past decade have laid foundations of how software and platforms are intentionally built to perpetuate biases (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019;

Eubanks, 2019) and have remits of building algorithmic identities through audience profiling, all of which have detrimental effects on Black, minority ethnic and marginalised communities for various reasons. In terms of the audience themselves, some scholars highlight the racial hatred that manifests in digital community spaces (Sharma and Brooker, 2016; Murthy and Sharma, 2019; Agudelo and Olbrych, 2022) but, equally, how Black users engage and build communities, often of resistance, within these spaces (Brock, 2012, 2020). However, with many of the monopolising technology companies infiltrating digital media spaces, such as advertising, there are emergent ways in which forms of racial violence present.

Building on this developing area of scholarship, this paper argues that advertising servers are compliant in increasing what this study conceptualises as technocustom racism; where the triad of weakened platform regulation, poor system design and manual racism by far-right users increases the level of online racial hatred, where Black and minority ethnic children are direct targets. Using the example of three children’s brand advertising campaigns, this paper highlights how organised far-right racism increases in AI personalised advertising due to the specifics of customisation, with racist users specifically seeking advertisements with Black children.

The paper argues that audiences are experiencing increased racial violence not only as a result of weaknesses in computerised automation, but the vulnerability of personalisation means that acts of racial violence are increasingly difficult to control. Further, the paper argues that Black children are particularly falling victim to this online abuse and custom advertising means that campaign posts with racial abuse are difficult to trace and report. This, coupled with weakened platform regulation, is reinforced by the rolling back of content moderation, the relaxing of freedom of speech on platforms such as Meta and dilutes what constitutes as hate speech.

Race, Political Branding and Rishi Sunak

Ruth Garland (Goldsmiths, University of London)

After five years as an MP, Rishi Sunak became UK Chancellor (Finance Minister) in February 2020, aged 39, and Prime Minister just over two years later. At 42, he was the youngest in modern British history and the first from an Indian background. His four-year social media campaign was led by a branding consultant from within government and represents the most far-reaching example of a UK governing politician being presented as a brand. His curated persona was presented as relatable and elite, caring, tough and committed, enabling this inexperienced politician to portray himself as a ‘leader in waiting’ to the sitting Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

This study examined a range of promotional materials published through government social media including all Tweets issued from the Treasury’s official Twitter feed, @hmtreasury, during a sample 10-month period while Sunak was Chancellor. Many Tweets included short videos, fronted by Sunak, of which more than 80 were released on YouTube. A further 10 selected government videos released while Sunak was Prime Minister were also examined. The analysis was conducted in the light of findings from empirical work on political branding from Hungary, Spain and Canada. The social media activity of governing and campaigning politicians was found to be top down, personalised and took broadcast form that by-passed traditional gatekeepers (Farkas and Bene, 2021; Pineda et al., 2022; Lalancette and Raynauld, 2019).

This paper examines Sunak’s in-government branding campaign as Chancellor and Prime Minister that created an anglicized persona that complied with Conservative values and tastes. To what extent did political branding considerations disguise a complex reality, both in Sunak’s online persona and the stories he told as Chancellor and Prime Minister. What role did race play in Sunak’s quick rise and sudden downfall, when, almost alone on the political stage, Sunak led the Conservatives to the worst defeat in their 190-year history?

From Advertising to Children, to the Advertising of Children

Suzanne Harris (University of East Anglia) & Isabelle Higgins (University of Cambridge)

In this presentation, the authors expand upon their concept of ‘ children’s bodies as digital visual commodities’, coined to explore how children’s bodies are increasingly becoming objects of transactional value within the racialised economies of digital media. Drawing on empirical research from the United States to Uganda covering state-run adoption portals, NGO sponsorship programs, and influencer-led family content, the authors interrogate the global rendering of racialised children’s bodies as they become routinely photographed and videoed, shared, and monetised online. The authors show

that this commodification of children's bodies does not only serve as social currency for likes and visibility, but functions too as hard currency within systems of surveillance, racial capitalism, data extraction, and exploitative content creation. These practices are shaped by neoliberal ideologies and racialised market dynamics, resulting in Black, Brown, and Indigenous children being disproportionately targeted and assigned unequal economic value. Thinking with ‘digital visual commodities’ offers a framework to both connect disparate practices of racialised child commodification occurring in different

geographic locations, while also addressing the broader racialised, political economic and technological infrastructures that sustain these harmful practices. Ultimately, this paper calls for a collective ethical reckoning and multi-stakeholder dialogue around the racialised commodification of children’s bodies online. It urges scholars, policymakers, and technologists to confront the intersectional dimensions of exploitation, and to reimagine digital futures that centre racialised children’s rights, dignity, and wellbeing.

What Colour Is Influencer Marketing? Exploring Racialised Digital Labour

Jed Senthi & Nandhini Bala Krishnan (Nanyang Technological University)

Influencer marketing is often depicted as a meritocratic field where brand

partnerships and visibility are achieved through entrepreneurial effort, creativity, and authenticity. However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that racial hierarchies are intricately linked to the influencer economy (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Noble, 2018). This essay poses the question: Is there a race component to influencer marketing? It looks at how race functions in digital promotional cultures as a contested identity and a structuring condition (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Grey, 2016).

The paper examines how Chinese, Malay, and Indian influencers manage

visibility in a society that formally fosters "racial harmony" while maintaining disparities in language, culture, and commerce, using Singapore as a case study from the Global South (Velayutham, 2017). Singapore provides an insightful perspective: although minority influencers are represented symbolically, English-dominant, Chinese-majority creators are frequently given preference in platform visibility and advertising campaigns due to structural and algorithmic factors (Abidin, 2016, 2022).

Through a qualitative analysis of influencer campaigns on TikTok and Instagram, three patterns merge. First, darker-skinned influencers are marginalised by algorithmic amplification, which conforms to globalised beauty standards associated with whiteness and lighter skin (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). Second, the logics of racial capitalism in digital marketing are also demonstrated by the fact that minority influencers are rarely used in mainstream, high-value endorsements, but are frequently used selectively in campaigns with diversity or cultural themes (Cottom, 2020; Robinson, 1983). Third, influencers themselves strategically navigate these circumstances: some use cultural specificity to carve out niche visibility, while others

minimise ethnic markers to appeal to wider audiences (Abidin, 2016, 2022).

This paper reframes the creator economy as a place where racialised structures of privilege and exclusion are reproduced and challenged, rather than just a place of entrepreneurial opportunity, by focussing on race as an analytical tool for influencer marketing. The aspirational figure of the influencer is never race-neutral; rather, it is ingrained in long-standing global hierarchies of value, visibility, and belonging. By doing this, it adds to critical discussions on race, media, and capitalism.

Panel 2A – The Cultural Politics of Race and Gender

Popular intersectionality and the racial, gendered, and classed politics of inclusion on Instagram

Katrin Schindel (Kings College London)

The visibility afforded by contemporary social media like Instagram has not only accelerated the rise of popular feminisms over the past decade (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Barbala, 2022), but also increasingly facilitated the neoliberal co-optation of Black, anti-racist, and anti-colonial discourses (Kanai and Gill,

2020; Saha et al., 2024). Intersectionality, a concept rooted in Black feminist activism and theorising (e.g., Davis, 1981; Lorde, 1984) and famously coined as a term by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), marks a prominent example of this neoliberal mainstreaming in popular and digital cultures (Sobande, 2019;

Banet-Weiser and Glatt, 2023; Kanai, 2020; Kanai, 2021). In this paper, I draw on interviews with 22 self-identified digital feminists about their perceptions of and affective engagement with intersectionality in digital feminist spaces. As my participants primarily use Instagram to engage with feminism online, I examine affordances and vernaculars of the platform, such as feminine design

features like the heart-shaped ‘like’ button or the popular share-pic trend, which encourage and reproduce expressions of and affects associated with normative white bourgeois femininities. This discussion constitutes the backdrop against which I examine popular articulations of intersectionality

in my participants’ talk. I demonstrate that a ‘popular intersectionality’ operates as a feminist sensibility and discourse promoting an affective desire for and an understanding of intersectionality as an imperative of inclusion. Moreover, popular intersectionality operates as a technology of self which

entices digital feminists to continue to learn about and consume marginalised identities in order to perform ‘intersectional allyship’ with those marginalised Others. Popular intersectionality thus reinforces ideals of ‘caring’ white femininities which ultimately reproduces white saviourism. My analysis critically interrogates how these articulations and performances of white femininities are shaped by the platform, Instagram, as well as how digital feminists can engage with intersectionality in more productive, change-making ways.

Whiteness, feminism, and moral failings: the translation of intersectionality in digital culture

Akane Kanai (University of Warwick)

In recent years, feminism has become more accessible in its online travels. But in the mediated circulation of feminist objects, ideas, and news, the concept of ‘intersectionality’, like ‘diversity’ has become highly contested affective terrain. This paper draws on an empirical project on online feminist culture to reflect on the affective politics engendered by intersectionality, weighed down by hopes of ‘perfect’ feminism as well as desires for clear, simple formulas for privilege and disadvantage. In similar fashion to the observations of many scholars of colour on intersectionality’s takeup (Ahmed 2019, Nash 2019), intersectionality’s uses were not always straightforwardly ‘useful’. Its popularity as a signal for ‘niceness’ could become a red flag for racialised people when brandished by white people on dating sites. But more than a story of appropriation or misuse, intersectionality could also be interpreted in terms that both notionally contested whiteness while also reinforcing highly traditional norms of middle class femininity, as white women in public became spectacles to be disciplined for ‘excessive’, ‘self-centred’ behaviour, often by white women themselves. What I want to suggest is that, as online feminism becomes focused on knowing what’s right, knowledge of contemporary feminist terms could be used to discipline those without middle class emotional and attitudinal protocols, across racial difference.

The Comforts of Race

Natasha Zeng (Kings College London)

Analyses of race and media representation are often met with the reply that, however limited, the affective resonance of representation, how it “feels good” for people of colour, cannot be dismissed. This paper takes such responses as a generative starting point to consider the comforts not of media representation, but of race within the current conjuncture. This is particularly significant in a cultural moment where affective economies of coziness proliferate and comfort has become a dominant logic, often positioned as a balm for the anxieties of late capitalism. This reflects wider characterisations of modernity as “shell-less”, wherein individuals seek protective bubbles to regain a sense of security (Sloterdijk, 2011), and how, amid the collapse of old certainties, “racial difference and racial hierarchy can be made to appear with seeming spontaneity as a stabilizing force” (Gilroy, 2004). In asking how race is made to feel good for people of colour, and what political and historical conditions enable it, I draw on Alana Lentin’s (2025) call to historicise race, rather than periodising it. Comfort/s and its ideological politics (Noble, 2010) thus can be placed as part of a racial regimes ongoing “efforts to repair or alter race as an effective mechanism of social ordering” (Lentin, 2025).

Engaging with the “warm bodies” (Wood, 2024) of digital culture, this paper draws on qualitative data from a project on how Asian Australian youth managed their racialised identities with and through social media, alongside emerging scholarship on the cultural resurgence of coziness. Through a phenomenological and affective lens, I examine how race is felt, its textures, intensities, and operations, within the settler-colonial context of Australia and in/across transnational digital cultures. Building on scholarship that has shifted focus from media representations of race to how media, for example cultural industries (Saha, 2018), make race, it contributes to broader discussions on the affective and materiality of race by “knitting together of the realms of representation and narrative with those of governance and political economy” (Lentin, 2025).

Racial Regimes in Rupture: Persistence and Contestation in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Roaa Ali (University of Manchester)

This paper examines how racial regimes adapt, persist, and are contested within the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) during moments of rupture such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the global antiracist uprisings of 2020, and the current nationalist resurgence in the UK. Drawing on empirical research with racialised creatives, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, the paper argues that crises in the CCIs function less as opportunities for transformation than as mechanisms through which whiteness reasserts itself. The analysis highlights how the pandemic disproportionately undermined the employment, wellbeing, and career trajectories of Black and ethnically minoritised workers in theatre, music, and the visual arts, while initiatives amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement proved largely performative and easily rolled back, or diluted (Ali et al, 2022).

These dynamics unfolded within a wider conjuncture where the fleeting insurgent energies of 2020 met a resurgent “anti-woke” backlash and rising nationalist politics, which is impacting CCIs by stalling progress on racial diversity and reshaping anti-racist and inclusion agendas. To interrogate these processes, the article foregrounds the concept of racial regimes (Omi & Winant, 2015; Goldberg, 2002) and critiques of meritocracy (Littler, 2017) and racialised risk (Erigha, 2021), exposing how the sector’s rhetoric of “talent,” “creativity,” and “risk” aestheticises whiteness while obscuring systemic inequalities. At the same time, it identifies limited but vital spaces where antiracist activists within CCIs disrupt the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Taken together, the analysis shows how crises both reassert and entrench whiteness in CCIs while also, at times, creating openings for antiracist intervention. These dynamics underscore the urgent need for structural accountability and genuinely transformative, rather than “non- performative” (Ahmed, 2006), approaches to anti-racism and equity.

ContradictoryConservatism: Black Women, Purity, and Religious Authority in the Age of Digital Religion

Taylor Smith (University of Pennsylvania)

The waning influence of the “Black Church” has long been a hot topic in popular culture as social and technological advancements seemingly threaten the centrality of religion and the church in Black American life. While empirical data (Booker, 2022) points to the contrary, long-standing anxieties over competing influences persist, prompting innovation in church policy, practice, and performance (Best, 2007; Martin, 2014; Weisenfeld, 2007). In the

twenty-first century, the ubiquitous nature of mobile technologies and increased global usage of social media sites have led these platforms to take on functions beyond their initial design (Leaver, 2020). For the dynamic, Black religious community, these sites have become complex places of competing influences and tools for modernizing African American religious practice.

This project analyzes how long-standing Black religious discourses adapt to new digital media. Taking up Weisenfeld’s call to center the unique contributions of Black women in the study of African American religion, this analysis centers Black women in the conversation of the maturation of Black digital religion (2013). Employing Black feminist criticism (Moultrie, 2017;

Lomax, 2018), I use controversial Black woman Bible teacher Jackie Hill Perry as a case study. This paper analyzes Perry’s viral clips on witchcraft, spirituality, and Beyoncé as cultural artifacts, parsing out questions of digital affordances and Black women’s roles in Black religion. While scholarship (Sampson, 2020; Castor, 2022) examines the progressive and even liberatory

dimensions of Black women’s digital religious practice, I argue that some, like Perry, use digital media to perpetuate conservative, and often anti-Black, homophobic, and sexist values. Thus, they position themselves in opposition to progressive notions of race, femininity, and sexuality. #ContradictoryConservatism” will contribute to the scholarship on the evolution of Black religion’s relationship with media and technology, specifically digital media, and the modern Black conservative.

Panel 2B – Race and Algorithmic Culture

‘We Doh Watch Face’: Notting Hill Carnival, the Biometric Gaze and the Expansion of Mass Surveillance

Hanna Klien-Thomas (Oxford Brookes University)

In August 2025, the Metropolitan Police Service deployed Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology at Notting Hill Carnival (NHC), citing an "intelligence basis" rooted in the festival’s alleged history of violence and crime. This deployment was met with criticism from civil liberties and anti-racism organisations, who raised urgent concers about the racialized use of surveillance technologies. Building on Fubara-Manuel’s analysis of the first trial of LFR at Notting Hill Carnival 2016/17, I will situate the 2025 deployment within the broader trajectory of “imperial biometric capture”, ascribing and re-inscribing race (Fubara-Manuel 2020). Applying this theoretical framework based on Fanon (digital epidermalization) and Hall (criminalization through overcoding), the paper sounds out how recent reinterpretations of Policing the Crisis (Nxolo 2024; Danewid 2021; Elliott-Cooper et al. 2014) can give insights into the role of media discourses and their interplay with digital platform affordances in facilitating the implementation of surveillance. My analysis draws on empirical qualitative data and a corpus of news media published in the aftermath of NHC 2024 and in the lead-up to NHC 2025.

Generative AI and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality

Dhiraj Murthy (University of Texas at Austin)

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini are being used throughout the world to generate text, images, music, video, and much more. Though GenAI systems have become advanced, they reproduce racist biases and inequalities overtly and subtly.

Specifically, GenAI reproduces existing social inequalities – racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. GenAI is trained from billions of human-produced data points which reflect structural inequalities. Training data ‘contain inherent biases’ (Wei, Kumar, and Zhang 2025) and have a ‘lack of diversity’ (Currie et al. 2025). Early iterations of GenAI like Microsoft’s Tay

had to be taken offline due to hugely racist (and other) outbursts (Vorsino 2021). Musk’s LLM Grok made the news with antisemitic content calling for a new holocaust (Sternberg 2025). Because GenAI training processes are black boxed, it can be ‘difficult to measure the bias’ (Zhou et al. 2024).

