Copyright by Krishnan Vasudevan 2017
The Dissertation Committee for Krishnan Vasudevan Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
Black Media Producers of Austin, Texas: Critical Media Production and Design as Citizenship
Committee:
Mary Angela Bock, Supervisor
Wenhong Chen
Donna DeCesare
Robert Jensen
S. Craig Watkins Black Media Producers of Austin, Texas: Critical Media Production and Design as Active Citizenship
by
Krishnan Vasudevan
Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin August 2017
Dedication
This is dedicated to all of the storytellers, social workers and teachers who fight for equality. Please never stop.
Acknowledgements
Throughout my life, strong women have guided my path and this process was no different. I could not have completed this process without the enduring support of my brilliant and beautiful wife, Mairead, who always believes in me. I am tremendously grateful to my dissertation chair Professor Mary Angela Bock for seeing value in the hodgepodge of disparate ideas I originally presented to her. My selfless and wise sisters, Lalitha and Veena, not only laid out the road map for me to base my own journey but also were always there to listen. I am so thankful for the unconditional love of my mother and father. I want to acknowledge my supportive dissertation committee who allowed and encouraged me to think differently. Finally but perhaps most importantly, this project could not have existed had it not been for the participation of nine tremendously talented visual artists. I learned so much from them and cannot thank them enough for sharing their time and stories with me.
v
Black Media Producers of Austin, Texas: Critical Media Production and Design as Citizenship
Krishnan Vasudevan, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017
Supervisor: Mary Angela Bock
The latest epoch of Black activism in the United States has emerged in response to the brutal treatment of Black citizens at the hands of law enforcement. Digital production software and networks have allowed Black citizen media producers to circumvent traditional authorities of knowledge production such as news media and have also engendered pathways to develop new and counter knowledge about racial and social inequality. This three part immersive study based on nearly 900 hours of field research examines the lives and work of nine Black activist media makers in Austin, Texas and develops thick description through ethnography, critical discourse analysis and methods of visual anthropology. Austin provides a unique context for this study given its historical segregation of Black residents and recent gentrification during its rise as a cultural and economic juggernaut. This study makes theoretical contributions to critical race theory and political voice along with developing nuanced ideas about citizenship, journalism and design.
vi Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ...... ix
Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Austin: America’s Third coast ...... 4 Independent Black Media Producers of Austin ...... 7
Chapter Two: Foundation ...... 10 Documentary film history ...... 11 User-generated content & Voice ...... 17 Intersections of Design and Media Production ...... 23 Voice ...... 26 New Media and activism ...... 27 Race and Media ...... 32 Literature Summary ...... 38 Problem Statement ...... 39
Chapter Three: Methodology and Methods ...... 44 Ethnography ...... 45 Critical Discourse Analysis ...... 47 Visual Anthropology and Documentary ...... 48 Grounded Analysis ...... 49 Self-Reflexivity ...... 52 IRB and Participants ...... 54 Data Collection ...... 58
Chapter Four: Cultural Production from the Margins ...... 61 Cultural production from the margins ...... 62 Creativist Impulse ...... 63 Spatial Margins ...... 65 Re-contextualization and Encoding Counter-Narratives ...... 67 Re-contextualization Model ...... 67 vii Re-contextualizing Visual Representation of Black Identity ...... 68 Re-contextualizing Space ...... 71 Re-contextualizing Under Accessed Margins ...... 76 Political voice ...... 81
Chapter Five: How Digital Affordances Support Material Voice and Hybrid Race Assemblage ...... 85 Interactive Affordances ...... 86 Voice as a Social Process ...... 86 Cultivating Hybrid Space ...... 90 Self-Publishing and Branding ...... 92 Witnessing ...... 96 Digital Racism ...... 98 Hybrid Race assemblage and material voice ...... 99
Chapter Six: Critical Media Production as Critical Race Design ...... 108 Media production as human centered design ...... 109 Design as a Critical Response ...... 112 Micah’s Racial Project ...... 113 Critical race design and Metonymy ...... 116 Trayvon’s 21st Birthday ...... 120 Critical Race Design and Citizenship ...... 121 Activism ...... 122 Community ...... 125
Chapter Seven: Conclusion ...... 129 Participant Feedback ...... 133 Strengths and Limitations ...... 134 Implications for future research ...... 138
viii Appendix A: Participant Table ...... 142
Appendix B: Interview protocol ...... 144
Appendix C: Sample Field Note ...... 147
References ...... 149
ix List of Illustrations
Illustration 1: Diane’s creative process ...... 70 Illustration 2: A photo from Simon’s gallery show ...... 73 Illustration 3: The third painting in Epiphany’s Creation series...... 78 Illustration 4: Pablo’s sketch of a politician posing for a “selfie.” ...... 89 Illustration 5: A photo Laila published on her Instagram account ...... 104 Illustration 6: Micah’s interactive installation piece ...... 115 Illustration 7: A frame from Flora’s music video ...... 119
ix Chapter One: Introduction
Over fifty years after the civil rights era movements, the United States of America remains fractured along racial fault lines. Violence against Black Americans by law enforcement and the mass incarceration of young Black men remain anathema to civil society. These issues have fueled recent social movements such as Black Lives Matter that seek racial justice through political action. During a time of unprecedented media production and consumption, racial violence also informs and motivates critically designed documentary, photography and studio art. Music and film productions by well-known African American artists such as Beyoncé Knowles have garnered recent scholarly attention, especially in the context of how these mediated artifacts offer new and counter visual representations of race and identity (Duffy, 2016; Mitchell, 2016). Researchers have also made several important contributions during the latest epoch of Black activism in the United States by examining how digital production and distribution tools facilitate the passage of oppositional media artifacts that challenge state and traditional media reportage during times of conflict (Clark, 2016; Freelon et al., 2016; Harris, 2015). Recent scholarship presents a context for understanding how more artistic forms of cultural production such as film and music are being created to cultivate oppositional voice and how narrative technologies support the passage of these mediated forms of critical expression. Relatively absent from this growing body of literature is the study of independent Black media producers and the films, photography exhibits and gallery art they produce. Such visually mediated forms are important because they offer textured and deeply personal insights in to how people make sense of the world around them, especially during a time of heightened racial tensions and economic precarity. As
1 evidenced by the vast amount of multimedia distributed by independent Black media producers in support of recent Black activism, their critical mediations and cultivations of space often offer oppositional meaning about racial identity in the context of sexuality, gender, and history. It is essential to study what motivates this independent critical media, how its practitioners leverage narrative technologies in its deployment and to what end they seek to engage and empower audiences. Studying the work of independent Black media producers offers a unique context to understand how and why citizens design and distribute critical visual storytelling as a means to cultivate political voice, especially during a time of heightened social unrest in the United States. This dissertation addresses a significant void in scholarship by examining the lives of nine independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas within the same context of the oppositional visual media artifacts and safe spaces they produce. This study presents a unique opportunity to examine and bridge the intersections of several disparate though adaptable strands of existing scholarship. Research about documentary filmmaking illustrates how visual media production can be leveraged for critical forms of expression (Minh-ha, 1993; Nichols, 2010). This is resonant with Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization of cultural production of the margins, which illustrates the ways in which Black cultural producers develop new and counter oppositional visual discourses that contest reductionist, hegemonic representation. Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization is rooted in similar ontological underpinnings of critical race scholarship, which explicates how the fluid, iterative racial project of White Supremacy manifests in lived experience to deny equal citizenship to racial minorities. Critical race scholarship in confluence with research about documentary filmmaking and oppositional cultural production, provide a robust foundation upon which to understand what motivates
2 independent Black media producers to create critical visual discourses such as film, photography and installation art. Research about user generated content and new media activism examine how citizens leverage digital storytelling technologies to circumvent traditional authorities of knowledge production by mediating oppositional visual discourses and cultivating spaces on and offline. The axiological undergirding of new media activists and marginalized groups is perhaps best described in terms of Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice, as their work is often in service of dismantling hegemony through the production of material discourses and the cultivation of spaces where these mediations can be equally heard. The study of independent Black media producers affords a unique opportunity to develop upon existing literature about user-generated content and new media activism to understand how these filmmakers, photographers and visual artists leverage narrative technologies to facilitate oppositional visual storytelling and to what ends they produce interactive media. Couldy’s (2010) conceptualization that voice is constructed through interaction is resonant with how Krippendorff (2005) described how human centered design develops meaning through material discourse. Bardzell & Bardzell (2013) offered how interactive design could be a form of critical response to dominant material discourses. Taken together, these theoretical ideas offer a way to examine how interactive media production could be considered a form of critical human centered design, developed in response to hegemonic discourses that suppress voice. The study of independent Black media producers and their creative labor affords a fitting opportunity to strengthen and examine existing intersections between critical media production and human centered design. Specifically this project affords the opportunity to study the ways in which oppositional cultural production by Black media producers is a form of critical race design that is 3 informed by racial inequality and is in service of challenging hegemonic ideology through interactive storytelling. A theoretical foundation developed upon the literature briefly described above will effectively guide the study of independent Black media producers and their creative labor. Critical race scholarship in confluence with documentary scholarship and Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins presents a robust framework to premise and study the ontological underpinnings that guide independent, oppositional cultural production. Research about user-generated content and new media activism provides a context for understanding how oppositional cultural production provides new and counter epistemic ideas that challenge dominant discourses. Finally, the intersections between human centered design and critical media production afford understanding of the axiological undergirding of independent media producers who seek to inform and empower audiences through interactive mediated experiences.
