The Department of African American Studies invites UMD faculty and guests to the Spring 2023 Brown Bag Event Series where faculty members share their research and scholarship. On Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at 12:30pm, The Department of African American Studies will welcome Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, Assistant Professor of Communication, from the Department of Communication.

Dr. Knight Steele and her lecture titled "Care as Praxis in Digital Black Feminism" will discuss care as praxis for Black women's imagination of digital technology and study how Black feminist praxis is integrated in the understanding of relationships with digital culture. This event is centered from her book Digital Black Feminism, which looks into the Black blogosphere of the early 2000s as sites which replicated features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. It considers the ‘magic’ of Black women, operating in digital spaces in ways that far surpass the possibilities that were imagined for them. Through close readings of texts on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram and in analysis of content and form, she demonstrates how the use of online technology by Black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome of Black feminist writing and simultaneously has changed the technologies themselves.

The event will be held in person at 1102 Taliaferro Hall.