Following the methods of small empirical experiments employed by Safiya Noble to explore racism and racist content in search engines, this talk introduces my own experiments using ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Meta AI regarding race-related prompts both in text and image creation. By examining these outputs, I render visible some of the deeply embedded biases in

contemporary generative large language models (LLMs) and discuss how these types of small-scale, empirical experiments can be used to audit GenAI. GenAI models are Big Tech products and overtrained with biased Global North-produced Internet and social media content. Ultimately, this study demonstrates some ways in which scholars of race and media can extend and develop theory regarding rapidly changing AI systems.

Generative AI and the Re-Making of Race

Sanjay Sharma (University of Warwick)

Generative AI is emerging as a disruptive force, saturating media and cultural landscapes with synthetic content. Drawing on critical race and media scholarship, I explore how generative AI technologies simultaneously erase and proliferate racial difference: producing hyper-visible spectacles of “diversity” while displacing lived experience. Far from neutral, these systems are structurally entangled with histories of racial capitalism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation. They do not simply represent race, but actively re-make it. Recent controversies – from Google’s Gemini producing bizarre images of Black Nazi soldiers, to digital supermodels such as “Shudu” commodifying Black femininity through white creators – llustrate how race is simulated and monetized in ways that extend genealogies of epistemic violence. What emerges is a post-racial automation of “diversity-on-demand,” where generative AI exploits racial difference as a resource to be extracted, while erasing the creativity, labour, and histories from which it is drawn (cf. Sobande 2020). Mainstream, corporate-driven “Ethical AI” techno-solutionist responses of bias audits, fairness metrics or AI safety fail to grapple with these deeper entanglements. The problem is not technical glitches or lack of transparency, but a system defective by design (Benjamin 2019; Katz 2020). Abolitionist thinkers such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022) urge us to refuse inclusion on unequal terms and instead imagine otherwise: not how AI can be made fairer, but how its logics of extraction and domination can be dismantled.

Generative AI mediates race by reshaping how representations are fabricated and contested. Its practices, whether producing false racial histories, commodifying diversity, or amplifying far-right propaganda, circulate across global contexts of resurgent nationalism and algorithmic governance. Yet counter-practices, such as Nettrice Gaskins’ (2024) Afrofuturist interventions into AI’s “latent space” offer alternative racial imaginaries. In resisting AI’s post-racial aesthetics, such practices foreground the possibility of media as sites of refusal, creativity, and collective re-worlding (Escobar 2018).

Does ChatGPT Know You’re Black? Afro-Scepticism Among Black Users of ChatGPT

Thomonique Moore (University of Pennsylvania)

This paper explores how Afro-skepticism, a form of Black technoskepticism, surfaces in Black users’ online reactions to ChatGPT’s increasingly noticeable use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In 2025, Black users across the social media platforms TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) began posting examples and discussing how ChatGPT was responding in ways that mirrored Black discursive styles, many times unprompted. These responses sparked a range of reactions, from amusement to unease and from playful engagement to critical concern. In this study, I investigate how Black users’ reactions to ChatGPT’s use of AAVE reflect a broader, historical tension between Black technophilia (Everett, 2009) and technological refusal.

I draw on Afro-skepticism (Network, 2025), a standpoint, practice, and framework for understanding Black people’s tension between technological optimism, critique, and refusal to explore the spectrum of reactions and orientations expressed by Black users of ChatGPT online. Specifically, I investigate the following questions: How does Afro-skepticism surface in Black users’ discourse about ChatGPT’s adoption of AAVE in its responses? What emotional, rhetorical, and discursive strategies do Black users use online to express concern, acceptance, or ambivalence?

Employing Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak, 2014), I analyze commentary from Black users who reflect on ChatGPT’s perceived performance of Blackness. Preliminary findings reveal that many Black users engage a nervous humor and satire to critique the LLMs' linguistic mimicry, drawing connections to cultural extraction or even digital minstrelsy. Other users embrace the tool’s linguistic mirroring as endearing, casting it as a playful companion or “bestie.” These reactions reflect how everyday Black users are navigating the blurry boundary between cultural recognition and appropriation within AI systems, and are shaping the discourse around these tools in real time. Black users are not simply rejecting or accepting ChatGPT’s “adoption” of Black discursive style, but are actively negotiating their engagement along a continuum.

Panel 2C – Border Infrastructure and Colonialism

Remote Control: Living Waste Management at the Border

Eszter Zimanyi (University of Pennsylvania)

This paper examines how border police remediate environmentally inhospitable border zones as sites for the management, containment, and eventual “natural” elimination of migrants. Whether it is the abandonment of migrants in the unpopulated desert region between Tunisia and Libya during a record-breaking heat wave (NPR, 2023), the funneling of migrants toward leftover landmine fields between Bosnia and Croatia (The Guardian, 2021), or “Palestinians returning to ‘toxic wasteland’ in Northern Gaza” (Al Jazeera, 2025), migrants’ deaths-by-environment are framed as predictable consequences of their own voluntary actions.

Taking seriously the notion of “image operations,” that is the real and material interventions images make in our world (Eder and Klonk, 2016), I show how documentary images of material waste in relation to those of camps, detention centers, and migrants within remote border zones configure migrants as living waste. I argue these formal, aesthetic, and discursive tropes foment a particular logic of disposability in international migration policies.

I contextualize how environmental and securitization goals cohere the logics of border security and waste management such that illegal pushbacks of migrants are encouraged, despite violating international law. Through pushbacks, border police hasten the transformation of the migrant’s body into waste by placing migrants under “remote control.” Here, remote control refers to police methods of isolating migrants in remote and dangerous environments, attacking migrants’ physical bodies, and confiscating and destroying migrants’ cell phones. By severing migrants’ access to media networks, the state ensures that migrants are both physically and digitally isolated after being “thrown out” in remote border zones.

Nonreciprocal Listening as a Foundation for Peace Through Media

Yuval Katz (Loughborough University)

In peace studies, dialogue can occur in two spheres: first, between politicians and diplomats attempting to find a way to end violence as representatives of nation-states; this type of dialogue receives the most attention in scholarly debates. Second is dialogue between ordinary people, which is often disregarded as inconsequential, and will be the focus of my presentation.

A dialogue is usually predicated on a reciprocal exchange between the two sides; yet what happens when the situation is asymmetrical ab initio in the context of settler colonialism? If its purpose is to maintain an equilibrium between the two sides, dialogue risks perpetuating a repressive status quo, where it becomes a façade – a performance of care that neither challenges power nor delivers justice. Therefore, what other forms of encounter could help tilt the scale?

Drawing on examples from my book about media encounters in Israel/Palestine, I will argue for a new model of nonreciprocal listening as a means of engaging in peacemaking through media-making. I define nonreciprocal listening as a media phenomenon in which those in positions of power utilise their resources and privileges to amplify the voices of the subaltern.

Nonreciprocal listening is the diametrical opposition of monological forms of expression, so common on social media and mainstream news, that maintain Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine. Drawing on Derrida’s (1997) definition of friendship, I will examine media encounters in a digital activist project and a popular television show. I will demonstrate how media activists collaborate in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, as Jewish allies forgo the expectation of receiving something in return when helping to create platforms where Palestinians share uncomfortable truths in a joint effort to create a better life for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Is Journalism and Communication Education in Puerto Rico Perpetuating Colonialism?

Federico Subervi (University of Wisconsin-Madison) & Maximiliano Dueñas (University of Puerto Rico-Humacao)

Journalism and communication education (J&MC) around the globe has multiple similarities as well as distinct local approaches. This paper addresses salient factors of J&MC in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the world—four centuries under Spain and over one century under United States rule.

The subordinate character of J&MC education in Puerto Rico is first broached through the presentation of a theoretical framework that helps to understand tendencies in media practices in a colonial setting. This is followed by a brief historical overview of the development of J&MC education in Puerto Rico. A central tenet of that synopsis is that the late emergence of such education at the university level was affected by the Island’s colonial status, a status that continues to severely influence what is included and what is omitted in the curricula.

The paper then seeks to assess if and how that education might itself be contributing to the perpetuation of colonialism in Puerto Rico. For that goal, the authors analyze the program and course descriptions and syllabi of core J&MC courses at the two main universities at which that discipline is offered: the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras campus and the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.

Suggestions addressed in the conclusion highlight strategies, in the context of the colonial parameters, to overcome institutional, political, academic and ethical challenges to professional and civic minded J&MC education. These challenges include strengthening J&MC education curricula with historical, sociological, political and economic analyses of Puerto Rican mass media and digital networks as both products and promoters of colonialism. They also include addressing student needs to understand and act in a global and digitalized setting of general and expanding uncertainty.

TBC

Israel Campos (University of Leeds)

Seeing beyond borders: European Migrant Cinema Through a Decolonial Lens

Hera Lorandos (Kings College London)

This paper rethinks the category of “migrant cinema” through a decolonial lens, focusing on two films that engage directly with the politics of mobility and borders: Revenir (David Fedele and Kumut Imesh, 2018) and No U-Turn (Ike Nnaebue, 2022). Scholars working within trans/national cinema frameworks have often defined European migrant cinema by the director’s background or humanitarian subject matter (Naficy 2001, Loshitzky 2010, Berghahn and Sternberg 2010). These approaches treat migration as a crisis suddenly disrupting European modernity, while overlooking the colonial and racial histories that underpin contemporary mobilities. Following Walter Mignolo’s (2010) call for epistemic disobedience, I argue that these films resist Eurocentric framings by unsettling the border spectacle (De Genova, 2013), which spectacularises migrant illegality and suffering.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with filmmakers, I examine how Revenir and No U-Turn reconfigure authorship and positionality. Revenir, co-directed by Kumut Imesh, an Ivorian filmmaker retracing his own migration route, directly challenges the humanitarian gaze by blurring authorship conventions to ‘surrender’ (Rangan, 2017) a Eurocentric vision of universal humanity. No U-Turn, an autobiographical essay, retells Ike Nnaebue, a Nigerian filmmaker’s own story within the afterlives of empire, reframing migration not as crisis but as continuity. Both works foreground migrant agency, memory, and testimony, while experimenting formally to resist spectacle.

By placing these films in dialogue with practitioners’ reflections, I show how migrant cinema can open up decolonial ways of seeing and knowing. Rather than being marginal to European cinema, these resistant practices demonstrate how cinema at the border is foundational to rethinking race, mobility, and belonging in a global context.

Panel 2D – Race, Cultural Production and Urban Multiculture

‘You Can’t Steal My Joy’: Mediating Musical Multiculture at a Time of Crisis

Richard ‘Gummo’ Clare (University of Leeds)

Wracked by economic stagnation, social upheaval, and cross-party nationalist revanchism in the decade after the 2008 financial crash, contemporary Britain ‘is not a happy place’ (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, p. 2). This paper offers a conjunctural analysis of the remarkable flourishing of the London jazz scene across the 2010s and early 2020s amid this fraught political and cultural climate.

I focus on the prominence of joy and spirituality in both the lived practices of the scene and in the promotional discourse that has surrounded it. Participant testimony and media coverage both herald the unique atmosphere of ‘new’ London jazz spaces using the vocabularies of ritual, pilgrimage, and communion. Meanwhile, artists including Ezra Collective, Shabaka Hutchings and Alabaster DePlume have repeatedly emphasised how their use of jazz to foster collective joy is an explicit form of political praxis.

I argue that these distinctive affective registers have underwritten the multicultural conviviality that marks London jazz, and animate an optimistic anti-racist politics rooted in cultural experience, set against a deepening crisis in British liberalism, and a rapid mainstreaming of the far-right (Mondon and Winter, 2020). I explore how the scene’s joyful, spiritual cultural politics articulated with activist efforts to realise the latent progressive political potential of collective cultural experience in Britain (e.g. football, raves, festivals), often described as ‘Acid Corbynism’ in the late 2010s (see e.g. Gilbert, 2017).

The paper also discusses how these same affective registers have proven central to the scene’s mediation and promotion, dovetailing with a widespread incorporation of discourses of racial and gender empowerment, and particularly “Black joy”, into promotional culture (Sobande, 2019; Iqani, 2022). The paper thus uses the London jazz case study as a worked example for exploring the complex entanglement of activism, cultural production, affect, and commerce in the current conjuncture.

Bites or Bytes? How Digital Foodways Nourish an Urban Diaspora

Stephanie Guo (London School of Economics)

This project explores the evolving relationship between digital technologies and food through the lens of placemaking practices. The deep, inextricable relationship between food, identity, and belonging is perhaps best summarized by the common adage: “we are what we eat”. However, it is not just what, but how we eat that reveals much about our relationships with ourselves, one another, and the societies we inhabit (Lum and Ferrie re le Vayer, 2016). Foodways thus facilitate “a certain ‘culinary’ being” (Barthes, 2013, p. 24) that, in the case of diaspora, serve as a tether to both the homeland and new places of settlement – a dynamic that is increasingly mediated by the digital.

This study examines how this increasing convergence between new mediascapes and urban foodways contributes to both literal and figurative forms of nourishment for diasporic communities. I specifically focus on London’s Chinese diaspora in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, during which an alarming global health crisis was accompanied by a dramatic increase in racism, xenophobia, and hate crimes targeting Chinese Londoners and those racialized as such. This project examines how Chinese Londoners leveraged foodways as a mechanism of belonging in the city amidst a dramatic turn toward online life, at a time of heightened alimentary xenophobia in which their food practices were weaponized as tools of alienation and antagonism.

My findings are informed by 42 interviews with Chinese Londoners, derived from a creative, multi-method approach that incorporated physical and visual participatory research techniques to capture their deep physical and digital entanglements in the city. This study ultimately provides a novel account of diasporas in the digital age, illustrating how foodways and their mediation not only serve as products, places, and practices of provision and consumption in a literal sense, but further cultivate a sense of home and belonging in the city.

Negotiating Identity and Emotion Through Musicking

Rafael Mendes-Browne (University of Leeds)

Racially Mixed people are the largest minority demographic in the British music industry (UK Music, 2024). However, the experiences of this ethnic group and how they navigate their identity in the British music industry are seldom discussed in academic and industry spaces. To fill this research gap, my research asks how racially Mixed musicians use musicking activities to convey their racially Mixed identity to others. I will explore this question by focusing on the relationship between a racially Mixed person’s creativity, their racial identity and their emotions to uncover how racially Mixed musicians represent their identity in the music they create.

My theoretical framework incorporates Denzin’s emotion theory (2017) and DeNora’s theory of music and emotion (2006) to understand the way emotions are experienced and expressed in racially Mixed musicians’ musicking. A combination of research methods, comprising 26 participant jam sessions and semi-structured interviews, were undertaken. Taking part in the one-to-one improvisatory jam sessions with racially Mixed musicians allowed both interviewer and interviewee to enter what Nakamura & Csikzentmihalyi describe as a ‘flow state’ (2014), providing a space for racially Mixed interviewees to express emotions and identity narratives difficult to describe verbally. Semi-structured interviews that followed the jam sessions are analysed to explore participant reflections on the jam session and other prior instances of musicking, allowing us to see how this practice can shape racially Mixed musicians’ self-perceptions of their racial identity.

Grenfell, Race and Institutional Neglect in Music Video

Joe Jackson (London College of Communication)

This paper compares two music videos co-authored by filmmaker Fahim Alam and musician Lowkey, drawing two main strands of argument. Firstly, I argue that the respective sonic and visual contributions of Lowkey and Alam operate in tandem in these music videos – in specifically audiovisual terms – to offer creative responses to the Grenfell Tower Tragedy, critiquing of austerity’s racist, neoliberal undertones while, simultaneously, disrupting the focus on visual communication which oftentimes shapes discussions of contemporary diasporic media forms at the expense of the sonic. Secondly, I argue that the creative outputs here proffered by Lowkey and Alam attempt to intervene within the shifting discussions about austerity in the aftermath of the Grenfell Fire by consciously emphasising how the (oftentimes underexplored) racial dimensions underpinning “everyday experiences” of UK-based austerity contribute to manifestations of institutional violence on the scale of the Grenfell Tragedy.

Drawing from Ed Kiely and Rosalie Warnock’s theorisation of ‘institutional neglect’ and their attempts “to extend and nuance” preceding conceptualisations of austerity’s violence, I focus on the disruption of Grenfell survivors’ combined sense of worth as British citizens as a result of the government’s ongoing lack of meaningful action in the aftermath of the fire. At the same time, by presenting to these afflicted communities an alternative mode of grassroots solidarity which does not rely on government endorsement or official authorisation, I posit that the sophisticated (in)congruities which nuance the sonic and visual elements of the Ghosts of Grenfell and Ghosts of Grenfell II music videos signal towards the complicated ways in which imperial legacies protractedly haunt (post)colonial contexts long after colonialism’s formal endpoint(s), thereby articulating how violent manifestations of ‘institutional neglect’ in modern Britain remain in certain ways entangled with moments of brutality that shaped the country’s past.