AUSTIN: AMERICA’S THIRD COAST
Austin, Texas is often heralded for its technological and cultural exports, garnering it the monikers “Silicon Hills” and “Weird City” (Edbauer, 2005; Long, 2010). Austin is a central hub for technology companies such as Google and Apple as well as a budding technology startup scene that produces mobile applications, virtual reality apparatus and video games. Austin has also been considered a mecca for independent filmmakers and musicians as a space to experiment with innovative and quirky ways of telling stories. While Austin is often portrayed as a land of opportunity, its African American residents have largely been left out of this narrative since the cities’ earliest days. Decades of institutionalized segregation and the recent gentrification of historically Black
4 neighborhoods in Austin have greatly damaged Black residents’ ability to attain equal financial opportunity. In his analysis of Austin city policy in the 1900s, Tretter (2012) described how the authors of the 1928 city plan dubiously assured Black residents that segregation was in their best interest. Black Austin residents were provided financial resources to build a community in south East Austin, out of plain sight of White residents. These resources would ensure that Black Austin residents had their own schools, businesses and financial institutions (Tretter, 2012). The authors of the city plan Koch and Fowler described that segregation would ensure Blacks were not discriminated against while saving the city money as it would not have to build double of everything all over the city (Tretter, 2012). However, by penning Black residents in to a small, undesirable area in Austin, the city plan essentially sequestered Black residents away from the financial, social and cultural capital necessary for any community to thrive. In the 1960s the construction of Interstate 35 sliced through the city creating a natural barrier between East and West Austin, furthering the distance between blacks and whites (Tretter, 2012). The Koch and Fowler plan also paved the way for segregated school districts, with white schools having access to better resources and opportunities (Tretter, 2012). When schools were reintegrated in the 1970s, schools in East Austin remained predominantly black and struggled with several issues including poor teacher preparedness and experience, poverty amongst the student body, and a lack of resources as compared with schools in other parts of Austin (Straubhaar, Spence, Tufekci, & Lentz, 2012). As Black residents were being systematically cut off from crucial resources, the city of Austin experienced immense growth during the same period. While most southern cities avoided federal grants and funds, Austin was an early adopter of public funds to bolster its private industries. Public funding from the New Deal helped Austin securely 5 build a damn system that would ensure a consistent water source (Busch, 2011). Instead of building labor-intensive industries, Austin from its early stages was always an innovation economy, creating ideas and processes rather than becoming a manufacturing hub like other southern cities of the day (Busch, 2011). Considering it did not become a manufacturing hub, Austin was relatively unscathed by the decline of the manufacturing industry that so many industrial cities in the US succumb to towards the end of the 20th century (Busch, 2011). The University of Texas at Austin was an integral partner throughout the 1900s during Austin’s ascent as an innovation powerhouse, providing skilled thinkers as well as laboratory and testing facilities (Busch, 2011). Austin’s reliance on high-skilled, technical labor made it difficult for poor and minority residents to become part of its growth (Busch, 2011). Over the last two decades, Austin’s creative industry has also experienced tremendous growth. Austin’s creative industry, which includes film, gaming, and visual art, grew 25% between 2005 and 2010, and employment in the sector grew by 10,000 jobs (TXP, 2012). Austin’s South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival have also become nationally recognized institutions that attract the finest creative talent and fans alike. While the narrative about Austin often focuses on its economic boom, its story remains a tale of two cities. In a 2014 report, by the Urban Policy & Research Institute at the University of Texas by Tang & Ren (2014), Austin was the only high growth city in the United States that had lost a percentage of its Black population. In part, the gentrification of East Austin by land developers building new apartment buildings and boutique stores has pushed Black residents out of the very space they were relegated (Long, 2009; Tang & Ren, 2014). Given that Black Austin residents have remained at the margins of the city’s ascent both historically and today, Austin provides a unique context for the study of 6 independent Black media producers. As Austin’s creative and technology industries have boomed, the physical spaces that support Black art, film and music have largely disappeared with the loss of the city’s Black population. This dissertation project examines how Austin’s Black media makers navigate the city’s geography, given that many of the places for Black culture have been displaced. This study also explores if and how Austin’s historic and contemporary racial inequalities manifest within the critical media practices of independent Black media producers.
INDEPENDENT BLACK MEDIA PRODUCERS OF AUSTIN
The creative and critical media practices of independent Black media producers in Austin could be understood in several different contexts. Their work could be considered a form of embodied citizenship that mediates oppositional visual discourses about race in service of seeking equal citizenship for Black Americans. Some of their work could also be considered as media activism that challenges dominant, stereotypical representations of race depicted in news reportage and popular media. Additionally, by producing paintings, photography and other visual forms of art the participants of this study seek to engage audiences in deeply personal, interactive narrative processes. The study of independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas presents a unique opportunity to engage and expand upon existing scholarship about user-generated content, new media activism, critical race theory and documentary films. Literature about user-generated content offers insight about how digital citizens leverage online production and distribution apparatus to cultivate online communities where meaning is constructed and negotiated. Research about new media activism engages with how subaltern and disenfranchised groups leverage mobile technologies in confluence with social media platforms to circumvent traditional authorities of knowledge production
7 such as state actors and traditional media outlets. Critical race scholars have studied the ways in which state and media actors construct= racism in the form of White Supremacy to systemically deny equal citizenship to Black Americans. Finally, literature about documentary and visual storytelling provides insight about how visual representations are deployed to reinforce colonial representations as race but also for the resistance of these stereotypical, reductionist mediations. Collectively, these existing threads of scholarship provide a rich foundation upon which to base the study of independent Black media makers and the media artifacts and spaces they produce. A rigorous, immersive study of Black independent media producers in Austin, Texas is very much needed given the temporal and spatial significance of their personal histories and creative work. This study examines the creative processes and personal histories of Black media producers during a time of heightened racial and political unrest in the United States. Additionally, this study commences during a moment of unprecedented self-mediation by citizens seeking to be heard often facilitated by digital production and distribution technologies. Given Austin’s rise as a creative hub and its history of racial segregation followed by gentrification of Black communities, the city provides a fitting canvas to study how Black media producers navigate its geography and may respond to the local racial inequality through their creative processes. In Chapter Two, I conduct a thorough review of existing literature and present the research questions that guide this qualitative study. In Chapter Three, I offer why the three-pronged immersive, qualitative approach that includes ethnography, critical discourse analysis and visual anthropology is necessary to understand the ontological, epistemological and axiological concerns of the study’s participants. After presenting the theoretical and methodological foundation of this project, I present the findings in Chapters Four through
Seven. In Chapter Four, I explore how the participants’ critical media practices stem from 8 similar though unique margins as described Hall (1990,1996). I also offer examine how their individual visual mediations and critically designed spaces contribute to (Couldry,2010) voice. In Chapter Five, I explore how digital production and distribution technologies facilitate the passage of material forms of voice through what I describe as a hybrid race assemblage. Drawing on the qualitative evidence collected with several participants, in Chapter Six I offer how their work reflects a complex, visual oppositional language that I describe as critical race design. This new concept contributes to a methodological extension of critical race and critical cultural theories. Finally, in Chapter Seven I offer self-reflection about my time in the field and offer implications for future research. Artists make sense of their lived experiences and the world around them through creative processes that often result in critical mediated discourses such as film, photography and studio art. Studying the creative processes and media artifacts of Black artists offers unique and important perspectives about how critical media production may be in service of voice and equal citizenship. During an era of unprecedented citizen media production and consumption, the study of Black media producers also offers much needed context about how and why Black artists leverage interactive narrative technologies for oppositional storytelling and critical design. This study develops upon existing theoretical constructs and presents new perspectives on citizenship, citizen media and critical design.
9 Chapter Two: Foundation
In the following sections I review the scholarly literature to locate and contextualize the ontological, epistemological and axiological considerations that support the creative labor of independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas. I first conduct a thorough a review of documentary scholarship to present how 20th century non-fiction films presented marginalized populations through colonial, stereotypical lenses. I also examine scholarship that addressed how women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community contested colonial and patriarchal representation through the production of oppositional documentary films. Reviewing prior research about user-generated content provides a context for understanding how people cultivate epistemic online communities centered upon the interactive production and distribution of media artifacts. I also explore the intersections between the scholarship about user-generated content and human centered design, to present how the production of critical media artifacts could be considered a form of critical design that seeks to challenge existing authorities of knowledge production. By addressing how user-generated content can be used to challenge authority, I offer a natural extension to the examination of new media activism scholarship. Tracing previous scholarship about new media activism to situates how the production of visual social media such as mobile film and photo are deployed in times of conflict to challenge state and traditional media reportage. This body of research locates new media activism as a form of embodied citizenship in service of democratic ideals in ways that resemble what Couldry (2010) described as a voice. Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice presents a context to consider the creative visual work of Black media producers
10 as forms of active citizenship that engages with existing power imbalances such as racial inequality. Finally, I examine the work of critical race theorists and critical cultural theorist Stuart Hall to present how hegemonic racism in form of White supremacy manifests through mediated representations and lived experience in the United States. Hall’s (1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins provides a context for understanding how Black media producers may contest racist representation through the production of visual mediations that offer oppositional discourses about race. In other words, this literature presents a framework to consider the ontological considerations of media producers from marginalized groups, such as the participants of this study.
