keynote address by Dr. Ashleigh Greene Wade
Black Girl Autopoetics
In this talk, Dr. Ashleigh Greene Wade will discuss parts of her new book Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice. In Black Girl Autopoetics, Dr. Wade explores how Black girls create representations of themselves in digital culture with the speed and flexibility enabled by smartphones. She analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content online: on one hand, their online activity makes them hypervisible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence; on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Wade maps Black girls’ everyday digital practices, showing what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. She coins the term Black girl autopoetics to describe how Black girls’ self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls throughout the United States, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, urging us to listen to Black girls’ experience and learn from their techniques of survival.
Black Girl Autopoetics is out and available at all major bookstores! Use code: E24AWADE to get a 30% discount at Duke University Press.
Ashleigh Greene Wade is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Broadly speaking, her work traverses the fields of Black girlhood studies, digital and visual media studies, Black Feminist theory, and digital humanities. Wade has a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and is an alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Fellowship Program. Her work on Black cultural production appears in Cultural Studies, The Black Scholar, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Visual Arts Research, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and National Political Science Review. Wade’s debut monograph, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press), explores the role of Black girls’ digital practices in documenting and preserving everyday Black life.