Cultural Collectives

Yasmine Kherfi & Kristina Kolbe (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

In an era marked by resurgent far-right rhetoric and ethnonationalist politics, grassroots art and music collectives provide an important lens for understanding how racial difference is lived, resisted and reimagined through situated cultural practice. This paper draws on ethnographic and interview data collected between 2020 and 2025 with migrant cultural producers and grassroots literary, artistic, and music collectives in Berlin - some of which work explicitly through decolonial frameworks and engage in cultural activism around migrant justice and justice for Palestine specifically. While Berlin is often celebrated as a cosmopolitan site of 'radical' cultural production, the facade of multicultural tolerance and its attendant conditions of recognition have been increasingly put in question - most acutely since the genocide in Gaza. This has been illustrated in part through the ways in which local grassroots initiatives articulating anti-racist and decolonial commitments increasingly encounter institutional barriers, funding restrictions, and censorship. The paper reflects on the social contentions that arise from this conjuncture - with special attention to the function of art and music as sites of articulating social discontent and forging modes of solidarity and resistance. It is grounded in an understanding of culture – not as a novel site of sociological inquiry – but as a historically important area of political activity, especially for the disenfranchised, including racialised migrant communities. Here, we explore how cultural collectives challenge hegemonic conceptions of citizenship and cultivate alternative imaginaries of community and belonging that push back against white nationalism and anti-Muslim racism in particular, whether through performance, collaborative organising, or the creation of autonomous spaces. By tracing how collectives and creative activists in Berlin navigate these tensions in their creative and organisational practices, the paper reveals both the possibilities and the limits of cultural work in confronting such ethnonationalist visions on the rise in contemporary Europe.

Panel 3A – Race-Making in Media Industries

Why Women? Notes on Editing, Archival Absence and Gendering of Production Cultures in Indian Media Industries

Priyam Sinha (Humboldt University of Berlin)

This article examines gender biases, gendered expectations and gendering of labour practices in Indian media industries, especially highlighting factors that make editing departments women dominant by classifying it as feminized labor. It is guided by two questions. First, why do women pursue film editing in India and what does its archival absence denote? Second, what challenges do they face as editors? Here, my insights are derived from 20 semi-structured interviews with editors and archival study conducted between December 2024 and August 2025. Furthering scholarship on feminist production culture studies by Miranda Banks (2009) and Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt (2008) and “hierarchization and gendering of labor in creative media industries” (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2015), this study foregrounds key concepts such as “archival absences”, “feminization of creative media work,” and “immaterial labour.” Although recent scholarship on sexism, women’s underrepresentation in creative decision-making, pay parity, exploitation in below-the-line production cultures and other forms of gendered precarity in India has been gaining traction (Mukherjee 2013; Mehta 2023; Mini Sreedhar 2024), this study foregrounds what makes editing women’s work and the sexism experienced by female editors in India. In doing so, this article is divided into three sections. It begins by theorizing archival absences in production cultures. Moving ahead, the extent to which women’s participation in media production cultures is informed by institutional barriers on entry-level skill-based training in even reputed film schools like the Film and Television Institute of India. It concludes by attending to the general inclination of gendering production cultures that deny women authorial control on set and reinforce their perceived immateriality within studio hierarchies. Hence, this study addresses how these interconnected and entangled factors of gender discrimination, sexism and labor-network hierarchization contribute towards compels women to pursue editing while relegating them as immaterial labor and absent in the archives.

The Hospital Floor: AI-Generated Representations of Filipina Care Labour

Marianne Nacanaynay (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

This paper asks how The Hospital Floor (@thehospitalfloor, THF), an Instagram AI-generated comedy series about Filipina nurses, and its use of AI may be contextualized within the historical and political landscape of Filipinx/a/o labor and media representations in the United States. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2015) and performance analysis, I argue that: (1) THF’s use of/engagement with AI is symptomatic of a desire to make visible Filipina care labor, given a dissonance between mediated representations and lived reality; and (2) Filipinx/a/o users’ interactions with THF, through improving THF’s AI depictions via commenting and other engagement, reiterate and reify a system of invisible Filipinx/a/o labor for American empire.

Created and facilitated by American empire, Filipina(/x/o) care labor is a formidable yet invisible labor force (Ceniza Choy, 2003). Filipina care laborers’ significance became more salient when the COVID-19 pandemic began, as Filipino communities were disproportionately affected by COVID-related deaths due to the high number of Filipina nurses (Leyva et al., 2024). It is with this context I turn to THF. Since June 2025, THF has compiled comedic depictions of Filipina nurses in minute-long clips, the women often either talking about a part of Filipino culture or playfully denigrating the patients they work with. (Presumably) Filipinx/a/o commenters on THF’s videos laugh along, though some point out what might not initially have been obvious: The Hospital Floor is entirely AI-generated. Early comments on THF videos offered suggestions for how to more accurately represent Filipina nurses, and it’s clear that over three months, THF took those suggestions and adapted the AI-generated representations accordingly. While situated in the spirit of “better” or “more accurate” representation, THF’s use of AI complicates the series’ sociocultural impact and potential for representational and political power.

Racial Capitalism, Neoliberalism and News Production in Postcolonial Jamaica

Vashan Brown (London School of Economics)

Neoliberalism has been significantly shaping the news media sector since its rise in the 1970s. When discussing the current state of the media (in both commercial and public forms), taking full account of political-economic context is vital and hence an interrogation of the structures, policies and practices of neoliberalism and their impact on news production has become key to understanding contemporary journalism. This paper examines the ways in which news production cultures in contemporary Jamaica are themselves subject to and shaped by histories, practices and ideologies of racial capitalism and neoliberalism. Via semi-structured interviews with both current and former journalists, it also explores how these actors understand and discursively represent the conditions and politics of their work and industry, and their place and identities within it. In the context of Jamaica’s postcolonial race relations and newly configured neoliberal print and broadcast newsrooms, the study also investigates the values and imperatives that shape the reporting of political and economic news stories. The scholarship on news production has largely taken a political economy approach in analysing the news media, but only few have tried to account for the role of race. Existing work on news production and race has also paid little attention to the ways in which colonial history underpins media practices and ideologies in postcolonial societies. The findings reveal that both the journalists and the news institutions reproduce the dominant belief in a "raceless" neoliberal society, which views the struggles of people through a class-based lens, rather than acknowledging racial dimensions. While some journalists are aware of the ways in which colonial history shapes news structures, they feel that institutional constraints limit their ability to fully report on race-related issues.

Inclusionary Discovery and the ‘Hungry Listening’ of Music Streaming Platforms

Raquel Campos Valverde (University of Leeds)

Creative Disappointments Beyond Datafication: Or Streaming platforms were born with the promise of endless exploration of music from all around the world from the convenience of an internet-enabled device. However, their utopian promises are far from the Western-centric catalogues and curation that are the base of the music products currently delivered by these services (Campos Valverde 2025). Leaving aside the media industries’ co-opted considerations of representation and equality, how can we rekindle scholarship interest in questions of cultural imperialism and global flows of music in the streaming era? In this paper, I will mobilise Dylan Robinson’s (2020) framework of inclusionary structures of music culture and apply it to music streaming services, coining the concept of ‘inclusionary discovery’. While Robinson’s framework of ‘hungry listening’ analyses the extractive industry trend of incorporating indigenous or minority musics to Western classical live performance and recording, here I will propose a broader understanding of this principle as the underlying ideology that underpins the exploration and discovery of music in the streaming industry for all racialised musics as a whole. Using empirical material collected from interface analysis and industry documents, it will demonstrate how playlists, recommender products, and public discourse elements of streaming platforms such as marketing copy and PR statements emphasise the idea of discovery of music from a perceived ‘other’ in terms of geography, race, and location, which is always situated outside the Western mainstream ‘centre’. The paper will conclude that the politics of inclusionary discovery in the music streaming industry foster extractive practices music curation and consumption. ientalist Production

Logics in Turkey’s Global Drama Industry

Ergin Bulut (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Streaming companies’ secretive data-driven production logics have transformed screening industries, and the Turkish global drama industry is no exception to this trend. Like their colleagues worldwide, Turkish drama creators either remain unhappy with these secretive logics or strategically ignore them. However, there is another layer to their dissatisfaction with streaming production cultures: Orientalist production logics. Interviews with thirteen drama creators reveal that while some reckon with these logics, others critique how streaming companies exoticize Turkey’s touristic destinations and instrumentally bring them together with the industry’s globally recognized stars at the expense of creative storytelling. Thus, the imagination and use of data in streaming production cultures and the terms of creative inclusivity in global drama markets cannot be understood without considering the older logics of Orientalism and the value of locations outside the West.

Panel 3B - Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music - 30 years on: A Roundtable

In 1996, Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Zed Books) offered one of the first critical explorations of the cultural politics surrounding the emergent British Asian dance music culture. Thirty years later, its reverberations continue to shape how we think about diasporic sound, race, and media. To mark this anniversary, we are developing Dis-Orient30, a new edited collection to be published by 87 Press in 2026, alongside a roundtable at the Leeds conference.

The new collection revisits the historical conjuncture of the 1990s while tracing the mutations, hybridities, and commodifications that have unfolded since. Topics include the anti-racist and cultural politics of the music; the afterlife of the original collection alongside contemporaneous interventions such as 2nd Generation magazine; contested labels such as the “Asian Underground” and “Asian Cool”; and the mainstreaming of diasporic sounds via institutions like the BBC Asian Network and platforms such as Boiler Room. We consider the shifting relationship between British Asian cultural production and Black musical forms (e.g. reggae-rooted Vedic Roots Sound System), experimental practices like Dhangsa, and global circulations in Bollywood, popular Indian music, and Qawwali. Attention is also given to contemporary collectives including Daytimers, Dialled In, and Pussy Palace, and to the entanglement of sound with other media - film, television, music videos, poetry, and visual culture.

The forthcoming book brings together essays, interviews, visual works, experimental writing, and digital media. At Leeds, contributors will reflect on the legacies and futures of South Asian diasporic sound cultures, drawing connections and divergences across three decades. The roundtable will be an open, multimedia conversation, combining talk, images, music, and video, with both contributors and attendees invited to listen, remember, and imagine together.

Panel 3C – Consuming Race and Gender

“You’re an Argumentative Woman”: A Content Analysis of Controlling Images of Black Women in the Black Manosphere on YouTube

Briana Edwards (University of North Carolina)

Existing studies on the manosphere center the radicalization of white men toward anti-feminist and far-right extremism, leaving Black manosphere communities and the women they target largely unexamined. In these spaces, Black women are systematically disparaged as misogynoir reinforces harmful stereotypes about Black women, legitimizes their denigration, and sustains structural harms online and offline.
Adopting Patricia Hill Collins’ conceptual framework of controlling images, this study examines how historical tropes about Black women, including the Mammy, the Matriarch, the Jezebel, and the Angry Black Woman, are deployed by content creators in the Black manosphere. Using deductive qualitative content analysis, this study analyzed 143 YouTube videos from two Black manosphere YouTubers, Chisha Zed and Mediocre Tutorials & Reviews (MTR).

Analysis revealed the pervasiveness of the Jezebel and Angry Black Woman tropes. The Jezebel image appeared through manosphere-coded language, in which creators used terms such as “modern women,” “freaks,” and “easy” to characterize women as hypersexual. This image was visually reinforced by citing the presumed aesthetic of Black womanhood, such as long nails, false lashes, and weaves, as evidence of promiscuity. The Angry Black Woman trope framed Black women as combative and aggressive, portraying their anger as a cultural defect rather than a rational response to provocation. The Mammy and Matriarch stereotypes were largely absent.

This study argues that Black manosphere content facilitates ritualized bonding, in which creators and fans collectively degrade Black women. MTR’s, livestreams functioned as ritualized degradational spectacles wherein he and his viewers evaluated Black women’s physical appearances and discussed their value as wives or sexual conquests, reflecting the visual and discursive logics of antebellum slave auctions.
Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the Black manosphere adopts and adapts the controlling images of Black women, reinforces historically destructive narratives about their social and sexual worth, and perpetuates their denigration online and offline.

In Search of Southeast Asian Women in UK Media: Consolidating, Reimagining, Keep Looking

Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat (University of Leeds)

This paper examines the persistent invisibility and stereotypical portrayals of Southeast Asian women in UK media, drawing on comparative analysis with U.S. media, demographic data, and lived experience. In the U.S. context, representations of Southeast Asian women are often shaped by Cold War legacies and military entanglements with countries such as Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. These portrayals frequently cast women as hypersexualised, submissive, or cunning figures seeking upward mobility, yet rarely as intellectually capable. Hollywood continues to reproduce these tropes, most recently in The White Lotus Season 3 (2025), where the character Mook, played by Lalisa Manoban, embodies the stereotype of a manipulative working-class Thai woman striving for a better life.

In contrast, UK media offers minimal visibility to Southeast Asian women, reflecting both the smaller size of the diaspora and the absence of historical ties that typically inform representational tropes. According to the Office for National Statistics (2021), 417,318 Southeast Asians reside in the UK (excluding second generation Southeast Asians who identify as British nationals), with Filipino, Malaysian, and Thai communities forming the majority. Yet Southeast Asians women, are rarely portrayed in media, and when they are, their representation often centres on food, hospitality or low-skilled service roles rather than professional ones. This lack of representation reinforces gendered and racialised stereotypes, as evidenced by my own everyday encounters, such as when male strangers asked if I looked for a British partner or offered Thai massage services, revealing broader societal assumptions about Southeast Asian women.

Drawing from personal experience and critical media analysis, this paper argues for a reimagining of Southeast Asian women’s visibility in UK media. It calls for consolidating representational efforts and ongoing advocacy to challenge legacy stereotypes of their lived experiences in contemporary UK.

Diasporic Muslim Women and the Oppositional Gaze: Transnational Audiences on Muslim Women’s Representations in Western Europe

Salma Mediavilla Aboulaoula (University of Ghent)

In the post-9/11 era, marked by crises of Western liberal values and growing fears of ‘Islamisation,’ (non-)fictional depictions of Muslim women have become central sites for symbolic battles over identity and belonging (Easat-Daas, 2024; Mirza, 2013). Postcolonial feminist scholarship has shown how the public presence and mediated representation of Muslim women’s ‘bodies’ have been politicized amidst the War on Terror (Al-Wazedi, 2020; Aquil, 2011). Yet, media studies have paid limited attention to audience perspectives, particularly transnational reception studies that foreground their heterogeneous voices.

This paper departs from bell hooks’ (2012) work on Black female audiences and how ‘there is power in looking.’ It also draws on Du Gay, Hall et al.’s (2013) circuit of culture framework to examine how diasporic Muslim women in Belgium (n≈15) and the UK (n=11) engage with fictional portrayals of Muslim female characters in We Are Lady Parts (UK), wtFOCK (Belgium), and SKAM France/Belgique. The genre’s focus on identity formation and the contrasting sociopolitical contexts of France’s laïcité, Belgium’s ‘neutrality’ model, and the UK’s ‘multiculturalist’ model provide a backdrop for exploring four interrelated questions: (1) whether participants enjoy these identity-driven representations, (2) how they see their own lives reflected (or not) in them, (3) how they interpret depictions of other Muslim women across Western Europe, and (4) how these processes are shaped by the specific national contexts in which they live.

In-depth interviews and diary reflections were analyzed thematically in MAXQDA using an inductive, grounded theory-informed approach. Preliminary findings reveal what hooks (2012) terms the oppositional gaze: shaped by experiences of prejudice and gendered Islamophobia, participants noted that the usual sense of watching for entertainment was absent when consuming Muslim storylines, inviting a more critical form of viewing that often discouraged them from actively seeking out Muslim representation. They also noted tensions between visibility, authenticity, and commodification and questioned calls for ‘more representation’ when it risked cultural simplification or repetitive ‘struggle stories’ rather than diversity and joy. Moreover, the paper highlights the value of centring transnationality: engaging with international portrayals across transnational audiences fostered dialogue and mutual reflections on Muslim women’s lives and positionalities in Western Europe.