DOCUMENTARY FILM HISTORY
Documentary film and photography have been described by recent scholarship as mediated forms where discourses are constructed and negotiated rather than as visual evidence as they were once considered. The earliest photography, according to film scholar and critic Brian Winston (1993) was originally thought of as mechanical reproductions of reality, but not as pieces of art. Largely shunned by art communities because of their mechanical delivery of images, photographs were used by scientists and police as recordings of objective truth and evidence. Documentary film scholar Bill Nichols (2010) described how film was similarly thought to reproduce an objective reality. When the Lumière brothers sent out “scores of filmmakers” all over the world with their patented cinematographe, according to Nichols (2010) many of the films they produced depicted quotidian activities such as walking, eating and playing cards. While these early films had the “indexical” nature of documentary in that they captured
11 historical events on a durable media format, according to Nichols (2010) they lacked an important element of what makes documentary unique, the filmmaker’s voice. Nichols (2010) and others have examined how documentary voice was developed through the culmination of several advancements in filmmaking during the early 1900s. French artist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, according to Nichols (2010) developed the concept of photogénie, which was a way to show imagery on film that was not a literal representation of that object, but rather a representation of a feeling or emotion located elsewhere. During the same period, Russian avant-garde filmmakers were experimenting with editing techniques such as montage and dissolves according to Nichols (2010). The usage of montage allowed filmmakers to edit scenes with various camera angles and also allowed them to show the passage of time through edits according to Nichols (2010). The emergence of narrative filmmaking and rhetorical oratories according to Nichols (2010) were also important to the development of the filmmaker’s voice. Narrative filmmaking, according to Nichols (2010) refined both the technical and narrative aspects of cinematic storytelling. Narrative films provided a framework for how plots could be introduced and resolved on screen, and how to connect audiences to characters through editing, music, and lighting according to Nichols (2010). Nichols (2010) described the rhetorical oratory as the God-like voice that addresses “questions of what to do, what really happened, or what someone or something was really like,” evidenced in many early films. Many scholars describe Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, as the first feature-length documentary film. (Renov,1993; Nichols 2010). Flaherty’s ethnographic examination of the Inuit people and their struggles to survive the Canadian Arctic followed a narrative arc, focused on a few characters and used editing techniques as well as a persuasive voice to embed preferred meanings to audiences. According to 12 Aitken (1990), in a review of Robert Flaherty’s second film Moana, John Grierson wrote that the film had “documentary value,” which was the first time the word documentary had been used to describe narrative, non-fiction film. John Grierson’s aesthetic choices were heavily influenced by the dramatic imagery of films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Robert Flaherty’s Moana, according to Aitken (1990). He embraced the dramatic, symbolic imagery as a way to convey “a system of values with which the spectator could identify (Aitken, 1990).” Grierson’s first film Drifters produced in 1929 heroically portrayed the lives of North Sea fisherman through symbolic representation over “naturalistic verisimilitude” as evidenced by the dramatic music and montage editing used in the film (Aitken, 1990). Considering Grierson was funded by the state, his films were not very critical of state policy and instead are sympathetic and glorifying portrayals of regular people. In glorifying the lives of everyman, Grierson and those that followed in his tradition were in a sense producing propaganda films that portrayed peoples’ life struggles as necessary to keeping peace in the state (Aitken, 1998). Grierson would later produce several propaganda films for the National Film Board of Canada during World War II. New Deal era films produced by the U.S. government during the 1930s are similar to films by the Documentary Film Movement in that they celebrate the state through dramatic narratives about regular people. In describing the 1938 film The River, late film historian Paul Arthur (1993) wrote, “the Roosevelt administration is implicitly as a formal mirror of the Mississippi, its branches and tributaries stretching across the nation’s continental limits.” Arthur (1993) also described how New Deal era films used dramatic imagery of technology as a way to show government progress and prowess. Grierson’s epistemology was predicated upon the idea that people should be informed but in a way that sways them to support state authority. The epistemology of the 13 New Deal Era films served a similar purpose in convincing people of the virtues of the federal government. The axiology of both film movements was developed on the premise that by watching documentary films a consuming public would use that information to become more invested in the state. In other words documentary knowledge was vital to establishing and maintaining social order. Grierson’s ontology was based on his concept of “organic totality,” and that reality is experienced through the social-connectedness of people and institutions and this could be represented through dramatic storytelling in documentary film. Direct Cinema and cinema vérité were two genres that came to prominence in the 1950s that were in part a response to the New Deal era and Documentary Film Movement, as described by late film historian Paul Arthur (1993). While the dominant voice of earlier documentary films was authoritative and dramatic, the voice of direct cinema and cinema vérité filmmakers was intended to be more passive and observational according to Arthur (1993). Additionally these films were filmed with smaller, more mobile cameras that allowed for more intimate filming of people and objects (Arthur, 1993). The epistemology of direct cinema films was developed through the unaltered observation of social actors by filmmakers (Arthur, 1993). These filmmakers intended to depict a documentary film’s reality as a true, unaltered representation of the human experience. The epistemology of cinema verité films was developed often through the provocation of social actors by the filmmakers, with the premise that the audiences were seeing things exactly as they happened as explained by Arthur (1993). As described by Winston (1993), “The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinema vérité artist was often an avowed participant. The direct cinema artist played the role of an uninvolved bystander; the cinema verité artist espoused that of provocateur.” French
14 filmmaker Jean Rouch is often credited with developing both genres through his work in films such as Chronique d'un été. The epistemology of direct cinema filmmakers was predicated upon the idea that the film camera captured unfettered reality. The intended axiology of these films then was to inform audiences what certain cultures or places were really like. The filmmakers were attempting to show reality as it were, and therefore the ontology of the direct cinema films was constructed from what the camera captured. While direct cinema filmmakers aimed to provide a “what you see is what you get,” vision of documentary film Arthur (1993) described their effort as both “futile and disingenuous.” Arthur (1993) explained that by not acknowledging the presence of the camera, the practice of direct cinema, “disdains documentary’s fiction of truth only to install something like the truth of fiction.” While Arthur (1993) offers an important critique, it does not take away from the fact that the direct cinema filmmakers thought of themselves as a form of resistance that challenged the colonialist eye of earlier documentaries. Early documentary movements have been heavily criticized and several scholars have called into question several ethical issues surrounding documentary filmmaking. Filmmaker and critic Trinh Min-ha (1993) described how early documentaries such as Nanook of the North were exploitative examinations of foreign Others. Minh-Ha (1993) described these early films as exploitative in that they did not allow people to describe themselves but rather they were interpreted in dramatic fashion through the filmmakers’ words and images. Film scholars Gross, Katz, and Ruby (Gross, Katz, & Ruby, 1988) questioned the “moral rights of subjects,” and brought up important questions of authority, ownership and consent. In analyzing Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 film Titticut Follies, in which he shows the daily happenings of a prison hospital, Gross et al (1988) questioned Wiseman’s ethics of showing mentally ill people who may have not been 15 fully capable of giving him informed consent. Gross et al (1988) also critically examined the power dynamics between white, male documentary filmmakers and their often poorer, foreign subjects who often possessed insignificant agency to control their own likeness. Scholars have also critiqued how early documentary films focused on the practices of working men (Nichols, 2010). While they did not completely neglect women, scholars have argued that early documentary were produced by men and described whole cultures largely through the visual explorations of men’s lives (Minh-ha, 1993; Nichols, 2010). The social movements of the 1960s were pivotal in diversifying documentary’s voice. As Nichols (2010) and Gross et al (1988) described women, minorities and the LGBT community gained access to increasingly affordable camera technologies and began creating their own independent documentaries that challenged existing ways of knowing about race, gender, sexuality and class. These filmmakers have examined several important issues and stories that were largely ignored by early documentary filmmakers. For example, Nichols (2010) described how the 1979 film With Babies and Banners, produced by Anne Bohlen examined the 1930s labor strikes and organizing from a women’s perspective through interviews and archival footage and challenged the male centric epistemologies about the workforce. Film production by previously disenfranchised groups such as minorities, women and the LGBT community in the 1960s and 1970s was described by critical cultural scholar Stuart Hall (1997) as a form of activism against hegemonic media narratives. Similarly media scholar John Fiske (1996) described how black activists in the 1980s and 1990s produced what he described as “counter-knowledge” in the form of film and radio that challenged widely held negative views about black people. Seen through the lens of
Hall and Fiske, the epistemology of this work could be considered as activism and also 16 cultivation of “hidden histories” that did not exist prior. These filmmakers were axiologically concerned with providing new meanings about race, gender, sexuality and class. Their work also contested colonial visual representation in ways similar to how Hall (1990,1996) described the work of new Caribbean filmmakers, by offering more complex ontologies about race, gender and sexuality (Nichols, 2010). This brief history of documentary filmmaking offers two crucial contributions to this study. First, scholarship about documentary film production presents how early documentaries presented women and racial minorities through colonial, patriarchal lenses. Secondly, this scholarship presents how and why racial minorities and women, in the wake of the civil rights era movements contested existing ontologies through the production of oppositional non-fiction film.
