CDCS Colloquium: Working Group on Digitality, Embodiment, Affect, and Performance

Featuring presentations by Cienna Davis, Kelly Diaz, and Adetobi Moses

Click here to register for the event on Zoom.

The Working Group on Digitality, Embodiment, Affect, and Performance (DEAP) from the Center for Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) is collectively engaging in research that critically and creatively explores themes including digital/culture, performance, embodiment, and affect. Fellows are drawing on a variety of methods from communication and related disciplines, such as critical technocultural discourse analysis, digital ethnography, and multimodal approaches.

The event will feature short presentations by:

• Cienna Davis
• Kelly Diaz
• Adetobi Moses

DEAP Colloquium Presentations

Cienna Davis 
Digital Blackface and the Troubling Intimacies of TikTok Dance Challenges 

I’ll be presenting research on the topic of digital blackface looking specifically at the #SavageChallenge, one of the first viral dance challenges of the pandemic created by Black femme teenager Keara Wilson. The presentation will draw upon a chapter that I recently finished for a book on TikTok Cultures edited by Trevor Boffone. In the chapter, I argue that the uneven rewards for white creators performing Black dances, gestures, and affect on TikTok constitutes a discreet yet insidious form of digital blackface minstrelsy that troubles the contours of Gen Z’s supposed racial progressivism. I offer a scale for evaluating cross-racial intimacies of dance challenge participation, from playful exchange to cultural extraction, and conclude by considering how platforms and influencers might undermine this exploitative digital economy through legal intervention and justice-oriented investments.

Adetobi Moses
Voicing the Crisis: Online Affective Communities in Times of COVID

Since the COVID-19 crisis emerged, people around the world have creatively sought ways to memorialize the everyday anxieties and small triumphs of living within a global pandemic. One particularly compelling project stemmed from a group of fellows from Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism. Together the fellows created “Corona Diaries,” an open access interactive site that allows participants to record a voice entry related to the pandemic. Consequently “Corona Diaries” has received responses from around the world by providing a platform for spatially dispersed voices to discuss the shared complexities of living within an ongoing crisis. Using a combination of grounded theory and narrative inquiry, this project seeks to analyze the voice diaries, not just as a living archive, but as a networked community of practice in which spatially dispersed, though digitally connected voices, can convene and use similar strategies to respond to the pandemic within a centralized domain. Overall, four categories of diaries emerged from the project: diaries that dealt with isolation, community, nostalgia and uncertainty, and diaries in which the affective nature of the voice temporarily disappeared the spatial and digital boundaries between the speaker and the listener— expanding the possibilities of connection and commiseration beyond the digital platform as a result. 

Kelly Diaz
West Philadelphia 2020: A Photo Essay

Starting in March 2020 I began taking photos of my neighborhood in West Philadelphia using my iPhone. This collection expanded throughout the course of the year, especially as I took frequent walks with my new puppy. The digital photos tell a story of the COVID-19 crisis, physical distancing, school and business closures, and the 2020 election. While some represent national and global trends, others are uniquely and deeply related to life in West Philadelphia and Spruce Hill specifically. By bringing these photos into an academic space I am encouraging my peers to reconsider what "real research" looks like and reminding myself that taking long walks and observing the world around me was plenty to have done over that time.