The Effects of Exposure to Gendered Stereotypes in Media Frames on Emotions and Attitudes Toward Refugees

Yossi David (The Lab for Social BIAS Research)

This study explores how exposure to gendered stereotypes shapes emotions and attitudes toward refugees. It aims to contribute a new theoretical perspective on the importance of gendered stereotypes while studying race and racism. Gendered stereotypes are common in media representations of individuals and groups, especially marginalized groups. French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, for example, asked of Alan Kurdi—a three-year-old Syrian boy who died en route to Europe—“What would little Alan have grown up to be?” It answered: “Ass groper in Germany.” Another example of refugees being represented this way is a headline in Polish magazine wSieci, describing refugees as an “Islamic rape of Europe.” Drawing on previous research examining how gendered stereotypes correlate to emotions and attitudes during political conflicts, this study offers a new theoretical model for exploring the effect of gendered stereotypes in shaping emotions and attitudes towards refugees. It uses three online experiments designed and conducted in Israel to examine the effect of gendered stereotypes on emotions and attitudes toward refugees. Such empirical examination can promote a better understanding of the role of gender and gendered stereotypes in shaping public opinion. It may also contribute to attempts to promote constructive political debate and stereotypical media coverage by specifically addressing the societal constructs—gendered representations and constructions—that can potentially advance positive political attitudes and behavior.

Racial Flow in IShowSpeed's China Tour: : Appropriating and Performing Racial Interpellations in the Transnational Attention Economy

Jiaying Tu (University of Amsterdam)

When the 20-year-old African American influencer, Darren Jason Watkins Jr. (IShowSpeed), visited China in the spring of 2025, his high profile in the transnational social media space stirred much debate about China’s post-pandemic image in the world. In the process, his Blackness often stood out as part of the media spectacles and discourses created by his interactions with the Chinese public. This paper examines the racial dynamics at play in the livestreaming content of IShowSpeed during his China tour, with a focus on how racial interpellations - specifically the performative adaptation and circulation of the “n-word” - is mediated, appropriated, and monetized in a (mis-)translated and cross-cultural digital context. Through close analysis of selected social scenes from IShowSpeed’s livestreams, we explore how a term deeply embedded in the history of anti-Black violence in the United States has been stripped of its historical weight and recontextualized in contemporary China and Sino-foreign relations as playfully provocative/provocatively playful. We argue that this process generates what we term a “racial spectacle” - a commodified display of racialized encounter that thrives on provocation, playfulness, and a relational tacitness grounded in the sensitivity of race and its plausible deniability.

This spectacle is not merely a byproduct of linguistic mis-translation or cultural misunderstanding, but a deliberate and strategic form of content production that leverages racial discourse for visibility and profit within the attention economy. We introduce the concept of “racial flow” to describe this mechanism of generating data traffic: the circulation, distortion, and monetization of racialized language in transnational media contexts. By tracing how race is reconfigured in the global livestreaming ecosystem, this paper urges scholars to take seriously the entanglement of race, digital spectacle, and platform capitalism, particularly in non-Western contexts where American racial discourse is reappropriated for entertainment, engagement, and economic gain. (297)

Panel 3D Technically Speaking: Uncut Communication Scholarship on the funk of Race in/and/as Media

Calls from Inside The House: Deepening Digital Hush Harbors in A Data-Driven Society

James Epps (University of California Los Angeles) and LaRisa Anderson-Horne (University of Utah)

A womanist pursuit of wholeness in a data-driven society considers how surveillance and data justice is central to religious practices on social media. The lineage of religious Black women and non binary people show the legacy of survival and innovation to express faith in transgressive ways. Likewise, critical internet studies reveal the need for justice from heteropatriarchal white supremacy enabled through technological capitalism. This project conceptually examines: what can critical internet scholarship learn from womanist tenets and how might technological critique enhance womanist and Black feminist technological practices? We are first guided by Melva Sampson’s (2020) articulation of digital hush harbors which analyzes the relationship between historic and contemporary strategies for fighting anti-Black racism and misogynoir via womanist and Black theological traditions. Sampson applies these concepts to the labor of Black preaching women who have built digital enclaves for prophetic, liberatory spaces of (religious) healing. Black feminists such as Catherine Knight Steele (2022) have similarly refocused our lens toward Black women’s 19th century labor and 21st century mastery of technologies to illustrate the transformative capacity of pursuing liberation, agency, and ownership. Thus, our analysis draws from Black religious/media scholarship such as Tamura Lomax, Erika Gault, Melva Sampson, Margarita Guillory, etc. and the digital civil rights scholars leading Black feminist scholarship on technological resistance such as Saifya Noble, SA Smythe, Moya Bailey, and Catherine Knight Steele. We read their scholarship in concert to reveal the power of embodied and anti-capitalist epistemologies. We conclude with a transdisciplinary conception of justice-seeking in a data-driven society, we call womanist techno-activism.

The Afterlives of Black Tech: A Rethinking of Techno-Next

Raven Lloyd (Washington University in St. Louis)

This paper explores what happens to online communities when their related online platform or technology dies or, less dramatically, morphs into something unrecognizable. From NetNoir and BlackPlanet to MySpace and Black Twitter, racial communities have long found a home in online spaces, a history that critical digital scholars have expertly charted. Beyond making this history visible, The Afterlives of Black Tech aims to fill in the gaps of how and in what ways each online community managed to morph into the next, if at all.

Through digital ethnography, textual analysis, and interviews of five Black ‘defunct’ online communities (Net Noir, Black Planet, MySpace, Vine, and Black Twitter), this project uses as a starting point the end of each racialized community to uncover the ways that Black technologists build on past iterations to create a network of intergenerational creative practices.

Each of these case studies reveals a particular moment in technology history chosen for the platform’s demise, which occurred at a major technological epoch (e.g. Net Noir and consolidation of tech-investment resources between 1995–2000; Black Twitter and the popularization of Artificial Intelligence and the rise of personalized algorithms in 2022). What this project proposes to accomplish is a collection of these kinds of aesthetic (and linguistic and skills-based) markers to make a broader argument about how Black users fashioned their afterlives from one platform to the next.

TikTok as an App is Not Friendly to Black Creators”: Algorithmic Conspiracy Theories

Zari Taylor (New York University)

During the strikes by Black TikTok users in 2020, Chinyelu Mwaafrika told Time Magazine, “TikTok as an app is not friendly to Black creators. Whether that’s because of the way that it’s programmed or because of the way that users interact and engage with content, it’s not an app that you see a lot of Black creators getting hugely successful on.” This chapter introduces algorithmic conspiracy theories – beliefs that algorithmic technologies perpetuate anti-Black racism – in order to understand the blame Mwaafrika and others place onto TikTok as a technical structure. How do users see themselves and their racial identity in relation to TikTok’s algorithm? How does it latch onto practices of conspiracy theorizing that Black people often use to make sense of anti-Black racism?

Algorithms are the set of rules and calculations that make computers work and are used in nearly every aspect of our lives, including what music we listen to, the route we take to work, or how policing is distributed. On social media, they categorize and construct what content users see on their feeds which largely shape how we see the world around us. But algorithms do not exist in a vacuum and are shaped by the society in which they were created. Scholars at the intersection of digital studies and critical race studies have contended with the ways in which algorithms reproduce and amplify societal inequalities and discrimination, particularly around race (Benjamin 2018, Brock 2020). Search queries or playlist curations may seem neutral but, in presenting a particular version of the world, may operate within a framework of anti-Blackness, sexism, ableism and more (Noble 2017). Notions of “algorithmic imaginaries” (Bucher 2016), “algorithmic folk theories” (Ytre-Arne and Moe 2020), and “algorithmic gossip” (Bishop 2019) describe how users make sense of how algorithms functions and how they respond to algorithmic systems in turn. Scholars have also considered how users make sense of algorithms in regards to identity (Karizat et al. 2021, Meyerend 2022). And while this scholarship teaches us how users see themselves in relation to algorithms, especially those on social media, they fail to explicitly consider how Black users carry understandings of racism to algorithmic systems.

My contribution to and extension of these concepts is algorithmic conspiracy theories – beliefs that algorithmic technologies perpetuate anti-Black racism against Black users by rendering them invisible within TikTok’s feed. While a conspiracy is a plot to do something harmful, a conspiracy theory is a hypothesis that uncovers such plots (Truss 2025), and conspiracy theories have often been used by Black people to make sense of racism and anti-Blackness as a conspiracy that shows up both systemically and in their everyday lives. Conspiracy theorizing draws on histories often erased or rewritten within dominant memory and may or not be true, a level of flexibility crucial to my conceptualization. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Black women content creators on TikTok, I map how algorithmic conspiracy theories are applied to technology broadly and TikTok specifically, with participants insisting that through both user behavior or innate coding, TikTok’s algorithm reproduces societal hierarchies that determine visibility and treatment on the platform.

Black Mediums and Messages: The Racializing Grammars of Comics and Cinema

Meshell Sturgis (University of New Mexico)

In the last decade, American scholars have expounded on the complicated and multifaceted relationship between Black subjects and technology. Some have focused on the agency of media users (Gray 2020; Brock 2020; Clark 2025), while others uncovered the ills of digital technology (Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019; Broussard 2023). At the same time, literature on representations of Blackness in comic books has come to the fore (Howard & Jackson 2013; Whaley 2015; Wanzo 2020; Dagbovie-Mullins & Berlatsky 2021). Amidst those who analyze representations of race and those who track racialized subjects and technology, few scholars have kept their attention on the inextricable link between mediums and messages (McLuhan 1964; Chun 2009; McPherson 2012). Replicating the methodology of Catherine Knight Steele (2021), this presentation and paper explicates the transaesthetic through-line from legacy comic books to a technological media successor, cinema. As Stuart Hall explains, there are two vectors of diasporic identity, one of fixed similarity and the other of flexible difference. If identity is “always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall 1990, 222), then the apparatuses that forge such representation necessarily encapsulate meaning and foreclose the possibilities of Black subjectivity (222, 1990). This can be witnessed in the racializing grammars of comic books (panels and gutters defined by conventionally straight-edged lines) as well as in the grammars of cinema (successive frames and reel motion). In all its verisimilitude, Black subjectivity exists simultaneously within these terministic bounds as well as beyond (Burke 1966; Friedberg 2009). To be in view is terminal: a beginning and an end.

Panel 4A – Theories of Race and Media

Centering Genre as a Core Analytic for Race and (Western) Media

Liz Hallgren (University of Pennsylvania)

Normative assumptions of our present media environment often deem journalism the reliable, orderly information antidote to the disordered, chaotic realm of social media. However, this assumption is rooted in Western liberal logics that see certain kinds of information as “coherent” or “logical,” while others are rendered “backward,” or “irrational” (e.g. Said, 1978; Hall, 1992). How might a renewed look at genre in our contemporary media landscape help explain the epistemological underpinnings for such assumptions? If genre is a window onto the productive conditions of discourse (e.g. Foucault, 1969; Bordwell, 1989), how can it help us account for the ways our primary modes of public discourse – journalistic media and social media (and the conflation of these) – negotiate race as an organizing discursive formation of Western contemporary life? How might taking a renewed look at genre help us to understand, for example, the impact of media moments like Kamala Harris’ entry into the 2024 US presidential race as both a social media meme and a feature of mainstream news profiles? Or the celebrification of the white male assailant of a healthcare executive last year, as both a social media “thirst trap” and a subject of mainstream media “think pieces” delimiting the boundaries of acceptable political speech? Studies of genre in other dominant Western expressive forms have laid the groundwork for this kind of thinking. For example, scholars have long identified the ways in which the structures of the novel (e.g. Said, 1978; Marais, 1996; Coundouriotis, 1999) and historical record (e.g. White, 1990; Trouillot, 1995; Hartman, 2008) convey information to embed othering impulses in everyday experience and understanding. This theoretically motivated paper builds from this foundational work by urging for the study of contemporary journalism and social media forms, as core sites of public discourse, together from a genre perspective, arguing that attention to genre helps us understand what is naturalized as truth and mobilized as knowledge in ways that entrench racial difference.

The Making of Racialised Publics: A Historical and Transnational Approach

Wendy Willems (London School of Economics)

The global historical context in which race emerged as a category of difference as well as the more recent, intensified global circulation of both racist and anti-racist discourses via social media, legacy media and physical space suggest that a more historical and transnational approach to the intersection of race, racism and media is urgently needed. And yet, existing work on race, media and digital technology has often adopted a nation-centric and presentist lens, focusing frequently on the United States context, which echoes recent critiques of critical race theory (Meghji 2020). Emerging work on publics in a digital age, on the other hand, often frames the making of digital publics in relation to technological change, capitalism and democratisation whilst silencing longer transnational histories of colonialism and racialisation that continue to shape digital publics. Racialised publics refer to both the transnational infrastructures that have constituted such spaces historically and the discourses that circulate through the spaces enabled by the infrastructures. In this paper, I challenge presentist analyses which privilege technological explanations of the changing nature of publics. Given histories of genocide, slavery and colonialism, the paper argues that publics should be examined as racialised publics which have always been shaped by the circulation of texts, discourses, technologies and infrastructures across national borders. Emphasising continuity rather than disruption, it explores the constitution of racialised publics from the vantage point of South Africa and its colonial links to Europe and its anticolonial connections to the United States and Palestine. It proposes four different methods to situate the making of racialised publics in a historical and transnational context: reparatory history, historical comparison, historical revisionism and historical analogy. In this way, it demonstrates that race does not simply provide another ‘prism’ to examine publics but instead actively enables and is constitutive of it.

Recent Debates About Racism as Ideology: Emphasising Practices Rather Than Beliefs

David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds)

The concept of ideology has fallen from favour in media and cultural studies over the last forty or so years, in spite of occasional efforts to restore it. The paper argues for the continuing relevance of the concept but draws upon recent debates in political theory and political philosophy to try to refine it in the context of modern debates about racism, media and social media.

It builds on Tommie Shelby’s (2014) claims that “racism is fundamentally an ideology” and that “An ideology is a widely held set of loosely associated and implicit judgments that misrepresent significant social realities and that function, through this distortion, to bring about or perpetuate unjust social relations”. But the paper also builds on feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger’s (2017) critique of the cognitivist elements in Shelby’s model, i.e. that he is overly reliant on reasoned public dialogue as a response to the existence of ideological racist beliefs. In response, Haslanger argues for an approach that understands ideologies “in terms of the concepts, rules, norms, stereotypes, scripts, and the like that partly constitute a practice” (emphasis added) so that we need “challenges to the concepts and other framing devices that create meaning, and more generally to the practice as a whole”. One of the potential implications of Haslanger’s position for analysis of media representations is that, rather than assert “facts” (which are often themselves constructed out of ideology) against false representations, the emphasis needs to shift to analysing underlying concepts, framing devices and practices. This is consistent with some approaches to race and racism in the media, but Haslanger’s approach delineates the key ideological elements in a clearer way than most media analysts manage. However, her approach is highly abstract (perhaps necessarily so for her to undertake the philosopher’s main task of conceptual clarification) so I test out Haslanger’s theory by considering how best critical analysts of race and media might approach the widespread circulation of claims on social media that diasporic and refugee populations are involved disproportionately in sexual crime, a vital plank of rising anti-migrant movements and far-right parties. What are the relevant concepts and framing devices underlying these claims, and what are the relevant practices underlying these deeply racist representations? To what extent might critique based on Haslanger’s approach be successful in countering them?

Racialism Without the Racism: A Way of Making Race That Contributes to Its Undoing

Anamik Saha (University of Leeds)

There is a broad consensus in race and media research that representations of racialised groups in Western media have shifted from visibility to hypervisibility. Black, Asian and other racially minoritised characters are no longer confined to marginal or stereotypical roles; instead, they appear increasingly liberated from the historical constructions of Otherness that once defined them. Yet, despite this apparent realisation of a civil rights imaginary, as media have become more superdiverse, racist currents have intensified – a wave that has helped propel populist right movements to political power.

Given the prominence of anti-DEI rhetoric within this explicitly anti-migrant populist resurgence, particularly in Western contexts, it is tempting to conclude that too much diversity on our screens is fuelling this backlash. This paper offers an alternative account. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Against Race (2000), I argue that the dominant form of media diversity – what I term popular superdiversity – is shaped by a postracial discourse that has lulled society into a false sense of racial security.

To move beyond this impasse, I turn to David Theo Goldberg and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s conceptual distinctions around racialism and antiracialism. Rather than denying race and racism, as postracial and antiracialist positions tend to do, I suggest that cultural producers can engage race directly, making it in ways that are racialist but not racist. Through an analysis of the YouTube collective Beta Squad, I show how such practices of race-making can destabilise the very logics of race that underpin racism.