USER-GENERATED CONTENT & VOICE
A true democracy, according to Couldry (2010), facilitates and nurtures voice, or the capacity for all citizens to be heard equally and fairly. However, in hegemonic societies such as the United States, state and media actors actively suppress citizen voice according to Couldry (2010). During the 20th century as described by Hall (1973) Western democracies deployed preferred meanings of culture through mass mediated cultural production such as newspapers and television. The mass mediated era was anathema to true democracy according to Couldry (2010) and others (Hall, 1973; Carey, 1989) as authority over knowledge production was in the hands of a few actors and citizens were effectively stripped of the narrative tools necessary to facilitate voice. However, according to Venturelli (2005) and others (Shirky, 2008; Jenkins, 2006) over the last three decades Internet technologies have provided citizens the narrative
17 production and distribution tools facilitate cultural production and have the capacity to engender socio-political voice. The “people formerly known as the audience” as coined by media critic Jay Rosen (2006) have become prodigious producers and distributors of digital media content. In other words the cultural practices of ordinary citizens mediated through smartphones and digital social networks have become integral to an increasingly democratized media environment. The cultural artifacts produced by citizens often described as citizen media or user-generated content (van Dijck, 2009) has afforded Internet and communication scholars opportunities to study communication as culture as envisioned by media scholar James Carey (1989). Several scholars have examined the ways in which narrative technologies facilitate user-generated content production and increasingly democratized knowledge production. Narrative or storytelling technologies as described by Couldry (2010) are analog and digital tools that allow citizens to produce, consume and share storytelling. Author and Internet advocate Clay Shirky (2008, 2010) explained how the Web 2.0 architecture beginning in the early 2000s provided for more interactive experiences than the top down user experiences of traditional media such as television and newspapers. Shirky described the vast amount of film, photo, music and text that citizens were producing and distributing in digital space as a “cognitive surplus,” that was overall beneficial for society. Media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006) has written extensively about digital participatory cultures or digital spaces where citizens generate knowledge about topics they are passionate about such as online games, television shows and also global news events. Jenkins (2006) described how fans of the popular reality show Survivor developed collective intelligence to predict and spoil the outcomes of upcoming episodes.
Similarly literacy scholar James Paul Gee (2005) envisioned online message boards and 18 digital forums as affinity spaces where young people could develop different digital literacies through conversations and experimentation. When individuals navigate across several affinity spaces, according to Gee (2005) learning becomes both a personal and social journey with infinite possibilities and pathways as compared to a more structured and hierarchal way of learning practiced in traditional schools. In his examination of how knowledge is generated on the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, media scholar Axel Bruns (Bruns, 2008) described how the site’s contributors were engaged in produsage, a term he coined that blends together “production” and “usage.” Bruns described that produsage was at the heart of “human endeavor in the twenty-first century,” as the collaborative efforts of people to form knowledge on sites such as Wikipedia have become to essential to our very existence. Scholars have also examined what motivates knowledge production within digital communities. Online gamers, according to new media scholar Dmitri Williams et al (Williams, 2006; Williams, Yee, & Caplan, 2008), players produce content both within multiplayer gaming worlds and also outside games themselves in digital forums and wikis. According to Williams (2008) and Kahne, Middaugh, & Evans (2009) gamers collaboratively produce content to develop game-play strategies and to organize civically and politically. Internet activist and scholar Lawrence Lessig (Lessig, 2004, 2008) and Jenkins (2006) have explored how digital media makers remix existing media artifacts to produce new ways of knowing for various purposes. Remixing is the act of taking a piece of music, art, film or photo and adding, subtracting or changing it (Lessing, 2004). Media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006) described that the production and distribution of media in the form of digitally edited images and animations were essential to early web activism. Jenkins (2006) described how after then presidential candidate
John Kerry had claimed he had “the support of many foreign leaders,” during the 2004 19 election, he was portrayed in a “mock version of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967),” standing with several dictators and terrorist leaders. By remixing according to Lessig (2008) and Jenkins (2006) citizens can reimagine and rearticulate iconic imagery or music to have new meanings that may be political, satirical and sometimes a mix of both. In their survey of digital culture on the video sharing platform YouTube, Burgess and Green (2009) described how the platform had become a space for multiple types of stories and multiple types of users. User-generated content made up more than two-thirds of their study’s sample and video blog or vlog entries made up 40% of the Most Discussed videos in their study. The authors (2009) explained that vlogging videos on YouTube invited feedback as vloggers often speak directly to audiences. Vlog audiences often responded to videos with their own vlogs (Burgess & Green, 2009). The authors concluded that the conversational and personal nature of digital storytelling on YouTube makes it distinct from more static forms of media such as television and also is a testament to the fact that people want to connect to each other’s stories. The above examples convey how citizens leveraged digital tools to re- contextualize existing media artifacts along with producing their own media artifacts to develop new knowledge. Bock (2009) described how visual news media is produced, consumed, contextualized and re-contextualized in “an overlapping set of social domains.” Bock’s (2009) idea of media re-contextualization lends itself well to the study of user-generated content in digital space as meanings of videos, photos and audio are constantly being contested and negotiated. The idea of media re-contextualization also provides a way to understand how physical and digital space can be spaces for people to be heard, as they can contest existing ideas through the production of their own social media. Bock’s (2009) theorization of re-contextualization is resonant with Shaw’s (2017) 20 construct of affordances. Shaw’s (2017) idea of interactive affordances brings forward Hall’s (1973) theorization of encoding and decoding to a new media environment and presents a framework to consider how users of social media platforms and digital games may leverage interactive technologies to develop counter and new meanings that were unintended by the architects of these digital artifacts. Shaw’s (2017) construct of affordances offers a way to think about how citizens might leverage digital tools in service of re-contextualizing dominant discourses in to new and counter representations through digital activism, debate or storytelling. The emergence of citizen media was met with much consternation and pushback by traditional media organizations. In his examination of activist user-generated content Garcelon (2006) explained how music companies targeted peer-to-peer filing sharing software companies such as Napster with lawsuits as these new companies challenged centralized control over the distribution of media. Professional media organizations, according to communication scholar Stuart Allan (2013), initially viewed citizen journalism as a threat to its existence. In a survey of newspaper business models journalism scholars Nerone & Barnhurst (2003) described how job roles such as journalist, reporter, and editor became increasingly professionalized over time. Nerone & Barnhurst (2003) explained that by professionalizing the business of journalism, newspapers could claim authority over the production of truth. The idea that citizens would be participating in the news making process caused panic amongst media organizations according to Rosen (2006) as it challenged the authority over the production of reality and truth. Allan (2013) described how media organizations initially tried to discredit citizen journalism as amateur and sloppy. When citizen journalism was tepidly accepted by news organizations it was often designated on news websites and
21 programs as amateur reporting as evidenced by CNN’s i-Report as not to challenge the authority over knowledge production by real reporting. Although early digital scholars studied the web through utopic lenses (Papacharissi, 2002), recent web scholarship has acknowledged how embodied forms of inequality manifest online. Papacharissi (2002) described the Internet as a “virtual sphere,” as a unique public where digital citizens must navigate through digital forms of embodied inequality, interactions with often-anonymous users and digital appendages that facilitate interaction. Couldry (2010) and others (Fuchs, 2012; H. Jenkins & Deuze, 2008) also identified that while digital media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook encourage the sharing of stories they also conduct surveillance on citizens for various purposes such as profit-seeking and preserving national security. In her study of race in digital space, Lisa Nakamura (2008) explained that while digital space may engender voice, it can also be a place to reinforce racial, sexist and homophobic stereotypes that suppress already subaltern peoples’ voice. Similarly in his examination of digital cultures media scholar Daniel Bell (2006) explained that “some kinds of differences are fetishized, while others are invisibilized.” Both Bell (2006) and Nakamura’s (2008) ideas resonate with how Hall, (1973) conceptualized the production of media as a process that over accessed certain actors in media narratives while systematically suppressing others (Couldry, 2008a). Regarding the relative dearth of scholarship about racial minorities in digital space, Nakamura (2008) wrote, “future studies of the Internet usage in America must ask questions regarding people of color as producers of Internet content, not just consumers.” While the focus of Nakamura’s (2008) argument was the portrayal of Asian Americans as consumers, the same could be said about Internet studies of African Americans. Much of the literature about Black Americans in relation to digital space has focused on access to 22 the Internet and digital tools (Boone & Hendricks, 2014; Schradie, 2011; Straubhaar et al., 2012). However, scholars have begun to identify the ways in which Black Americans are producing user-generated content. For example over the last few years scholars have examined the production and spread of user-generated content on Black Twitter, which is used to describe the digital spaces on the social media platform Twitter where Black citizens congregate to discuss issues important to their community (Prasad, 2016; Sharma, 2013). Sharma’s idea of a digital-race assemblage provides a context for understanding how digital apparatus on social media platforms such as algorithms facilitate distinctively digital constructions of race. Although Sharma’s (2013) study of racial assemblage on the platform Twitter was published prior to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, this theoretical construct remains very relevant as with the wide adoption of mobile technologies, people are increasingly developing meaning about identity in digital space.
