Azsaneé Truss

Azsaneé Truss employs the frameworks of communication and cultural studies to examine how the dismissal of expressive modalities within Western knowledge production processes perpetuates epistemic violence. Her work is a Black feminist approach to multimodal theory.

Truss’s dissertation work focuses on conspiracy theorizing in Black American art and media as a study of epistemic violence both in terms of form and content. This project explicates the culturally specific logics of these practices, understanding them as a type of vernacular theory grounded in critical understandings of racialized oppression. As such, she argues that conspiracy theorizing among Black Americans is an ongoing exercise in anticipating and subverting white supremacist power. Through critical multimodal discourse analyses of conspiracy theories in Black art and media, this work seeks to understand how these forms structure alternative, subversive modes of knowledge production.

In addition to her dissertation work, Truss also the ways in which digital technologies give rise to new modes of expression and communication, modalities of storytelling across the African diaspora, and radical imagination in Black media-making, each of which are a part of her broader research agenda. She has presented widely and in a variety of formats, winning two top paper awards from the National Communication Association. Her work has also been published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Truss uses podcasting, photography, collage, film, and other media, in addition to traditional written forms in her work. Her multimodal scholarship has been supported by the Sachs Program for Innovation in the Arts, the Teachers College, Columbia University Digital Futures Institute, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. In accordance with Black feminist approaches to research, her work fundamentally seeks to disrupt hegemonic ideas about what constitutes legitimate scholarship through these practices.

Prior to joining Annenberg, Truss earned her M.A. in Instructional Technology & Media from Teachers College, Columbia University. Here, she studied the ways in which media production can be used to both teach youth critical media literacy skills and teach us about the world they hope to create. She was profiled as a featured graduate for her work at Teachers College.