Black/Latinidad: The Failure of Race, Ethnicity in the Media

Isabel Molina (University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign)

This paper employs a critical ethnic and intersectional feminist framework to interrogate the persistent inadequacies of media representation for mixed-race Black/Latinidad identities. By examining Global Hollywood texts, the paper interrogates the issues with US categories of ethnicity that reinforce binary, homogenising, and exclusionary constructs of race and ethnicity. The slash (“/”) in Black/Latinidad is deployed to highlight both the cognitive and social dissonance experienced by multiracial individuals and the failure of media industries to capture this complexity. The result is a flattening of intricate experiences of identity by placing actors into narrowly-defined, visually prescribed roles.

The abstract draws on recent census data documenting a dramatic rise in mixed-race and multiracial populations globally and in the United States, as well as industry studies showing continued underrepresentation and typecasting of Black/Latina/o/x actors—particularly women with darker skin—in film and television. Using three media case studies—Marvel’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, Netflix’s “Emma Perez” starring Zoë Saldaña, and USA Network’s “Suits” starring Gina Torres—the paper explores the relationship between Hollywood’s casting choices and Westernised racial hierarchies that visually position de-ethnicised whiteness at the top and ethnicised, racial and racialised ethnic identities at the bottom. Each case study provides an opportunity to consider how Westernised racial hierarchies are both challenged and enforced through visual ways of seeing.

The paper concludes by contrasting the complex visibility presented in each case study with other media depictions of racial violence and death. Engaging in this contrast presents an opportunity to reflect on Global Hollywood as a widely consumed digital and legacy archive that highlights the hypervisibility of race by subordinating ethnicity and performances of ethnicity that complicate race.

Ultimately, the project calls for a more nuanced, intersectional academic analysis and critique of media practices that flatten the complexity of multiracial bodies and identities, insisting instead on the recognition of the full lived realities of audiences, actors, and the stories on our screens. Thus, it asks media practitioners and scholars to confront how visual “truths” in media contribute to ongoing structures of exclusion and dehumanisation, and to reimagine representation beyond reductive binaries.

Panel 4B – Asian American Racialisation and Diasporic Consumption

‘Asians are Cool’: Giant Robot and the Aesthetics of Asian American Racialisation

Caroline Hsu (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

The debate between “Asian American” as a coalitional political identity and “Asian American” as an essentialist racial category can be traced to the origins of the term itself. Although this definitional conflict is still not settled, the Asian American arts and culture magazine Giant Robot (GR), which ran from 1994 to 2011, added a wrinkle to the debate by suggesting that “Asian American” can also be defined as a type of aesthetic discernment, or in other words, as coolness.

Editors, writers, and fans of GR laud the magazine for its impeccable, near-prophetic taste in Asian diasporic music, film, fashion, food, and art. GR’s commitment to racialized coolness helped construct “Asian American” as an aesthetic, a market, and an identity. Notably, many of the artists who contributed to or were profiled in GR were niche and subcultural at the time, but have since achieved mainstream Western fame, and are acclaimed for contributing to the AAPI representation matters moment that began in 2015 with the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat (e.g. Taika Waititi, Michelle Yeoh, Dev Patel, Bong Joon Ho, etc.).

Rather than defining “Asian American” as a political commitment or an essential racial trait, GR suggested that “Asian American” was a style, a product, and a consumption practice, paving the way for our present moment, where the mainstream adoption of Asian diasporic film, music, and food is often cited as the proof that Asian Americans have finally “made it.”

Marketing Asian Americana: Aesthetics of a Diaspora

Christine Phan (University of Pennsylvania)

Should K-Pop Just Be Called Pop?

Joey Song (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

The global K-pop industry shows no signs of slowing down as K-pop Demon Hunters (2025) recently became Netflix’s most-watched film, and its song “Golden” became the number one song on the Billboard Top 100. The girl group in this animated film is fictional, yet their massive popularity eclipses the real singers who voice the members. Additionally, more multi-ethnic “K-pop” groups are entering the mainstream, such as the United States-based girl group Katseye. K-pop often invokes national and ethnic specificity, yet, simultaneously, its massive global popularity signals a seemingly apolitical sonic platform that is palatable for all audiences. K-pop operates as an endemic genre that concerns itself with representing Korean culture/history, but the industry often employs American producers who utilize sound design popularized a decade prior by Black and white producers (trap hi-hats, bombastic synth horns, hyper-compressed 808s, etc.). The sonic landscape is distinctly familiar to a Western listener, but the specific appeal of K-pop resides less in the music than in the parasocial relationship between fans and boy group/girl group members. I argue that K-pop’s duality as both Korean-specific and paradigmatically multicultural contributes to the genre’s appeal. This account of racial identity as a matter of aesthetics informs the popularity of the genre as well as fan interaction.

Panel 4C – Performing Racial Identities in the Attention Economy

Digital Ethnographic Deep-Dive into the Intricacies of Racial Performance

Lauren Michelle Harvey (Duke University)

This project is a digital ethnographic deep-dive into the intricacies of racial performance and influencer authenticity on the social media platform TikTok. Within the last several years, a trend has emerged in which non-Black women deliberately darken their skin, wear culturally-Black protective hairstyles, change their manner of speaking to mimic African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or otherwise attempt to co-opt Blackness in digital spaces. This practice of presenting oneself disingenuously as Black in an online setting is called “blackfishing” (Thompson, 2018). As of yet, however, the scope, frequency, and markers indicating when blackfishing is occurring have not been defined. This project seeks to do just that.

To date, much of the research examining blackfishing has focused on “calling out” some of the most egregious cases of the practice (Stevens, 2021; Cherid, 2021). These studies focus only on a very small number of highly-followed influencers who have been “called out” for their behavior and faced dramatic social backlash as a result of these accusations. However, I assert that blackfishing is more wide-spread of a practice than has been documented in the few overt, highly-publicized cases.

To determine how wide-spread the practice is on TikTok, this project involves over a year’s worth of intensive study of the accounts of different influencers from varying levels of social media fame. Comprised of data derived from more than 3,000 videos of several hundred aspiring influencers on TikTok, this project names, identifies, and categorizes the different ways in which blackfishing is performed on the platform.

With its explicit focus on how race is constructed, performed, and re-articulated on the app, this project seeks to identify the boundaries of race in influencer culture—and determine the extent to which influencers on the app benefit from engaging in digital racial variability.

Vitamin B: How Brahmin Content Creators Perform Caste Supremacist Identity on Instagram

Tejas Harad & Natasha Williams (University of Pennsylvania)

Eminent sociologists of India such as Srinivas (2003), Beteille (2012) and Gupta (2019) have proclaimed that the caste system is slowly disintegrating. However, cultural practices on Instagram reveal a persistence of ordinary users taking pride in their (upper) caste identity, endorsing endogamy, and claiming caste superiority through eugenicist rhetoric that challenge these claims of post-caste society.

In this study, we closely analyze short-form videos on Instagram to show how users construct and perform caste supremacist Brahmin identity, and in turn cultivate intimate publics among their viewers which reproduce caste-based discourses. Following Hall’s theorization that identities are “never completed”, “never finished” and always “in process”, we show how Brahminness is reconfigured contextually through aesthetic norms and algorithmic logics of Instagram (Hall, 2019).

We are interested in Instagram content that constructs and depicts a sense of Brahmin identity and how this identity is reproduced in intimate publics that cohere around Brahmin-related content and creators. First, we conceptualize for our purposes what constitutes Brahmin identity. Next, we draw a corpus of posts from prominent Brahmin-related hashtags and accounts on Instagram.

We then code for those posts that meet our inclusion criteria, and randomly sample a corpus from this for a qualitative close-reading to understand how Brahmin identity is in turn discursively constructed and represented in these posts. Finally, we turn to the comment sections of these posts in order to analyze how discourses of Brahminness and cultural representations of Brahmin identity are further (re)produced among audience publics on Instagram.

Performing Peripheral Whiteness on Instagram: ‘Slavic’, ‘Eastern European’, and ‘Soviet’ as Online Identities

Marta Wójtowicz (University of Leeds)

Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Eastern Europe has once again become highly visible in the media worldwide. In this paper, rather than focusing on geopolitical narratives, I examine how the categories ‘Slavic’, ‘Eastern European’, and ‘Soviet’ emerge as identity markers and are used by content creators on Instagram. I focus on two Canada-based creators – Cristina Cataman and Kateryna Fylypchuk – whose online presence frequently references their immigrant backgrounds.

I argue that, through exaggerated performances of stereotypes associated with ‘Slavs’ and ‘Eastern Europeans,’ these creators distance themselves from hegemonic whiteness and emphasise their peripheral whiteness (Blachnicka-Ciacek & Urbańska 2025) via a process of self-Euro-Orientalisation.

Kobayashi et al. (2017: 161) define self-Orientalism as ‘the wilful (re-)action of non-Western individuals and institutions to ‘play the Other’’ to gain visibility and strategically position themselves in the global order. Since whiteness is central to the racialisation of Eastern Europeans (Wiedlack 2018), I propose the term ‘self-Euro-Orientalism’ to distinguish these practices from those of the non-European, non-Western context. This mode of self-representation marks a shift away from earlier post-Cold War ‘return to Europe’ narratives, which stressed the inherent ‘Europeanness’ of the former Eastern Bloc.

I situate my analysis within the context of migration and globalisation and consider how generational differences shape the ways in which ‘Slavicness’, ‘East Europeanness,’ and ‘Sovietness’ are embraced and humorously performed online. This paper contributes to scholarship on digital culture and identity by showing how self-Euro-Orientalism operates as a strategy of negotiating visibility for Eastern European diasporas.

Disciplined by the Algorithm: Social Media, Religion, Caste, and Queer and Trans Women in India

Tanvi Kanchan (SOAS)

This paper takes a political economy approach to understanding queer and trans digital cultures in India, focusing on the experiences of caste-oppressed and Muslim queer and trans women. Based on insights from 23 in-depth interviews, conducted during my doctoral fieldwork, I present a critical analysis of how the nexus of global laws, Indian laws, and content moderation policies on social media platforms influence queer and trans users’ online experiences.

Specifically, I examine how queer and trans women’s efforts to use social media to build community, produce and disseminate knowledge, and engage in discourse is constrained by the confluence and intertwined impact of three major factors. This includes 1) the global deplatforming of sex (Tiidenberg and van der Nagel, 2020), driven by changes in US law, 2) the increase in digital authoritarianism in India, and 3) the friction between queer uses of social media platforms and their un-queer logics, including those of content moderation and algorithmic ordering, and the lack of appropriate content moderation in languages other than English.

I discuss how both material instances of censorship or moderation, as well as perceptions and ideas of how such forces work, driven by algorithmic folklore and gossip, lead to Indian queer and trans women engaging in a range of negotiations and self-censoring behaviour online.

Given how social media users marginalised along the lines of race, gender, religion, caste, queerness, and transness have long been disproportionately affected by platform content moderation strategies and algorithmic governance (Dasgupta and DasGupta, 2018; Banaji and Bhat, 2022; Are, 2024), I explore how these forces are specifically experienced by caste-oppressed and Muslim queer and trans women in India.

(Re)imagining Black Creole Mauritian Femininity in and Through Online Self-Representation

Joe Ann Chavry (London School of Economics)

(Re)imagining Black Creole Mauritian femininity in and through online self-representation. Black women are increasingly at the forefront of some of the most important discussions pertaining to digital cultures. This includes research on how they use social media for self-definition, self-assertion, and self-valuation in the face of systematic misrepresentation and/or invisibilisation in (trans)national media. However, the body of literature on the topic is largely situated in North American/ European contexts, with increasing interest in the online experiences of women on the African continent. Still, little is said about Black women’s online practices in the Indian Ocean.

In this paper I engage with Black femininity in Mauritius where antiblackness has historically been constituted under the European racist imaginary alongside the Brahminic caste system. Within this palimpsestic, transcolonial, formation informed by an increasingly Hindu ethnonationalist sentiments, I look at the extent to which Black Creole Mauritian women make sense of their subjective selves in and through the practice of visual online self-representation on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. In doing so, I also ask to what extent such practices potentially constitute a Black Creole Mauritian feminist discourse.

By deploying semi-structured interviews with Black Mauritian women, followed by discourse analysis, this paper suggests that online self-representation helps Black Mauritian women to constitute themselves as ethical subjects through the lens of beauty. Online self-representation, then, becomes an ambivalent practice in and through which Black Mauritian popular feminist discourse manifests. Through this discourse, Black Mauritian women simultaneously make an ontological claim, while engaging with antiblackness anchored in Mauritius’ majoritarian politics informed by communalism, a system crystallising white and Hindu racist ideologies.

Together, this paper positions Mauritius as an important analytical site opening up new understandings of Black femininity, alongside online popular feminisms, thereby extending existing scholarship largely informed by Black Atlantic and/or continental African perspectives.

Panel 4D – Racism, News and Politics

From Courtroom to Newspaper: Recontextualising Race in US Coverage of the Chauvin Trial

Natalie Jones (University of Leeds)

Focusing on the State of Minnesota v. Derek Chauvin trial (2021), I investigate how crime narratives are transformed as they ‘travel’ (Heffer et al, 2013) from the trial courtroom to U.S. newspaper coverage. Drawing on Agha’s (2011) notion of mediatization and Critical Race Theory (e.g. Delgado & Stefancic 2023), the study examines how legal talk is recontextualized in both local and national news reporting and how the two discourses interact to shape collective understandings of race, police violence, and justice. Combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL) and using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff, 2014), I analyse cross-examination transcripts of ‘key’ witnesses and contemporaneous news reporting, considering how narratives are selectively framed, recontextualised, and repurposed for a new audience.

While the principle of ‘open justice’ is intended to make trials publicly accessible (Open Government Partnership, 2025), in practice, they are primarily consumed by the public through news coverage. This raises questions about how selective framing and recontextualization influence public perception. When arguments and events are fore-, backgrounded or omitted, these choices construct and reflect social narratives about race and policing, potentially adding to unrest, fear, and victimisation.

Findings indicate a contrast between local and national newspaper reporting, showing how national media influence public knowledge through dissemination of ideologically charged narratives about race and justice. In local newspapers, keywords such as ‘jurors’ and ‘bystanders’ emphasise those directly involved, situating events within a localized context, while national reporting employs more ideologically charged language, such as the keyword ‘slavery’, linking the trial to broader historical and systemic racial injustices: ‘In order to justify American slavery, Black people were deemed to be objects to be owned and controlled, or beaten and killed if thought to be rebellious. Seemingly in Chauvin's mind, he was just carrying forward an American tradition.’ (Philadelphia Daily News, 04/04/21).

‘This Is the Kind of Racism One Should Worry About’: Affective-Discursive Practices Constructing Racism and ‘Not Racism’ in Finland

Aino Nevalainen (University of Helsinki)

In mainstream and social media in Finland, recent years have witnessed moments of expansive mediated contention over (anti)racism where definitions of racism as well as the content and practices of antiracism have been intensely contested and where discourses challenging antiracism have gained abundant visibility. This contention manifests not only as struggles over what racism and antiracism are (not) and what should (not) be done about them, but also as struggles over emotions—what is (not) and should (not) be felt about them.

This paper parses how events, practices, and objects are constructed through mediated affective-discursive practices—‘patterned forms of human activity articulating, mobilising and organising affect and discourse’ (Wetherell, 2015, p. 57)—as racism and 'not racism' (Lentin, 2018), referring to the ‘denial and redefinition of racism... that has become a central formulation for the expression and legitimation of racism’ (Lentin, 2018, p. 401). This article brings new depth to the analysis of public struggles over the meanings of (anti)racism by centering the interwovenness of meaning-making and emotion in circumscribing what can and cannot be publicly named as racism.

This paper, utilizing analysis of affective-discursive practices on 86 mainstream news media articles and 1000 X (formerly Twitter) posts, examines two recent cases of mediated contention over (anti)racism in the Finnish context: discussions on the racist abuse targeting the first Black woman selected to represent St. Lucia at the traditional festival of light in December 2024 and the renewed discussions on the popular traditional Star of Africa board game in January 2025.

This research argues that the ability to invoke a public response against racism is conditional and deeply ambivalent. Drawing attention to power and resistance, this paper examines how hegemonic notions of what constitutes racism are reproduced and recalibrated but also challenged through affective-discursive practices in mediated contention.

The Post-Mortem Mea Culpa: Trouillot’s Abortive Ritual and Journalism’s “Racial Reckoning”

Anjali DasSarma (University of Pennsylvania)

Just five years ago in the United States, as protestors called for Black liberation and an end to police brutality, newspapers across the country began delivering “episodic and reactionary” apologies for their racist pasts (Sridharan and Taylor, 2023, p. 2066). This paper aims to interrogate the American journalism industry’s apology-response to the 2020 racial justice social movement by returning to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (2000) abortive ritual of collective apologies. In Trouillot’s configuration, collective apologies function as illocutionary acts and transformative rituals, operating between spatial-temporal planes, necessarily both separated and bonded by time.