Intersections of Design and Media Production
There are several parallels between media and design scholarship regarding how the production of user-generated objects can support new ways of knowing by disenfranchised populations. Design was long considered as a way to aesthetically encompass industrial objects, mass produced by a select few according to communication scholar and designer Klaus Krippendorff (2005). Market forces according to Krippendorff (2005) allowed for more participants to produce and design objects and as a result production transformed from a low diversity culture to a high diversity culture. Over the last few decades as the design and production of objects has moved away from beautifying large industrial machinery to the production of interactive and digital interfaces for human consumption, designers have adopted a human centered design
23 approach that focuses on human behavior, problems and capabilities (Norman, 2013). A human centered approach allows designers to empathetically understand the needs or people and how they derive meaning from objects (Krippendorff, 2005). Krippendorff (2005) described the shift in design away from simply beautifying industrial objects to producing meanings for stakeholders as a semantic turn in design. While the designer according to Krippendorff (2005) was a cog in the wheel during the industrial age, today’s designer is at the heart of a network of actors, who are both stakeholders and gatekeepers. As stakeholders these actors, according to Krippendorff (2005) have different values and meanings for the design of objects that are shared through language and discourse. Krippendorff (2005) described how stakeholders rely on previous experiences to recognize and categorize objects in developing meanings for their design. These actors are gatekeepers as they may assert certain levels of authority and power over the implementation of a design (Krippendorff, 2005). Krippendorff’s conceptualization of the designer as part of a network of actors is similar to how Couldry (2008) examined the production and consumption of media through actor network theory. Actor network theory as described by one its founders John Law (2009) is a way to study the “social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located.” Using actor network theory to study media, Couldry (2008) envisioned media not as a social object, but rather as a process by which meaning is developed by producers and consumers, in a network with asymmetrical power relationships. Mobile and Internet technologies according to Couldry (2008) have greatly shifted and in certain ways diminished the power of traditional gatekeepers over the production of meaning. Networked media environments, according to several scholars (Couldry, 2008; Shirky, 2008; Jenkins, 2006) allow citizens to circumvent the authority of television and news media by facilitating the production and 24 consumption of user-generated content. Couldry’s (2008) study of media as a process in confluence with Krippendorff’s (2005) idea of a semantic turn in design allow for the conceptualization of user-generated media artifacts as both the production of meaning but also the design of meaning. The work of design scholars Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell and their collaborators (Bardzell, 2011; Bardzell & Bardzell, 2013; Bardzell, Bardzell, & Stolterman, 2014; S. Bardzell, Bardzell, Forlizzi, Zimmerman, & Antanitis, 2012) provided a way to contextualize user-generated objects as being both theoretically and methodologically critical. Bardzell et al (2012) explained that while critical theory allows for the examination of power within objects, it lacks a methodological component. By combining critical theory with the practice of design or meaning making, Bardzell et al (2012) offered critical design as a way to not only identify power structures in existing objects, but also a way to design and make new objects that critique existing epistemologies. The work of the Bardzells’ and their collaborators is resonant with the ways in which media scholars have examined user-generated content as a means to challenge authority and produce new epistemologies. Moreover, the idea of critical design in the context of this project offers a context for considering the work of Black media producers who produce oppositional visual media as a form of critical design. Specifically, the concept of critical design offers a context to consider how racial minorities may produce oppositional, interactive objects and media artifacts that challenge hegemonic norms. This project expands upon Bardzell et al.’s (2012) construct of critical design and seeks to understand the ways in which oppositional cultural production by Black media producers is a form of critical race design that challenges hegemonic norms through critical interaction.
25 Voice
Couldry (2010) described humans as inherently social creatures who learn dialogically through shared narratives. Suppressing someone’s ability to freely engage in cultural production such as storytelling and the design of objects according to Couldry (2010) is a violation of their human rights and is anathema to a true democracy. Couldry (2010) criticized the neoliberal agenda of both traditional media and state institutions in Western countries that rendered citizens as workers and spectators of democracy rather than active participants. Jacobs & Skocpol (2005) offered a similar critique of the United States in their examination of political voice in the United States. According to Jacobs & Skocpol (2005) “economic inequality and political disparity,” erode political participation and voice. They offered that the United States government is beholden to the “privileged and well-organized,” and may not be designed to fix existing disparities and thus may continue to adversely impact political voice. In accordance with Couldry (2010), Coleman (1999) described how even when the public is given space to be heard, “their voice is treated with marked condescension by political elite.” The public’s role in democracy according to Loader, Vromen, and Xenos (2014) was to be seen by acts such as voting but not to be heard. However, as explored in the previous section, Internet technologies provide citizens the narrative tools necessary to challenge authority in that these technologies facilitate the production of counter narratives and also the cultivation of digital communities that engender voice (Couldry, 2010, Loader et al, 2014). Krippendorff’s (2005) construct of a semantic turn in confluence with Couldry’s (2010) idea of voice present a way to think about user-generated content as a form of political voice deployed through what Bardzell et al (2013) described as critical design or critical human centered design. In other words, when oppositional user-generated content is considered as critical human centered design, the creative processes of citizen media 26 producers resemble a form of voice that is in service of engaging with and potentially solving inequalities harmful to democracy. This theoretical framing in confluence with Hall’s (1996) construct of cultural production from the margins offers a way to think about how racial minorities may leverage digital production and distribution tools to develop new and counter knowledge about race through interactive, human centered design media artifacts and spaces.
