Radical Remembering: Black Feminist Technopractice for Interactive Narratives
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Pettijohn, Brandy J.
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Abstract
The affordances of digital media can provide a meaningful intervention to bring various histories to people in public and private spaces. Grounded in the theories and ethics of Black feminist thought, my dissertation considers interactive narratives of Black culture and histories using the parameters of race and technology, and visual culture to remediate gentrification in the American South, or what has been characterized as southern forgetting. I am interested in the affordances that digital technologies bring to location identity (Kwon, 2004) and in defining a praxis called “Black feminist technopractice” that reduces harm and trauma at digital cultural sites. Black feminist technopractice is an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework for interactive narratives that deploys what we know as participatory design and speculative design, combined with art and archival practices while leveraging Black technoculture, which examines how Black people make meaning in digital spaces. Black feminist technopractice is rooted in the ideology of Black feminist thought (BFT), which honors the standpoints of the lived experience of marginalized people, particularly Black people, as an intellectual starting point. What is at stake is that when designing historical and cultural sites, the research and work of the humanities need to be engaged as robustly as the technological mediums. The affordances of technologies allow radical remembering to act as an activation to witness the recuperation of histories that have been obscured through time instead of acting like technologies can solve gaps in research and issues in storytelling.
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2023-07-10
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Dissertation