In their slew of apologies, newspapers followed this model closely: The Baltimore Sun admitted fault for selling advertisements for enslaved people in the 1800s; The Kansas City Star issued an apology for misrepresenting Black people in coverage during the Jim Crow era; The Los Angeles Times apologized for disregarding the role of race in the 1943 Zoot suit attacks.

In addition, collective apologies, as operations, require a “perpetrator and apologizer” and then “a victim and addressee” (Trouillot, 2000, p. 390). Apologizing newspapers retain continuity by way of form, from perpetrator to apologizer, subsequently making the ritual possible (though not necessarily successful). However, in newspapers that no longer exist, the ritual of apology is disrupted by the existence of a perpetrator (catalogued and archived en masse) but no apologizer.

This paper will contemplate apologies in terms of continuity (Long Soldier, 2017), hauntings (Hartman, 2008; Bergland, 2015), cycles of narrative violence (Usher and Carlson, 2022; Saha, Sobande, and Titley, 2024), and moral economy (Hesmondhalgh, 2016). Parsing the diametric between living newspapers and dead, apologies delivered and forgotten, it asks:

1. What ephemeral violence remains drifting in the seas of history, unacknowledged?
2. What do we do with the material traces of journalism’s violence when printing stops?
3. How does the dead newspaper say I’m sorry?

Mediating White Victimcould: Hypothetical Injuries, Imaginary Futures, and the ‘Criminalisation’ of Donald Trump

Kathryn Claire Higgins (Goldsmiths, University of London)

This paper theorizes how far-Right and white supremacist movements leverage hypothetical injuries and imaginary futures to justify agendas of social violence – a technique I term victimcould. Victimcould is both a representational achievement (alive within the cultural repertoires of the far-Right) and a justificatory logic (supporting the cultural legitimacy of far-Right political agendas). Working with feminist theorizations of vulnerability politics (see Cole, 2016; Oliviero, 2018) and extant critiques of ‘tactical’ white victimhood (see Chouliaraki, 2024; Sengul, 2021), I position victimcould as an analytical intervention that clarifies how far-Right movements use representational media (including but not limited to Generative AI) to strategically exploit both the prospective temporality of vulnerability as openness to injury (rather than injury itself) and the definitional openness of the unarrived, always-as-yet-undetermined future.

I do this by way of an illustrative example: the so-called criminalization of US President Donald Trump, a “tough on crime” convicted felon. As abolitionist scholars of the criminal legal system have long argued, criminalization is a racialized and classed system of vulnerability politics whereby the state inflicts violence, exclusion and economic exploitation on some of its citizens (and non-citizens) in the name of ensuring ‘safety’ and ‘justice’ for the nation ‘as a whole’ (see Cacho, 2012; Davis, 1998; Wilson Gilmore and Gilmore, 2016, Kelley, 2016). Through close analysis of a series of AI-generated images of Trump’s could-be arrest that went viral online in March 2023—six months before his actual arrest occurred in September 2023—I give an account of how Trump and his allies engaged white victimcould to a) appropriate the cultural and aesthetic legacies of anti-racist justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter; and b) strategically invert the actual racial politics of the US criminal legal system, repositioning ‘conservative’ white men (and Trump as their proxy) as its primary victims. This analysis has implications for how we make sense of far-Right claims of “two-tier policing” in the United Kingdom, as well as Trump’s militarized “war on crime” in cities like Washington DC and Chicago.

Framing Racism in Contemporary Germany: Discursive Shifts and Activist Media Strategies

Thomas Zacharias (Goldsmiths, University of London)

This paper addresses the changing discourse of racism in Germany. The German context presents a distinctive challenge for critical race scholarship, as the historical trauma of National Socialism has fostered a discursive and institutional avoidance of the concepts of “race” and racism. This avoidance has complicated efforts to address systemic racism and racialized structures. Until recently, public and political discourse largely eschewed sustained analysis of racism’s operational logic. A rise in antisemitic and racist attacks over the past decade, such as the racist riots in Chemnitz in 2018 or the terror attack in Hanau in 2020, has prompted increased engagement by state and civil society actors to deploy the term racism (Bojadžijev, Celikates & Mecheril 2025). Yet many initiatives remain limited, failing to conceptualize racism as a social relation, or a relation of domination that has grown historically out of European modernity (Goldberg 1993; Hall 2002).

There has been some progress in the fields of academia and anti-racist activism in the ways in which racism is theorised and applied to situations which might previously have been simply labelled ‘hostility towards foreigners’ (Ausländerfeindlichkeit) or ‘xenophobia’. However, more work needs to be done in developing rigorous and consistent accounts of the logic and operation of racism in Germany at the discursive level.

This paper offers a combined semiotic and critical discourse analysis of the social media campaign Hast du Rassismus erlebt? [“Have you experienced racism?”] by the local activist group Runder Tisch Gegen Rassismus [Roundtable Against Racism]. The campaign, which integrates social media and poster-based strategies, seeks to raise awareness of racism and mobilize community responses. By examining its visual and rhetorical design, the paper asks: How is racism framed and theorized in this campaign? How are issues of sameness and difference represented, reproduced, or contested in its imagery and language?

Panel 5A – Anti-Racist Media

Creating Fugitive Media: New Tactics for Discussing Liberatory Politics Through Popular and Mass Media

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin (University of Michigan)

Popular media —media that circulate through popular culture, such as news, television shows, music, and movies— has historically acted as an important space through which liberatory messages that push against these repressive tactics have been communicated and translated to broad audiences throughout society (Fiske, 1989; Gray, 2004). However, Today, rising threats to democracy around the world have led to increased censorship and misinformation around liberatory racial political movements that seek to critically examine how the intersection of race, gender, sexual identity, and class shapes people’s lived experiences and equitable access to valuable social resources (Ferragamo, 2025). Thus, it has become imperative to consider new frameworks and tactics for ways we might still discuss liberatory politics through media under systems of oppression and repression. Drawing on my research examining how U.S. Black women, femme, and queer journalists, writers, and media producers strategically engage their representation and informational values within an increasingly repressive media systems and institutions, or what I term “Popular Black Feminism,” I suggest one such approach may be to engage in the production of fugitive media: media-embedded with meanings and actions that subvert the dominant representational norms and grounds set out for them while drawing resources from and still being encapsulated by the neoliberal markets of larger media industries (Harney et al., 2013; Hartman, 1997; Moten, 2017). Through the examples of tactics engaged within different media of Popular Black feminism—journalism, television, and visual albums — this paper illustrates the tools these media producers have engaged to navigate the tension between dominant media industry economic paradigms and their own political values. More broadly, I argue that the concept of fugitive media offers a new framework for how we might engage in complex discussions around systemic oppression through media in moments of social and political repression.

Reparations and Theorising Media Harm: Extraction, Distortion, and Exclusion

Khadijah White (Rutgers University) & AJ Christian (Northwestern University)

Focused on the United States, our paper proposes a reparative framework by which we can think through media harm and repair to marginalized communities in three interconnected areas: Extraction, Exclusion and Distortion. Extraction includes the ownership, appropriation and co-optation of intellectual property, stories and cultural artifacts in ways that leave people and communities indebted or worse off. Exclusion occurs in the hiring of labor, sourcing for stories and in stories across mediums, in ways that render communities invisible, limit opportunities for self-representation and disproportionately benefit those in power, perpetuating inequalities. Distortion extends from exclusion of the diverse perspectives in media and technology and reflects the agenda of those in power, including through false objectivity/neutrality, stereotyping, and invisibility/hypervisibility. By charting how media harm has occurred in these three domains, we outline a path towards media reparations and pro-democratic inclusion.

What Blackness Can Teach Us About Religion and Media: On the Pursuit of Liberation

LaRisa Anderson-Horne (University of Utah)

The notion that “religion” is a language-game among scholars has been widely documented1 in the same ways we may question what constitutes “media”2, yet the interplay of these problematic categories considering antiblackness and other loci of power is undertheorized.3 Likewise, the intentionality of religious resistance to oppression such as the freedom-seeking quality of Black religions described by Erika Gault’s work on digital Black Christians is an emerging research area for religion and media scholars.4 My conceptual framework, technocultural religion, is an opening toward situating the study of religion within what Armond Towns calls a “black media philosophy”. Specifically, my presentation will review the ways a technocultural turn in the study of digital religion can open new possibilities for research grounded in the embodied experiences of settler colonialism.

To demonstrate this new path for religion and media research, I follow progressive religious deconstruction among Black digital creators through in-depth interviews, podcast episode audio analysis, and a digital ethnography of a Black deconstruction community. Religious deconstruction in its digital and religious patina disassembles religious indoctrination to resolve social and ethical dilemmas within their religious practice. The people I analyzed are mostly former Christians who must deconstruct their former religious/media identity before reconstructing a progressive, universalist Christianity or a completely new religious identity. For example, they begin re-examining the music they once enjoyed uncritically, the books about hell or the apocalypse they once believed, and the fundamentalist creators they once followed. Applying a technocultural religion approach to their practice of religious deconstruction reveals the way Blackness contests normative approaches to religion, Black liberationist theologies reject colonial logics, and digital Black religiosity destabilizes Christian hegemony.

‘We Were a Danger to the System’: People’s Community Radio Link and Entangled Listening in Birmingham, 1985–1989

Jacob Saheb (University of Nottingham)

This paper considers the Birmingham, Black-run free radio (“pirate”) station People’s Community Radio Link (PCRL) between 1985 – 1989. During this period, media discourses in Britain were dominated by highly racialised descriptions of urban blight, inner-city disaffection, and violent crime (Hall, et. al 1978). Against this backdrop, PCRL provided diasporic listeners in Birmingham not only with a media outlet for culturally affirming programming, but also began to resemble a wider community-facing “apparatus of communication” (Brecht, 1932) that extended beyond the realms of sound broadcasting.

Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s notion of entanglement (1997) and Pauline Oliveros’ (2024) quantum listening. I argue that PCRL invited a mode of entangled listening, sensitive to hybrid or creolised sensory identities and listening practices. This mode of sensory orientation both produced and facilitated tactical (de Certeau, 1991) interventions that enabled Birmingham’s diasporic communities to respond, alter, and adapt to dominant listening and media practices, temporalities, and constructions of race linked to enduring colonial epistemes. This piece intervenes in existing literature on free radio (Chapman 1992; Bradley 2013; de Lacey 2020; Cordell and James 2021) to move beyond a London-centric orientation and also endeavours to consider free radio’s imminent critique of dominant media infrastructures.

Panel 5B – Politics of Diversity

Starting from Zero (2021): Representational Justice and Twitter Users’ Responses to an Italian Netflix Series

Alessio Baldini (University of Leeds)

Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) have become central to the commercial and artistic strategies of streaming platforms. However, recent backlash from far-right groups has prompted media scholars to critically examine how EDI content is produced and distributed (Saha, Sobande, Titley 2024). This tension has revived debates on representational justice—whether accurate and fair representation of mis- or under-represented groups on screen can contribute to social justice (Fraser 1999, 2008; Young 2011). While critics and consultants often focus on Anglophone media (Jones 2024; Smith 2023), audience responses from global media contexts are increasingly central to media studies (Ramasubramanian and Banjo 2024). Scholars have explored how streaming platforms distribute content from cultural semi-peripheries (Lobato 2019; Lotz, Eklund, Soroka 2022; Taeyoung 2022; Wayne and Uribe Sandoval 2023), but the intersection of this dynamic with representational justice remains underexplored. The Italian Netflix series Zero (2021), described as ‘a watershed in Italian television’ and ‘the first Italian series to feature a predominantly Black cast; (Greene 2022), offers a compelling case to examine this intersection.

This paper investigates how Twitter users responded to Zero’s release to empirically assess the effects of consuming EDI-driven content on audiences. Using a mixed-method approach (Murthy 2017), I combine quantitative and qualitative analyses of approximately 3,500 tweets collected via the Twitter API. While statistical patterns reveal user behaviour, multimodal analysis is essential to interpret temporality, sarcasm, and site-specific interactions. Given the sensitivity of moral and political issues surrounding representation, caution is necessary when interpreting user responses. Although Twitter users represent a small segment of the television audience, their reactions offer valuable insights into how audiences respond to EDI content from semi-peripheral cultures. This study contributes to broader debates on representational justice by foregrounding audience perspectives from Italy’s evolving media landscape.

Measuring Representation in the Audiovisual Media: A Racial Technology? The Case of French Television Channels

Celine Charrier (Paris 8 University)

On March 31th, 2006, following the 2005 riots that took place in several French suburbs, the Social Cohesion Act, known as the ‘Equal Opportunities Law’, was finally adopted. This law marks a turning point as it extends the missions of the French audiovisual regulation authority (Arcom): from now on, its role is to measure the representation of ‘diversity’ on French television, particularly the representation of racialised groups (Mattelart and Hargreaves, 2014). The challenge of this measure in France lies in the constitutional impossibility of compiling statistics based on a person's race or ethnicity (Ghosn, 2013). To circumvent national legislation and after validation by the Council of State, the ‘Diversity Barometer’ was created in 2009, based on the perception of speaking persons on TV, with statistics derived from categories such as ‘perceived as “white”, “black”, “Arab”, “Asian” and “other”’. A number of studies have highlighted the inherent limitations of such a quantitative approach (Macé, 2009; Gray, 2016), pointing out the inability of these measurement tools to take into account the complexity of how audiovisual content is received by TV viewers (Cervulle, 2013; Seurrat, 2015). These studies have also highlighted to what extent these criteria can contribute to the reification and inflexibility of categories (Cervulle and Quemener, 2014).

Fifteen years after the introduction of the diversity barometer, I would like to present how it acts as a ‘technology of race’, in the sense used by Teresa de Lauretis (1987), i.e. a mechanism for reproducing normative conceptions of race. Indeed, categorising race is a difficult exercise, prone to numerous biases linked to what Cristina Grasseni calls skilled visions (2007). However, perception is standardised in order to obtain quantifiable data. By objectifying the state of ‘diversity’ in France, the categories contribute to the reproduction of racist stereotypes. To this end, I will draw on a survey of interviews with diversity and inclusion managers at French television channels, as well as a two-month ethnography conducted at Arcom between January and March 2024.

Google ‘Diversity’: An Intersectional Feminist Political Economy

Tanner Mirrlees (Ontario Tech University)

Google (Alphabet) is among the most powerful tech and media corporations in the world, controlling key infrastructures of search, browsing, online advertising, and social media platforms. While research has shown how Google perpetuates intersecting racial and gendered inequities and oppressions through its business models, hiring and labour practices, algorithms, and content flows, less attention has been paid to how the company has responded to internal and external criticisms of these inequities through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and “Diversity” brands that represent this firm as committed to empowering racialized minorities, including women. Bringing together the lenses of intersectional feminist media studies, critical political economy of big tech, and the sociology of cultural work and labour, this paper interrogates Google’s representation and management of “race” through its DEI policies, as articulated in its annual “Diversity” Reports and related promotional media. It contends that Google’s DEI framework is a strategic managerial response to the broader “techlash” against the company, as well as to tech worker activism challenging Google’s labour conditions, algorithms, and media content. The paper identifies key contradictions between Google’s stated DEI ideals and its ongoing practices across its division of labour, platforms and algorithms, and YouTube content flows. Google represents “diversity” as both a managerial problem to be solved and a brand to be marketed to publics, advertisers, and shareholders—aimed at boosting productivity, generating goodwill, and driving revenue. Rather than disrupting inequities within and beyond Google, its DEI management and branding often reproduce them. Revisiting Meredith Whittaker’s “incomplete map” for tech worker-led collective action, the paper concludes that the potential for real change at Google lies less in top-down DEI strategies than in the bottom-up agency of its intersectional working class.

Too Polarising to Even Acknowledge: Aspirants’ Thoughts and Reflections on Contemporary Representations – The Rise of Absence

Jay Dunstan (University of East London)

Starting from the departure point of PhD-led research, this paper draws on a 12-week immersive series of focus groups, capturing the thoughts of a cohort of UK based aspirant creatives. The study employed a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to investigate the findings (Bourdieu, 1990; 1993). From this emerged an unexpected pattern of results open for discussion in this paper. It explores the overwhelming presence of ‘absence’ (Ferguson, 2016; Gonzales-Day, 2023), to begin to make sense of a representational mediascape that is conversely saturated, overwhelmingly performative and increasingly racialised.

Contrastingly, with minorities vastly more visible than ever across mass communications media (al-Gharbi, 2024; Leong, 2024), the ability to merely acknowledge this empirical reality is contentiously impossible to mention. This paradoxical and problematised silence offers a critical opportunity to examine society at a unique and unprecedented moment in the wider politics of minority representation. This paper presents an entirely unforeseen and yet profound finding, using results to demonstrate how discussions of race – as prolific representational constructs of media discourse – have degenerated in era of ‘over’-representation to become unmentionable, suppressed and avoided. Analysis of the findings provide insight into how race and its representation is currently creating polarity even as its acknowledgement is rendered absent.