NEW MEDIA AND ACTIVISM
As described in the previous section, Couldry’s (2010) concept of voice presents a context for considering citizen media production as material forms of political discourse in service of voice. Material forms of narrative expression according to Couldry (2010) are essential to voice, as they offer citizens oppositional discourses to see and hear that challenge hegemonic representation. This is further evidenced in recent scholarship about new media activism that explores how smartphone technologies and social networking sites facilitate the passage of crucial information during times of political unrest. Given the web is an interactive platform that allows citizens to produce and distribute media; it has been a space for digital activism since its earliest days. In his examination of Indymedia, Marc Garcelon (2006) explained that the loose network of citizen journalism websites came together during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting to challenge the authority of both corporate and state control over information. The Indymedia network as described by Garcelon (2006) challenged the idea that citizens should be passive consumers of news and information but rather active producers and editors of its production. In contrast with the more structured editorial process of traditional news outlets, Indymedia’s loose structure allowed for a wide variety of radical viewpoints and narratives (Garcelon, 2006). Internet researchers Kahn & Kellner (2004)
27 activist computer programmers often referred to as “hacktivists,” have developed encrypted file sharing software that allowed citizens to share activist media in repressive regimes such as China. Hacktivists, as described by Kahn and Kellner (2004) developed untraceable blogging software so that activists could freely publish critiques and commentaries about governments without fear of being arrested. The authors (2004) explained that blogs “became distinguished for providing a broad range of trustworthy alternative views concerning the objectives of the Bush administration and Pentagon and the corporate media spin surrounding them.” Donk, Loader, Nixon & Rucht (2004) explained that Internet technologies allowed activists to circumvent traditional forms of authority and knowledge production. Donk et al (2004) also described how activists used electronic mail, mailing lists, electronic forums and activist websites for “coordinating the activity of often physically dispersed movement actors.” From the earliest days of the web, Internet activism has sought to disrupt control over knowledge production and access to information held by state and corporate institutions. While early Internet activism relied heavily on computers and the web, recent digital activism has benefited greatly from improvements in mobile technologies and the emergence of digital social networks. Over the last decade scholars have written extensively about how social media platforms and mobile camera technologies provide infrastructure that facilitates activism in service of democracy (Allan, 2013; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Couldry, 2010; Ettema, 2009; Papacharissi & De Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Scholars have studied how the passage of digital media is crucial for protest movements and activist groups to overcome temporal and spatial boundaries. Studying recent protest movements, communication scholars Lance Bennett and Alexandra
Segerberg (2012) described how the viral sharing of media content on the platform 28 Twitter and YouTube during protests was pivotal to the formation of what they described as connective action. By sharing media on digital platforms protestors enabled “coordinated adjustments and rapid action aimed at often shifting political targets, even crossing geographic and temporal boundaries in the process (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).” In their examination of how citizens leveraged social media during the Egyptian revolution, Papacharissi & Oliveira (2012) described how “networked publics” developed on the social media platform Twitter that relayed important news and information, after traditional media was blocked by the government. The authors also described how activists posted photos and video as evidence of the chaos that challenged the sanitized truth and reality presented by the state sponsored media (Papacharissi & De Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Communications scholar Mary Angela Bock (2016) explored how cop- watch groups followed and filmed police officers as a form of counter-surveillance. Cop watching according to Bock (2016) could be considered a form of embodied citizenship that seeks to give “credence, attention and voice to the concerns of other.” Along with distrust of local police, Bock (2016) explained the members of the group were “working around” news media and distributing their films directly to audiences to avoid the gatekeeping and mediation of traditional editorial practices. In producing their own form of surveillance, Bock (2016) explained that cop watchers “challenge the authority of the police and traditional media.” Producing activist media during times of conflict is often an embodied and perilous task. Both media scholar Stuart Allan (2013) and Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (2013) have written about how citizen journalists leverage new media technologies to tell important stories during times of conflict. Allan described how citizen journalists challenge existing “regimes of truth,” in times of crisis by adopting the “role of a journalist in order to participate in newsmaking (Allan, 2013).” Capturing images using 29 smartphone cameras and distributing them through free file sharing sites such as Flickr, citizen journalists according to Allan (2013) were able to quickly dispatch news to the public. Similarly, Andén-Papadopoulous (2013) described witnessing as an instantaneous, embodied action by which citizen journalists challenge the authority and legitimacy of state actors through virally shared digital media (Anden-Papadopoulos, 2013). Both Allan (2013) and Andén-Papadopoulous (2013) also described how witnessing does not imply a person simply captures footage of a protest or riot for the sake of it, but rather also has the intent to share it with an audience. Allan (2007) also described that the shaky, grainy photo and video captured during the 2005 London subway bombings offered the public a unique perspective of witnessing the events through the eyes of victims. The work of citizen journalists in times of crisis, according to Allan (2013) is in service of democracy as it seeks to tell the truth through embodied civic action. Perhaps most relevant to the current study is the emergence of Black Lives Matter movement and how its supporters leverage digital technologies. In the days following the death of 18-year-old Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a White police officer, the city of Ferguson, Missouri became ground zero for racial inequality in the United States. Protestors from Ferguson and around the country flooded the city’s streets demanding justice for Brown’s death (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). While Black Lives Matter had existed for nearly a year prior to Michael Brown’s death, the organization according to Freelon et al. (2016) went “from infancy to maturity” during August 2014 in service of the Ferguson civil unrest. Members of Black Lives Matter and citizens who believed in their cause deployed the hashtags “#Ferguson” and “#Blacklivesmatter” on the social media platform Twitter for several grassroots purposes. As Bonilla & Rosa (2015) described, #Ferguson was a digital site to file information vital to protestors such as 30 potential hazardous areas in Ferguson. In their analysis of the role social media played during the Ferguson protests, Freelon et al. (2016) also described how citizen journalists and journalists from media companies used the #Ferguson to broadcast the conditions that protestors and members of the media were facing at the hands of a highly militarized police force. Photos and video showed tear gassing diffusing through crowds, and police aggressively detaining protestors and members of the media (Freelon et al., 2016). #Ferguson was also deployed by citizen journalists to challenge how both Ferguson police and traditional media organizations were portraying protestors as violent thugs and looters (Hristova, 2016). Countless citizen journalists instead uploaded and shared images and videos of peaceful protestors as counter knowledge in service of what Jackson & Welles (2015) described as a “counter-public narratives.” In a 2015 study Jackson & Welles described how the NYPD tried to generate good publicity by asking citizens to share positive photos of New York police officers using the hashtag #mynypd on Twitter. The public responded by using the hashtag as a space for counter-public narratives about “police brutality, abuse, and racial profiling (Jackson & Welles, 2015).” Since the Ferguson protests, the #Blacklivesmatter hashtag has continued to be a space for citizens to organize protests, share citizen journalism and as a space to grieve after the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. The work of citizen journalists and digital activists according to Bakardijieva, Svensson and Skoric (2012) is in service of circumventing mass media and institutional gatekeepers to provide “real-time coverage and non-hegemonic interpretations of offline political events.” Additionally digital production tools facilitate a hybrid presence, which allows activists to develop knowledge production networks in both analog and digital space. Although the current study is not focused on activists during a particular conflict, the literature examined in this section provide a few important considerations. First, the 31 idea of how digital production technologies facilitate hybrid presence for oppositional material voice provides a way to consider how independent Black media producers may leverage digital technologies to construct material voice in physical and digital space. Literature about new media activism in confluence with Couldry’s (2010) idea of voice also offer a context for considering how citizens may contest inequalities in their local context through the production and distribution of media artifacts. In other words, literature about new media activism presents a way to consider critical media practices as a form of citizenship.
RACE AND MEDIA
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall bridged the semiotic work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’s concept of discursive power and knowledge in his analysis of how television messages are constructed, distributed and consumed. Hall’s (1980) seminal work envisioned the production and consumption of television as a cyclical relationship rather than a top down transmission of information as described by important scholars of the day such as Marshall McLuhan. Hall used a similar approach to Bourdieu (1973) in analyzing the cultural production of journalism in that he described how media messages were shaped through asymmetrical relationships and processes of power. Perhaps most importantly, Hall’s (1980, 1997) concept of hegemony, borrowed from Italian theorist Gramsci, provided a way to consider how dominant powers encode preferred meanings about race, identity and culture in to media messages designed to influence and convince the public of what is real and how to feel about different issues. Peoples’ tastes and desires influenced by highly potent media messages according to Hall (1980) then cycled back to the media producers to complete the circuit.
32 Examining phenomenon similar to Hall (1997), Patricia Hill Collins (2002), John Fiske (1994) and Edward Said (1985) have also examined how media organizations reproduced indigenous cultures, minority groups and women through a dominant cultural lens in news reports, fictional television programs and advertisements. In an examination of popular television and advertising images, Stuart Hall (1997) described how black bodies had been stereotyped, or reduced to a few corporeal attributes and culturally understood meanings as a way of making them seem different. Similarly Patricia Hill Collins (2002) described how black women had been reduced to just a few images in popular culture as mammies, hoochies and matriarchs. Each of these depictions was an intersectional combination of race, class, gender and/or sexuality. According to Collins (2002), mammies were portrayed as good, docile and asexual black women who were loyal to the white families they worked for. In sharp contrast “hoochies” were portrayed as young, sexually promiscuous black women who were trying to use their bodies as a way to survive and provide for their many children (Collins, 2002). In his study of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case television coverage, media scholar John Fiske (1996) described how Hill’s race, class, gender and sexuality were described through multiaxial terms to stereotype her in ways consistent with Collins’s (2002) concept of intersectionality. Edward Said’s (1985) examination of the portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in American media described how their corporeal attributes and cultural practices were used to Orientalize them as dangerous and sexually deviant while simultaneously effeminate and weak. Taken together, the above scholarship suggests that dominant discourses strategically inflicted representational violence upon marginalized people through mass mediated stereotypical depictions.
