Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication and the director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab. Dr. Steele is an educator, researcher, and award-winning author whose work focuses on representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and practice joy using online technology to create spaces of community. She writes, teaches, and leads digital research projects focused on Black discourse and technology. Dr. Steele is a co-editor of the Critical Cultural Communication series at NYU Press and the reviews co-editor for Dialogues on Digital Society.
Research:
Catherine Knight Steele is the author/coauthor of three books: Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Nancy Baym Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the 2022 Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association; Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (Routledge 2023) with co-authors Jessica Lu and Kevin Winstead; and Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press, 2025), a collaborative project with the DISCO Network. In her latest project, "Automating Black Joy," she is building a collaborative, cross-generational cohort to create an accessible online pedagogical and research space that addresses critical questions about automation, AI, and their implications for our liberation. This project stems from her latest book-in-progress, "The World Didn't Give It: Black Joy and Digital Culture. Dr. Steele has published in journals such as Social Media + Society, Quarterly Journal of Rhetoric, and Feminist Studies.
Areas of Interest
- Race, Culture and Media
- Digital Black Feminism
- Digital Methods and Ethics
- Digital Humanities Program Development
- Administration and Mentoring
Media Theory
Mediated Communication
Advanced Historical/Critical Methods in Communication Research: Critical Methods in Media and Digital Research (Reading List available)
Black Discourse and Digital Media (Reading List available)
Her research focuses on race, gender, and media, with a specific emphasis on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community. Dr. Steele's research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Television and New Media. Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press Fall 2021), examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S.