Panel 5C – Intersections of Racism, Sexism and Misogyny

Affects of Racialisation: Misogynistic Incels’ Affective Constructions of Race and Ethnicity

Kate Babin (University of Coventry)

The ‘blackpilled’ misogynistic incel (involuntarily celibate) subculture, a subset of the manosphere, subscribes to a biologically deterministic worldview. The blackpill ideology positions men who they perceive as not fitting into traditional and hegemonic ideals of masculinity as low-value, subhuman and condemned to a life without sex or relationships. This belief system is a part of a collaboratively constructed narrative that has been intensified over the last decade through collective participation in pseudonymous online incel forums. The form of masculinity that is lionised within these communities is a White and fascist masculinity (Johanssen, 2022). This is exemplified by popular incel rhetorics such as the ‘Just Be White Theory’, which forum members use to exploit concerns around racism and desirability politics by dehumanising and devaluing non-White men as inherently less successful with women (Gheorghe, 2023). The internalisation and naturalisation of blackpill logics around race is an affective process, a process named by Tamar Blickstein (2019) as ‘affects of racialisation’. By theorising these digital spaces as affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) and thinking through feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2004), this paper aims to understand the affective tensions and emotional textualities that construct race and amplify White supremacy within a community that has previously self-reported half of their members as being non-White (Speckhard et al., 2021). Through conducting an affective-discursive analysis (Wetherell, 2012) on forum data from a prominent ‘blackpilled’ misogynistic incel forum, this paper examines the affective conceptualisations of race and ethnicity. With the construction of regressive racial hierarchies, overt vitriolic hate speech and body fascism, White incels secure a sense of racial superiority while denigrating and stereotyping their non-White peers. Racialised incels earn their belonging in the community by bolstering their victimhood and participating in hateful constructions of their own racialised bodies.

Ticket to Success?: The Reproductive Utility of Black Women on Love Island (UK and USA)

AE Stevenson (University of Chicago)

This summer, fan favorites from Love Island UK (2015-) and USA (2019-) Whitney Adebayo (Season 10) and Ja’Na Craig (Season 6), respectively, came under scrutiny due to the revelation that they had been in relationships with men who harbored anti-Black sentiment towards them. Both women were partnered with non-Black men of color, Lochan Nowacki and Kenny Rodriguez, with whom they had reached the finals of their seasons with. But why would these men attach themselves to Black women, who are consistently figured as the least attractive in the dating pool, on a show where their success depends on viewers believing their love for said women? This paper will discuss how gendered racialization affects how monoracial Black women contestants and their courtships are received by audiences in the US and UK. I argue that Black women’s presence on these shows creates a problem for established sexual hierarchies in both countries while simultaneously generating massive social-cultural capital for the franchise itself. Following Saidiya Hartman’s assertion that Black women are the “belly of the world,” I argue that non-White men have been able to use Black women’s cultural productivity on Love Island to generate new avenues for themselves that would otherwise be outside of their grasp. To make this argument, I will look at how each couple’s story developed in relation to established Love Island franchise tropes, their public presentation after the show, and the dissolution of their relationships. I will contextualize these stages through the works of Hazel Carby, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Through this analysis, I will demonstrate the trap that representation lays for Black women on Love Island and what this means for the dating community.

‘Save Our Girls?’ Racialised Gender Politics, Womanhood and European Ethnonationalism

Christy Kulz (TU Berlin) & Naaz Rashid (Independent Researcher)

Our starting point is how race and gender are mutually constituted. Firstly, we look at the perceived threat of the racialised migrant to ‘emancipated’ European women, and secondly we examine the construction of a white femininity whose purity and fecundity need to be both preserved and contained. Drawing on media coverage in the UK and Germany, we explore how these representations interact in the media to feed into rising ethnonationalism across the political spectrum.

Recent attacks on migrants in the UK following the Southport attacks in 2024, are often justified through recourse to narratives of protecting our ‘women and children’. This narrative builds on earlier Asian ‘grooming’ scandals thus showing how racism and anti-migrant sentiment have dovetailed. Sexual assaults in Cologne in 2015 were promptly co-opted by the right-wing to justify anti-migrant sentiment; rather than addressing inadequate laws around sexual offences, the public debate centred on expelling those threatening ‘post-feminist Germany’ (Boulilla and Carri, 2017). Recent rhetoric from the AfD also presents the queer body as victimised by racialised migrants.

The construction of white femininity centres on the acceptable boundaries of femininity and the question of what constitutes whiteness. In the context of central and northern Europe, the white eastern European/Russian female body is positioned as sluttish, sexually excessive, in need of ‘toning down’. She is also perceived as not emancipated enough, and therefore not white enough (Krivonos and Diatlova, 2020). In the UK, recent media panics about birth rates have focused on Albanian mothers also suggesting that the whiteness has to be of a specific kind. The range of what counts as ‘appropriate white femininity’ is, therefore, narrow and linked to narratives of emancipation. We reflect on how moral panics about migration, which are central to right-wing projects, are bolstered through appeals to preserving the sanctity of the nation through an imagined form of gendered whiteness.

‘[She’s] Playing with a Bit of Anger’: Misogynoir and Mediated (Re)Constructions of Women Footballers in Matchday Commentary

Paul Ian Campbell & Allison Thompson (University of Leicester)

This paper is the first to examine how praise comments and narratives within women’s football matchday commentary differ for Black and White female footballers and the ways these mediated framings reproduce the misogynoir logics that shape Black and White women’s experiences within the sport.

We draw on approximately 4800-minutes of matchday commentary gleaned from the 52 televised matches at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup Finals (on the British Broadcasting Corporation), to conduct a systematic exploration of the variations in verbiage used by commentary teams to praise and describe the on-field actions, performances, behaviours, talents, and physical appearances of women football players from different racialised backgrounds.

Our findings show: (1) clear differences in the ways in which visibly Black and White women footballers were praised and discussed, which aligned with the ‘natural athlete’ discourse. (2): That natural athlete framings became more pronounced when Black and White women played alongside each other. (3) The natural athlete frame when applied to women extended to include talk about perceived inherent emotional dispositions that were demarcated by race. (4) The othering of Black women footballers also occurred via a consistent over-celebration of aspects of Black sports-womanhood and sporting culture as ‘exotic’.

Misogynoir’s Use-Value: The Cultural Commodification of Misogynoir Online

Areyana Proctor (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

Viral digital media content that explicitly demeans Black women reinforces misogynoir (Bailey, 2008). Such content often appears in podcasts and recorded debates uploaded to platforms such as YouTube. It circulates widely through networks known as the “manosphere”, including the “Black manosphere”, and far-right circles. This paper advances our understanding of digital misogynoir by situating the viral digital artifacts that promote its ideology as cultural commodities. I ask what insights emerge when we analyze its production, circulation, and consumption in relation to the use-value it holds for audiences, creators, and platform companies. Pulling primarily from content distribution platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, I first textually analyze select viral content, including episodes from the controversial men’s lifestyle podcast FreshandFit, or demeaning commentary made about Black women on former influencer Kevin Samuel’s YouTube channel, who passed away in 2022. I then discursively analyze how various stakeholders respond to and understand this content’s production and consumption. I argue that framing digital content that perpetuates misogynoir as a cultural commodity exposes how Black women’s ongoing objectification works to fuel digital media platforms’ increasing profit margins. Within the precarious labor environment of digital media content creation, the subjugation of Black women continues to be used as a low-hanging fruit to reinforce the capitalist hierarchies that primarily benefit platform companies. Yet, creators and audience members are also trading in their ability to engage with more liberatory economic, political and social relations in hopes of potential fame, monetary gain, or affective offloading due to misplaced frustration at their material realities. By situating digital content that relies on misogynoir for its virality within the framework of cultural commodification, this paper not only illuminates the broader socio-economic and ideological conditions that underwrite its persistence, but also informs potentials for disrupting the exploitive relations behind its creation.

Panel 5D – Digital Becoming: AI, Race and the Re-mediation of Identity in Contemporary Visual Archives

‘Death Is Seeking You at the Bingo Table’: Black Fungibility in AI-Slop

Rianna Walcott (University of Maryland College Park) & Nessa Keddo (King’s College London)

Building on previous work exploring how large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered tools reconstruct the speech styles of Black users, this paper negotiates the rise of Black visual avatars as substantiations of Blackface versus participants in kinship rituals.

Following the development of LLMs from text-based to audio chatbots, AI-generated audiovisual representations of Blackness are becoming ubiquitous, from ‘YN’ chatbots to AI Black influencers. Using a sample of TikTok videos collected between September 2024 — the introduction of OpenAI’s advanced voice mode — and July 2025, we examine Black users’ engagement with and refusal of AI tools’ expanded capacity to mimic Black vernaculars and aesthetics from across the diaspora. Even as Black communities refine existing tools to identify and gatekeep interlopers, varying digital literacy leaves communities vulnerable to infiltration by non-Black identity tourists.

These new forms of content creation have birthed new profit models along well-trodden ground; the appropriation and exploitation of Blackness without Black people’s consent or control. In particular, the growth of Black AI-generated influencer content marks a movement away from social media as a space for individualised content and curated digital community, and towards aggregated mass-produced and recursive ‘AI slop’, designed to generate profitable engagement.

Additionally, we question whether ownership of AI platforms such as ‘BlackGPT’ constitutes equitable engagement with AI tools. We consider whether Black participation in the commodification of Black (and digital) bodies can be considered liberatory and question the transformative possibilities of such Black-owned tools as a practice of Afrofuturity.

Brown non-sovereignties as Queer Digital Diasporic Performance in Contemporary Visual Cultures

Maitrayee Basu (University of Leeds)

This paper builds upon and extends the seminal work by Lisa Nakamura (2008) on the “racio-visual logic of the internet” to reflect upon issues of AI and subject formation, not by looking at the digital but by looking through and with the digital. Focusing on contemporary artworks by visual artists Aarti Akkapeddi, Frida Orupabo, and Maria Than and utilising the conceptual lens of queer digital diasporic performance I contemplate the ways in which subjectivities emerge in relation to visual generative AI tools. Each of these artists playfully and critically re-mediate (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) the digital in their work in a way that illuminates the potential of embracing brown non-sovereignty even as they interpellate us to move sideways against such technology’s subjectivising force that produces us as racialised and gendered individuated subjects. In order to do this, I argue in this paper, these artists kineticise scenes-of-difference that they find themselves into a “subjectivity-in-brokenness” where, as Berlant (2022) postulates, one not only “takes form...but also holding and attaching” which implies the necessity of putting in the affective labour to cultivate responsiveness (Campt, 2023). Following from this thread in Berlant’s work I ask in this paper: how do contemporary digital visual cultures signify and mediate modes of identity formation with brown non-sovereignty at its centre? Moreover, I explore how such digital diasporic cultural production plays a pedagogical role in constructing motile subjectivities that incorporate sideways movements within the texture of worldbuilding, by which I also mean how such subjectivities are enmeshed within projects that draw its affective momentum from “reproductive futurity of brown-ness" (and Blackness) (Munoz, 2020).

WhyReturn: Cyberfeminist Investigations in Producing Othered Selves Across Platforms

Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University)

My 2024 encounter with Midjourney's generative AI revealed the platform's restrictive nature—users have minimal control over image creation. This limitation drove me back to Second Life, where I revisited my avatar inventory and digital artifacts created during 2006-2009 ethnographic research spanning virtual worlds and South Indian handloom communities, work that informed "Cyberculture and the Subaltern" (Gajjala 2012).

In Second Life's earlier digital landscape, despite feeling like an outsider due to offline age and identity markers, I constructed a marginal digital self and discovered an affective sense of belonging within India-identified communities. The platform's user-built tools, cultural artifacts, and community dynamics created a paradoxical experience: simultaneously building "home" and identity while remaining perpetually out of place, unable to fully integrate.

Midjourney, two decades later, generated different dissatisfactions. Its constrained user agency triggered what DISCO Network scholars describe as "contested and negotiated" digital nostalgia (DISCO Network, 2025, p. 9)—a comparative analysis of what Second Life's "old" technology permitted versus contemporary AI platforms' allowances and restrictions.

Returning to Second Life intensifies feelings of temporal displacement, being "left behind" in pre-social media, pre-machine learning space. This nostalgic re-engagement raises methodological and affective questions about digital existence and practice. Within this temporal return, experiences of racialized and gendered identity occupy affective dimensions through continuous modification processes: crafting Second Life clothing textures, repeatedly generating and regenerating visuals (image and video) from virtual environment screenshots—an iterative cycle of digital identity construction and remediation of avatars that highlights the embodied persistence and layered skills while remediating the visual in pixels across technological platforms and temporal moments.

New (Re)Mediations in Colonial Archives: Art Practice as Decolonial Memory Work in Southeast Asia

Darshana Mini (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

In this paper, I examine art-making practices engaged by Southeast Asian artists, Eddie Wong and Sim Chi Yin, who revisit the historical contingencies that accompanied the British colonization of Malaya. In Portrait of the Jungle People Redux (2024), Wong revisits the history of his grandfather, a Malayan Communist Party worker who left for the jungles to fight the British. Similarly, Yin interrogates colonial violence and trauma in “The Suitcase is a Little Bit Rotten” (2023), which uses images from colonial archives to rework different temporal relations. Yin remixes and alters twelve glass lantern slides from the late 18th and 19th century that were used to promote the colony of Malaya. Working through digital adaptations of these original slides, Yin adds images of her grandfather and her child into the slides to offer new layers of interpretation. Reading through the strategies used by both these artists to foreground family histories to unpack transgenerational memory, this paper explores the instability of archives that condition their interrogations, and explores what they tell us about the ways experimental art making mobilizes traces left in the colonial archives. Both artists work with new and old footage and weave together a palimpsest of personal and public histories in a speculative mode to imagine lost connections by revisiting media formats haunted by colonial violence. I argue that these works expand how visual media infrastructures sutured memory-building for colonial subjects and how the aftermath of colonial violence and occupation still haunts postcolonial identity making.

Panel 6A – Exploring the politics of race/racism through creative practice

Sounding Solidarities: Sonic Collaboration and Digital Media Activism for Palestine in Super-Diverse Birmingham

Ali Shair, University of Sussex

This paper explores the role of sonic and digital practices in shaping anti-racist and decolonial solidarities within Birmingham community arts scene. Drawing on my ethnographic engagement and creative collaborations as a musician and researcher, I examine a series of events and performances organised in solidarity with Palestine across community spaces in Birmingham, including Soul City Arts (Sparkbrook), Nexus Café (Digbeth), and grassroots initiatives such as the Palestine Bike Ride ceremony at St. Johns Church, Sparkhill. These gatherings, often co-curated with artists from Gaza and other Pro-Palestinian collectives, mobilised music, poetry, and social media to create affective publics around justice and liberation.

Central to this analysis is my participation as a Raag-dari (raga-based) flute player, where collaboration required ongoing processes of musical adaptation, improvisation, and ethical listening across diverse sonic traditions and political contexts. Rather than reproducing fixed musical forms, flute performance became a relational practice—attuned to Palestinian vocal, poetic, and rhythmic idioms—through which solidarities were negotiated in real time. In these performances, sound functioned both as a medium of empathy and as a critique of racialised silences in mainstream media representations of Palestine. Digital platforms (Instagram and community livestreams) extended these ephemeral acts into broader networks of transnational solidarity. By situating these practices within the framework of anti-racist media activism, the paper argues that sonic collaborations not only amplify marginalised voices but also generate embodied counter-narratives that challenge dominant racial and political orders of listening. The presentation will conclude with a short flute performance to demonstrate these sonic and methodological dynamics in practice.

Cicatrizes: Art and Migration - A map of Border-Crossing life

Arú Rosa, Linköping University

This presentation shares Cicatrizes, a visual storytelling project that explores migration, race, and queer identity through the body as a living archive. Unfolding across six visual episodes, the work traces scars, borders, and crossings shaped by colonial histories, racialisation, and migration from the Global South. Drawing on Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminist thought, the presentation reflects on how art and media can resist imposed categories of race, gender, and belonging, and create space for memory, resistance, and collective imagination beyond imposed borders. The work was previously presented at a public exhibition in Marseille, France, and in the Research Exchange Program for PhD Candidates, Austria–Sweden (2025), at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna."