33 In accordance with the study of hegemonic racial representation by Hall (1997) and Collins (2004), critical race scholars have examined race as a social construction deployed by the racial project of White Supremacy to deny equal citizenship to Black Americans. Critical race theory was developed in the 1980s to investigate as legal scholar Angela P. Harris wrote (Harris, 2012) “how does racism persist despite its nearly universal condemnation by state policy and by norms of polite society?” Under the auspices of cultivating an equal and just society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, critical race scholars contended the Reagan administration was in fact championing colorblind policy as a way to curtail the political and economic gains of the Civil Rights movement (Collins, 2002; Omi & Winant, 1986). However, unlike slavery and Jim Crow laws, critical race scholars argued colorblind racism was deployed through coded language and imagery designed to stoke the ire of Whites who felt betrayed by the policies of the Civil Rights movement (Collins, 2000). This betrayal was predicated upon the idea that blacks were unfairly being given handouts by the way of affirmative action and social welfare, while whites were footing the bill through taxes (Collins, 2002). Frequent news and state images of blacks as drug dealers and “welfare queens,” as Omi & Winant (1986) explained, essentialized the idea that they were undeserving of state help without acknowledging the brutal history of slavery and what the Civil Rights era policies were intended to do. Unlike its predecessors critical race scholars explained colorblind policy was the latest iteration of White supremacy intended to deny blacks equal rights and opportunity (Omi & Winant, 1986; Collins, 2000). The concept of iterative, fluid racism as a way to continually repress a group of people is perhaps best summed up by Omi & Winant’s (1986) seminal racial formation theory which they described as, “a process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn 34 shaped by racial meanings.” The construct of racial formation rejected prevailing static paradigms of race that described it in epiphenomenal terms to class inequality, ethnic assimilation, and peoplehood (Omi & Winant, 2014). Instead Omi & Winant (1986) described race as, “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” In other words, peoples’ bodies and corporeal attributes that were previously unclassified could be racialized and given “racial meaning,” according to Omi & Winant (1986). A final component of Omi & Winant’s (1986, 2014) theory of racial formation was the description of White hegemonic rule in America as a “racial project,” that normalizes racism towards blacks and other minorities by describing their downfall as essential to their culture. By normalizing the idea that black culture was dependent on social welfare and was prone to criminal activity, Omi & Winant (1986, 2014) explained that White Americans could claim that Black Americans were responsible for their own situation rather than the result of oppressive colorblind policies. While Omi & Winant’s (1986, 2014) construct of racial formation focuses what they describe as the “master category” of race other scholars have premised the study of race in the context of gender, sexuality and class. Crenshaw’s (1991) construct of intersectionality outlines how the combination of race and gender are deployed by White Supremacy to oppress Black women through lived experience and visual representation. Similarly, Collins’s (2002) theorization of a “matrix of domination,” presents how “intersecting oppressions work together in producing injustice.” At the core of these seminal theoretical constructs is the concept that race in confluence with another corporeal signifier is employed to root difference in the multiple identities of racial minorities. Collins and Crenshaw also offer how intersectional forms of racism are designed to damage racial minorities’ sense of self by narrowly defining their existence. 35 Additionally, the idea of intersectionality offers scholars a methodological and theoretical lens with roots in legal and feminist thought that more specifically locates how racial inequality is experienced by the multitude of identities within the Black community (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2002). While Crenshaw (1991) and Collins’s (2002) contributions focused on the oppression of Black women, scholars have adapted and expanded upon the construct of intersectionality to examine the lived experience and representation of Black gay men, queer Black women and transgender youth (Bowleg, 2008,2013; Daley, Solomon, Newman, Mishna, 2007). The scholarly contributions of critical race and critical cultural scholars provide contexts for considering how representational and embodied forms of racial inequality inflicted upon Black Americans may influence the production of media artifacts that offer oppositional meaning. To further locate the ontological underpinnings of oppositional cultural production it is crucial to consider Hall’s (1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins. For much of the 20th century, the racial “Other” was the subject of various modes of cultural production such as documentary, anthropology and television (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Said, 1977; Collins, 2004; Hall, 1997). Dominant regimes of cultural production in the West constructed “the black subject and black experience,” by developing the historical, cultural, and political meaning of Blackness according to Hall (1996). The position of the “Black Other” according to Hall (1996) in the context of mass mediated cultural production was that of the marginalized subject. Through this discursive othering deployed in mass and state media, dominant cultural production regimes according to Hall (1997) normalized the idea that racial minorities belonged on the economic and political fringes of society and deserve the institutional violence waged upon them.
36 Hall (1990,1996) described how in the wake of the civil rights era movements Caribbean filmmakers began to explore a “diaspora aesthetic,” which engaged with and challenged hegemonic racial representation. While hegemonic representations of race were rooted in binary difference and static past, the films of the diaspora aesthetic according to Hall (1990, 1996) offer visual representations and narratives that were rooted in contemporary explorations of identity as well as “hidden histories,” that were previously suppressed. Through visual explorations of the past and present the “new Caribbean cinema” as described by Hall (1996) presented “cultural identities,” that offered Black citizens, spatially located in the West, new ways to think of themselves and their communities. In other words, these films, according to Hall (1996), reflected oppositional visual ontologies developed from within Black communities that allowed Black citizens to view themselves through empathetic histories and identities rather than through the lens of the oppressor. The new Caribbean cinema also provided new meaning to the position of the other (Hall, 1997) as a cultural producer of political discourse rather than one who is oppressed through representation (Hall, 1990,1996). Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization also offered how the margins where racial minorities are relegated through symbolic and embodied oppression could be considered as communities where oppositional cultural production emanated from within. Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins provides a helpful framework to understand how Black media producers may engage with and challenge dominant representations of race as described by critical race scholars through the production of critical media artifacts. Recent films by Black American filmmakers such as Ava DuVarney’s 13th, suggest that Hall’s (1990, 1996) framing of oppositional media production from the racial margins is very much relevant in an American context.
Hall’s (1990, 1996) framework is certainly pertinent to this study, as several of the 37 participants’ creative work engages with identity, history, and sexuality in the context of oppositional racial meaning. The current study provides a unique opportunity to develop upon Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins by adapting his framework to examine the lived experiences and critical media practices of Black American media producers during a time of heightened racial unrest.
LITERATURE SUMMARY
This history of documentary film helps explain how and why marginalized groups leverage narrative tools and technologies to circumvent traditional authority in service of political voice. The work of critical race scholars and critical cultural theorist Stuart Hall in confluence with scholarship about documentary film offer how systemic and representational racial inequality may manifest within the ontological underpinnings of oppositional cultural production by racial minorities. Hall (1996) also rearticulated the margins as incubators for oppositional cultural production rather than spaces for discursive and embodied oppression. Recent scholarship about user-generated and new media activism content illustrate the epistemologies of subaltern groups who leverage digital technologies to produce and share media artifacts laden with oppositional meaning in physical and digital space. Bardzell’s theoretical construct of critical design in confluence with Krippendorff’s (2005) concept of a semantic turn address the axiological concerns of critical cultural producers whose work could be considered as active, embodied citizenship as they seek to engage with and solve social inequality through constructions of critical, interactive media artifacts and the cultivations of space. This reflects how people from marginalized groups may leverage narrative tools not only to speak but also to be heard. Material forms of voice and the safe spaces where these
38 mediations can take root and be shared are essential to a healthy democracy according to Couldry (2010).
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Much of the recent scholarship about oppositional cultural production by Black Americans has focused on the critical contributions of well-known artists and the ways Black citizens leverage digital tools such as smartphones and digital platforms for activism during times of conflict (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Duffy, 2016; Freelon et al.,
2016; Mitchell, 2016). This scholarship offers valuable insight as it describes the sheer volume and types of media artifacts shared in support of Black activism and the ways in which famous Black American artists leverage their position to deploy oppositional constructions of race and identity (Clark, 2016; Duffy, 2016; Mitchell, 2016). Additionally, this literature reflects how race and racial inequality have rapidly emerged to the top of the national discourse. There remains, however, a dearth of literature that examines the more in-depth media productions such as documentary films, music videos and fine art produced by independent Black media producers. An immersive, qualitative examination of independent Black media producers whose art presents new and oppositional visual representations of race, identity, history and community would address this gap. These producers regularly engage in labor- intensive productions such as art installations and films that engage with contemporary social issues related to racial inequality such as police brutality and gentrification. Their work also offers important cultural commentaries about the beauty standards of Black women, unexplored histories and the visual representation of young Black men. The work of independent Black media producers provides insight from within Black communities about how Black American citizens are experiencing the latest epoch of
39 racial unrest. For these reasons, it is crucial to understand what motivates independent Black media producers. A thorough examination of their personal histories, and creative processes will offer much-needed context about why these artists produce visual art, what they seek to say through their work and to what ends do they produce mediated visual discourses. The current study is developed upon the in-depth profiles of nine independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas. The central Texas city provides a unique local context for this study given its historic and contemporary issues of racial inequality. Segregation followed by gentrification has ostensibly made it increasingly difficult for Black media producers in Austin to showcase critical media artifacts that offer new and oppositional constructions of race. Additionally, as Austin becomes increasingly expensive to live in, the existing precariousness facing independent creative producers are exacerbated further (Burnett, 2011). The existing scholarly literature provides a helpful roadmap for locating how marginalized communities may leverage visual media production technologies to cultivate their political voice. Still, questions remain that are worthy of further study. First, Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins provides a fitting framework upon which to examine the ontological ideas that undergird the critical media production of independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas. Specifically, Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization in confluence with critical race scholarship presents a context by which to consider cultural production by racial minorities as visually mediated responses to hegemonic representation and treatment they encountered through embodied experience. Hall’s (1990) theorization also rearticulates the margins as discursive and physical spaces and moments that engender political discourse. Critical race scholarship and Hall’s (1990, 1996) theoretical construct of the margins guide the following research 40 questions to understand the motivations of this study’s participants:
How do the identities and personal histories of independent Black media producers influence the media artifacts they produce?
Sub RQ: How do the lived experiences of the study’s participants as Black Americans influence and motivate the production of oppositional media artifacts? Sub RQ: In what ways do the lived experiences of the participants as Black
Americans influence their decisions to develop media that transgresses against state and traditional media institutions?
Further, The participants of this study develop oppositional meaning about race, identity, history and community through the production of visual media artifacts and the cultivation of safe spaces. Couldry’s (2010) concept of voice in confluence with scholarship about critical race theory presents a way to consider the epistemological and axiological considerations of the current study’s participants. Taken together, these theoretical threads offer how racial minorities may leverage narrative tools to develop oppositional media in service of democratic ideals. The following research questions are developed upon the intersections of Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice and Critical Race Theory: What can be learned from the media artifacts produced by independent Black media producers about the politics of voice as it relates to Critical Race scholarship?