Practice-Led Podcasting as Decolonial Method: Reflections from “Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt)” and “Birdland Refracted”

Kim Fox, American University in Cairo

This practice-led presentation explores the Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt) Podcast (EYM) (2016), an award-winning bilingual narrative non-fiction series that focuses on lived experiences in Egypt. My presentation will also highlight Birdland Refracted, an award-winning co-authored audio work rooted in sonic storytelling and critical listening. My autoethnographic lens will focus on my intertwined roles as executive producer and former professor to most of the EYM production team. I discuss how the projects embodied my unique pedagogical approach rooted in feminist pedagogy and Project-Based Learning (PBL). These principles informed not only the storytelling and production process, but also the collaborative ethos behind the projects. Through reflection on my practice, I will illustrate how the EYM Podcast and Birdland Refracted serve as both a site of decolonial media practice and a pedagogical experiment in co-creating narratives that challenge reductive representational frames. The presentation will highlight how practice-led research in podcasting can advance decolonial scholarship by centering listening, collaboration and narrative agency.

Panel 6B – Statues, Race, and Empire: Cultural Symbols of Racial Capitalism

Statues and Symbols, Redux

Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews)

When my book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2025) went to press in the autumn of 2024, I had the nagging feeling that the references to Donald Trump’s intervention in the statue wars that roiled the US between 2017–20 would come across as dated. I could not have been more wrong. Following Trump’s second presidential victory and perhaps even productive of it, the symbolic politics of the far-right has returned with a vengeance on both sides of the Atlantic. The UK’s largest ever far-right demonstration in London in September 2025 was awash with symbols, especially the St George flag and the Union Jack. In this talk, I reflect on the burgeoning structures of racial capitalism that these symbolic displays index, with a particular focus on the figure of Elon Musk whose financial might was pivotal in enabling Trump’s return to power. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, which called for a decolonisation of knowledge production by taking the statue of Cecil Rhodes in the University of Cape Town as a symbol of the enduring legacies of apartheid, formed a key point of departure for The Psychic Lives of Statues. In this talk, I read Musk as a latter-day Rhodes and the sporadic mobilisations against him as an echo of RMF. I ask what comparing Rhodes, Musk and their antagonists can tell us about the shifting structures and contours of racial capitalism.

From Robert E. Lee to Trump: Confederate Statues and the Construction of White Supremacy in the United States

Milly Williamson (Goldsmiths, University of London)

This paper looks at the statues and monuments of the Jim Crow era in the South of the United States. Much media and public discourse has focused on the motivations of those who wish to remove statues in recent years, but less attention has been given to the motivations of those who campaigned and paid for them to be erected in the first place. Taking the statue of Robert E Lee in Richmond Virginia as a case study, I will outline the specific groups and elite interests who lobbied for this statue to be built; I argue that statues of Confederate soldiers – particularly of Lee – played a central role in the establishment of Jim Cow as a political system of apartheid and in disseminating the ideology of Lost Cause which underpinned it. I argue that these statues were a means by which Southern elites reasserted political power after the abolition of slavery, in order to crush the inspiring Black Reconstruction movement and the growing democracy it represented. I trace a continuity between the Lost Cause of Jim Crow in the late 19th to mid-20th century and support for Trump’s race agenda in the 21rst. Rituals and rallies surrounding Confederate statues have long been a central means of building and consolidating support for white supremacy and the symbolic and actual violence that surrounds it. It is a tradition that provides part of Trump’s racist base, where statue plinths once more serve as a rallying point for white supremacy.

Militarist Realism, from Colston to Musk

Dan Hicks (University of Oxford)

Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, and author of Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (London: Penguin, 2025).

This talk introduces some of the main ideas of Dan’s new book Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting, an excavation of the unfinished colonial legacies of 19th-century British imperialism in statues, collections, and universities. The book's argument about "the four As" (Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture) and "the four Ms" (monuments, museums, memory and militarism) will be introduced — with specific reference to questions of cultural racism, enduring legacies of dehumanisation, institutional inheritance, and mnemonic reparation.

Panel 6C – Social Media Activism

‘An African in India’: Reckonings with Racism and Colorism in the Work of African Social Media Creators in India

Anirban Baishya (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Colorism has long been an issue in India, where fair skin is seen as a marker of upper class and upper caste status. This “epidermal politics”1 also operates between “mainland” India and regions such as the North-East and Southern India as a sign of ethnic difference. It also directly impacts how African visitors and residents are treated within the country, where they often face housing discrimination, mob violence and police brutality.2 Such issues have screen counterparts: depictions of African nationals in Indian cinema reduce their blackness to a shorthand for criminality through stereotyped figures such as gangsters and drug dealers.3 The recent social media landscape however, showcases some interesting developments in the work of a new cohort of African social media creators. This paper examines two such creators who overturn hegemonic discourse through a combination of humor and cultural performance. Agu Stanley Chiezode, a Nigerian national who lives in India primarily uses humor to showcase racial misunderstanding and discrimination, using his knowledge of Hindi to turn stereotypes on their head in his short form content on YouTube and Instagram. Pascal Olayele, another Nigerian national, runs a series of interviews with Africans from various countries who speak about their experiences in different parts of India on Instagram and YouTube, employing less of humor, but engaging his respondents in more serious discourse. User-generated content in this case, becomes a way for African creators to represent themselves while negotiating the complexities of racism in a postcolonial context. Through an analysis of Chiezode and Olayele’s social media content, I argue that racism in India is at a moment of reckoning, whereby social media becomes a way for African residents to hold up a mirror to India’s complex layers of class, colorism and deep-rooted logics of discrimination that have their roots in the colonial experience.

MeToo India: Believability, Consent, and the Racialised Politics of Digital Feminism

Ruhi Khan (LSE)

This paper examines MeToo India as a site for interrogating how caste, religion, and class operate as racialised categories within Indian digital feminist cultures. While the campaign amplified feminist voices through social and mainstream media, it disproportionately privileged upper-caste, urban, and often Hindu women with significant media visibility, while marginalised groups like Dalit, Muslim, working-class, and rural women remained largely excluded. In this sense, the movement illuminates how digital feminist activism in the Global South reproduces the uneven politics of race-making, echoing long histories of caste oppression, religious exclusion, and colonial hierarchies.

Drawing on interviews from my doctoral research, I argue that the MeToo India moment demonstrates a problematic triad of believability, consent, and victimhood under neoliberal conditions of media visibility. Believability was tied to social capital and caste privilege; consent was reframed through individualised liberal frameworks; and victimhood was narrated in ways that alienated those structurally silenced. While MeToo India unsettled patriarchal norms, it simultaneously reinforced the exclusions that underpin racialised and caste-based inequalities in Indian media, thus underpinning a need for a new vocabulary to understand and articulate these concepts, which this paper offers.

By situating this case within the wider terrain of race and media scholarship, the paper argues that caste and religion must be understood as racialised logics that shape how feminist voices are mediated in postcolonial contexts. This analysis contributes to ongoing debates on intersectionality, postcolonial nationalism, and anti-racist feminist activism, and calls for reframing digital feminist movements as not only sites of resistance but also as terrains where racialised hierarchies are reproduced and contested.

Digital Feminist Activism Against Rape Culture in Universities: #MeToo in India and #RUReferenceList in South Africa

Adrija Dey & Gavaza Maluleke (University of Westminster)

In October 2017, Raya Sarkar, a 24-year-old Indian law student, joined the global #MeToo movement by creating a crowdsourced list on Facebook that came to be known as the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (#LoSHA). The list named Indian academic men accused of sexual harassment. A year and a half earlier, in South Africa, an anonymous list of men similarly accused of sexual and gender-based violence surfaced on social media, going viral on a Rhodes University Facebook page and sparking student mobilisation under the hashtag #RUReferenceList.

This research draws on online data from X and Facebook in South Africa, as well as interviews with survivors and student activists in India, to explore why survivors and activists in both countries turned to social media for justice. While critics argue that such movements as discussed above undermine due process and unfairly target individuals, our findings reveal that they sought to expose broader structures of violence, particularly around race, caste, and gender. Both movements highlighted entrenched power dynamics, revealing the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators within higher education institutions and the vulnerability of survivors, which fuelled the creation and circulation of these lists. Our data also show how these privileges and vulnerabilities were shaped by intersectional issues such as race and caste.

These digital activist movements underline the importance of moving beyond a narrow focus on due process in cases of sexual and gender-based violence on university campuses, and towards developing a more nuanced, intersectional understanding of campus rape culture. Through this comparative research, we conclude that unless mechanisms for addressing SGBV in higher education are intersectional and restructured to ensure survivors have meaningful access to support and justice, it is unsurprising that survivors and allies will continue turning to social media as a source of justice and solidarity.

Politicising Instagram: Connective Witnessing in Visual Social Media

Yena Kang (UMass Amherst)

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified racial violence, particularly against Asian American and Black communities. Terms like “Chinese virus” fueled anti-Asian sentiment (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020), while the murder of George Floyd exposed systemic anti-Black racism and sparked global protests. Amid these crises, Asian American online communities mobilized against racial violence but also revealed political divisions. Some expressed solidarity with Black communities (Kang, 2023), while others emphasized Black-on-Asian violence and aligned with right-wing rhetoric. Instagram became a key arena where these contested identities and politics unfolded (Ong, 2020).

Drawing on ethnographic observations of Instagram accounts run by Asian American and Black activist groups, this paper examines how racialized political actors use Instagram to respond to racial violence and leverage visual affordances to narrate racial harm, articulate affective responses, and construct collective identities.

Building on and extending scholarship on witnessing (Richardson, 2020; Mortensen, 2015), this paper shows how political actors engage in the collective documentation and circulation of racial violence through visual social media while negotiating Instagram’s governance, including content moderation and algorithmic curation. These practices blur boundaries between users, activists, and journalists, while enabling new political subjectivities within racialized publics. This paper challenges the binary analytic of “good” and “bad” actors in racial politics, complicating moral framings by showing how actors navigate platform logics, structural constraints, and interracial tensions in uneven and contradictory ways.

This study contributes to scholarship on race and media by theorizing connective witnessing as a key practice in contemporary visual politics. It shows how diasporic actors negotiate the risks and rewards of racialized witnessing online, offering nuanced insights into the potentials and pitfalls of social media activism in shaping racial politics and collective identity.

Panel 6D – Racialised Inequalities: Interrogating Race, Gender, and Peripheral Labour in Global Creator Economies

Panel 6D – Racialised Inequalities: Interrogating Race, Gender, and Peripheral Labour in Global Creator Economies

‘Vanilla Content’: How Platform Economies Shape Creative Expression

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent (University of Zurich)

Social media platforms have long perpetuated inequalities by obscuring and censoring political, racial, and other identity-based content deemed controversial. Through interviews with 30 mainstream creators in Spain and Switzerland, this research reveals the emergence of "vanilla content”. Vanilla content refers to deliberately sanitized material that counters desired self-expression, designed to avoid algorithmic penalties and audience controversy. Platform algorithms and monetization systems place particular pressure on women and racialized creators with intersecting identities, forcing choices between economic viability and authentic expression. Rather than negotiating a balance between authenticity and commerciality (Arriagada & Bishop, 2021), many turn to homogenization as a strategy of survival, prioritizing financial stability and mental well-being while sacrificing genuine self-expression. Three key patterns define this “vanillization” process. First, creators select universally palatable topics and genres to maximize acceptability. Second, they systematically avoid political issues, even when central to their identities or interests. Third, they capitalize on outsider status, but only in a sanitized form—for instance, self-branding as an expat rather than a migrant to sidestep controversy. This dynamic exposes the hidden “conformity labor” required for platform success—constant monitoring and sanitizing of content to fit algorithmic preferences that privilege whiteness, apoliticality, and commercial safety. While some creators devise resistance strategies, the pressure toward vanilla content marks an expansion of digital censorship that is crucial to understanding how platforms regulate race, identity, and expression.

The Double Burden: Female Interracial Relationship Content Creators’ Encounter with Racism in China

Qian Huang (University of Groningen)

In recent years, Chinese social media platforms have seen a growing wave of content focused on interracial romantic relationships. Chinese women creators in this niche are frequently subjected to vitriol driven by nationalism and misogyny. They are accused of internalizing racism and preferring white men over Chinese men, leading to their stigmatization as “easy girls.” How do they perceive and cope with such vitriol? What do their experiences reveal about the dynamics between race and national identity in platformized and globalized cultural production? By conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 female influencers of this genre on Red, Douyin, Bilibili, and Sina Weibo, this research presents the double burden they face in their daily production practices. On the one hand, they adopt tactics such as adjusting account settings, curating content, and moderating community interactions to cope with racialized vitriol directed at themselves and their partners. On the other hand, they feel compelled to prove their relationships are genuine expressions of love rather than a product of internalized racism. I conceptualize these reactions and strategies as cautious labour, a combination of cognitive, emotional, and affective labour. Cognitively, these content creators need to interpret and justify the racial power relations in their romantic relationships. Emotionally, they adopt tactics of self-regulation, working on themselves by treating negative interactions as trade-offs, rationalizing hostile comments, and taking on the burden of “cross-cultural communication.” Affectively, they work to manage the emotions of their imagined audience, producing content that conforms to what is perceived as “appropriate.”

Hopeful Mobilities in Irish Creator Cultures

Tugce Bidav (King’s College London)

As an island on the edge of Europe whose history is shaped by colonialism, waves of emigration, and economic austerity, Ireland occupies a peripheral position within global media and creative economies. Situated within a postcolonial and peripheral context, Irish creators have also been positioned at the margins of dominant creator ecosystems due to historical, geographic, and cultural hierarchies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with YouTube creators and contemporary media examples, this work examines how Irish creators navigate structural inequities in the global creator economy and develop unique survival strategies as they seek to establish sustainable careers. The research findings reveal that Irish creators develop hopeful mobilities to navigate the challenges of multiple precarities that arise at three distinct levels: platform, industrial, and international mobility. They seek platform mobility for community building, industrial mobility to mitigate labour precarity, and international mobility to connect with dominant creator cultures for broader career opportunities. While their hopeful mobilities may not always lead to expected outcomes, the findings demonstrate that the presence of hope provides them with the emotional drive to continue pursuing their passions, and more importantly, their agential resilience in the face of the precarious present, towards a better future. Their experiences, shaped by the inequities structuring the global creator economy, deepen debates on race, labour, and creative resistance. They demonstrate how peripheral creators negotiate structural marginalisation while aspiring toward transnational visibility and sustainability, underscoring the uneven geographies of platformed creator labour and the need to rethink the creator economy beyond its dominant imaginaries.

Aspiration Under Fire: Racialised and Feminised Peripheral Creative Labour in Genocide Zones

Jess Rauchberg & Tom Divon (Seton Hall University)

Within creator studies, aspirational labour refers to the neoliberal free-market logic that pushes workers to invest long hours and unpaid effort in the present with the promise of “having it all” later, typically imagined as fame or financial stability (see Duffy, 2017). While this framework has largely centered on white, North American creators, we extend it to examine the aesthetic, affective, and communal labour Palestinian women creators perform under infrastructural collapse and epistemic violence. Our analysis, based on a critical reading of three Gazan women creators—Bisan Owda, Hind Khoudary, and Plestia Alaqad—highlights how their cultural production articulates survival and refusal in spaces routinely stripped of global attention. We ask what aspiration means in active genocide zones, where, in the absence of independent media in Gaza, creators take on the role of documenting war crimes. Moreover, our close reading opens a broader conversation about what it means to work as a creator when the stakes are not consumption but everyday survival. We foreground the racialized, gendered, and geopolitical stakes of peripheral creative labour, emphasizing how these dimensions shape whose work is seen and valued. In doing so, we call for recognition of peripheral creative labour beyond white, Western imaginaries, positioning it not as auxiliary but as central to witnessing and archiving genocide in real time.

Keynote

Media as Violence and the Wretched of the Earth

Paula Chakravartty (NYU)

In the wake of the livestreamed U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, historian Sherene Seikaly (2025) writes: “Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a problem to be solved. It is not an object of salvation. Palestine is a paradigm.” Seikaly’s intervention offers an opportunity to rethink normative theories of media, democracy and colonial racial violence. Psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon argues that modern Western civilization is rooted in an unredemptive racial violence, and that for the colonized it is not labor but rather violence “that is the school of action” (Sekyi-Out, 98). In previous work, I have made the case that our field is hampered by a seemingly race-neutral methodological nationalism that refuses to acknowledge the colonial present. Here, I argue that the question of Palestine allows us to foreground asymmetrical “total violence,” expropriation and dispossession and its countervailing forces in our theoretical understanding of modern media and digital technologies.  I suggest that thinking through Palestine might help us reorient the limits of contemporary discussions about disinformation, democracy and fascism on the one hand, while also challenging the curiously apolitical stakes of much of the new sub-field of data/digital colonialism and the decolonial turn in media and technology studies.