41 What new and counter knowledge do independent Black media producers produce, that challenges White Supremacy and other forms of hegemony in service of cultivating distinctively voice? Existing literature provides a context for understanding how citizens leverage digital production and distribution tools to support the production of citizen media or user-generated content in service of democratic ideals. This project seeks to understand the ways in which independent Black media producers in Austin leverage digital production and distribution tools in service of cultivating voice (Couldry, 2010). This project will also develop upon existing literature about how new media activism challenges state and traditional media’s authority over knowledge production. Couldry’s (2010) concept of voice in confluence with literature about user-generated content and new media activism guide the following research question: In what ways do digital production, distribution and networking tools facilitate voice as related to the creative activism of Black activist media makers in Austin, TX? Sub RQ: How do Black activist media makers leverage digital social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to share their activist media? Sub RQ: In what ways do Black activist media makers use digital social platforms to connect to other activists and other activist media? Sub RQ: In what ways do Black activist media producers use digital tools to cultivate space to be heard? Sub RQ: How do Black activist media producers use digital production tools such as video, photo, and audio editing software?
42 Finally, from within the intersections of Krippendorff’s (2005) and Bardzell et al.’s (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014) theorizations about design in confluence with Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice emerges way to conceptualize the participants of this study as designers of critical cultural artifacts that provide new and counter meanings about race and racial inequality in support of a more informed society. This study seeks to build upon the existing literature by identifying the intersections between the design of critical objects and the production of critical media, within fluid networks of power. Examining the potential intersections between design and media scholarship is at the heart of the following research question. In what ways might the production of activist media artifacts by Black activist media makers in Austin, TX resemble the human-centered design of objects? Sub RQ: What role might identity play in human centered design and critical design theory? Sub RQ: What are the intersections of critical design theory and critical race theory? The guiding research questions of this study comprehensively address the epistemological, ontological and axiological concerns of the current study’s participants. These questions offer a way to engage existing theory while also affording the potential for new theory development, given the unique, interdisciplinary theoretical foundation. An immersive qualitative research design is needed to effectively engage with the theoretical connections drawn within the research questions. In the following chapter I present an immersive qualitative research design that will effectively operationalize the research questions, developed upon ethnography, visual anthropology and critical discourse analysis. 43 Chapter Three: Methodology and Methods
The ontological frameworks developed by Stuart Hall (1990,1996,1997) critical race scholars (Harris, 1993; West, 2002) and Couldry (2010) guide my inquiry in to the lives and creative labor of independent Black media producers in Austin, Texas. The axiology of critical studies also guides this dissertation project as it allows scholars to embrace their own values in the research of how different forms of power contribute to social inequality. By embracing a critical axiology I seek produce a collection of artifacts that contribute to the growing body of scholarship media that challenge the dominant representations of racial and social inequality. I undertake with this project with humility understanding the limited power of scholarship to enact social change. Though news media should uncover and investigate social inequalities designed through state policy, much of the professional news media today inflicts ideological violence upon Black citizens through racialized tropes and stereotypes. It comes as no surprise that news media have proven ill equipped to justly and thoughtfully examine the latest epoch of Black activism. Given the heightened racial tensions in the United States, I believe it is crucial to examine the lives and creative work of Black media producers whose visual mediations and lived experiences offer much needed context about race in the context of gender, sexuality, history and community. While a positivist, quantitative study may reveal the sheer scale and types of recent Black activist media, this type of inquiry separates the researcher from the participant and thus is predicated upon an external material reality (Slevitch, 2011). However, to really know how media artifacts produced by the study’s participants reflect what they know to be true about racial and social inequality, an immersive critical study is needed that examines the participants and their work in the same context. Immersive
44 methods such as ethnography allow for the collaborative development of epistemology and ontology that value the participants’ cultural practices and viewpoints in their own context. Additionally, I believe by collaboratively developing an epistemology and ontology with the participants, this study values their contributions as integral to developing knowledge and shaping reality. An immersive study that derives its critical axiological premise by valuing the work of independent Black media producers for its democratic qualities will also provide new ways of knowing about both citizenship and in the United States. To engage with the research questions and the theoretical frameworks found in existing literature, this immersive dissertation project is developed through a three-part study that employs ethnography, critical discourse analysis and visual anthropology.
ETHNOGRAPHY
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) described man as, “an animal suspended in the webs of significance he himself has spun,” and continued, “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” To understand this web, Geertz (Geertz, 1973) encouraged researchers to study within cultures. By studying cultures as discursive according to Geertz (1973), researchers could record behaviors and actions in the context they were situated in and collect what he described as “thick description.” To capture thick description practitioners utilize several ethnographic methods such as participant observation, ethnographic interviewing and play participation to collaboratively develop knowledge based on a shared reality with participants (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Tracy, 2012).
45 An important distinction of modern ethnography to early 20th century ethnography is how the participant is considered during fieldwork. This can be evidenced by how different scholars have described people from the cultures they seek to know more about as informants, conversation partners, or participants (Pink, 2001; Rubin & Rubin, 2011; Tracy, 2012). In treating ethnographic participants as partners rather than subjects, the voice of ethnographic writing has shifted away from an objective, authoritative voice of the 20th century ethnographer towards a voice that seeks to facilitate the narratives of participants in the context of their culture. Achieving a high level of cultural understanding through the development of trust with community members and potential gatekeepers is crucial to developing an understanding of the cultural context an ethnographer is situated within. Cultivating trust and relationships with participants allows for the rich and complex understanding of cultures through the collaborative production of knowledge. By immersing myself within the homes and studios of the study’s participants I examined their personal lives and creative labor in the same context. Through collaborative ethnographic methods such as participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I gained insight about how the lived experiences of this study’s participants shape the aesthetic and narrative choices that are illustrative of what they know and what knowledge they seek to share. As a researcher of color who identifies racism and racial inequality as real, I offer an empathetic viewpoint that sees the democratic value of the participants’ creative labor. In this sense, my personal biases provide a unique lens through which I ethnographically examine the cultural practices and creative work of the research participants.
46 CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Stuart Hall (Hall, 1992) defined discourse as, “a way of representing – a particular kind of knowledge about a topic.” Words, images and speech according to Hall and others do not have meaning on their own, but gain meaning through the discourse encoded within these texts by a producer and decoded by a receiver (Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2011; Stuart Hall, 1980; van Dijk, 1993; Kress & Leeuwen, 1996). Receivers use existing cultural knowledge to derive meaning from texts. Critical scholars who study discourse argue that dominant groups in societies use discourse as a way to normalize hegemonic ideas, while quieting and discrediting the discourse of subaltern groups (Stuart Hall, 1980; van Dijk, 1993). Scholars employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) to identify hegemonic discourse that manifests and normalizes within different texts such as newspapers, film and photography (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1993). When conducting CDA scholars take an “explicit sociopolitical stance,” that critically examines the “power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice (van Dijk, 1993).” The participants’ critical media artifacts explore a wide array of social issues including racial inequality, identity, history, disability and community. By employing a CDA to examine the participants’ work often with their assistance, I developed a strong understanding of the epistemic considerations of their creative labor. Examinations of the participants’ films, photos and art installations were also crucial in identifying the types of visual discourses the participants’ transgressed against through their work such as racist and stereotypical mediations of Black people on television programs. A key feature of critical discourse analysis is that the research method allows researchers to study texts in the contexts they are produced and accessed (van Dijk, 1993). The participants of this study are prodigious users of social media platforms such 47 as Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. Participants use these platforms to share their work and garner feedback. CDA is crucial to understanding how this study’s participants leveraged social media platforms to deploy media artifacts laden embedded with oppositional visual discourses. By using CDA I can understood how the participants cultivated digital space for oppositional discourse, facilitate interactive media practices with digital contacts and also leverage social media platforms for self-branding.
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND DOCUMENTARY
Ethnographic films have been described by scholars as visual depictions of reality that offer specific ways of knowing (Aitken, 2013; Minh-Ha, 1993; Nichols, 2010). The epistemological and ontological ideas of documentary films are influenced by negotiated relationships between the filmmakers and participants, how the cinematographer frames and selects shots and also who may be funding the film (Aitken, 2013; Nichols, 2010). According to Min-Ha (1993) power and authority over knowing in early documentaries rested in the hands of mostly White men who often depicted foreign cultures in colonial and ethnocentric ways. However since the Civil Rights era, as more women and minority filmmakers have produced both mainstream and independent films, their work has provided new ways of knowing about race, gender and class (Nichols, 2010). Film scholarship has the power to combine visual aesthetics of cinema with the theoretical underpinnings of traditional research in ways that writing cannot. The incorporation of montage, music and lighting in films are powerful tools to influence what audiences know to be real. Filmmaker and scholar John Jackson Jr., (2014) described the production and post-production process of ethnographic filmmaking as theoretically rigorous processes in that the filmmaker must develop the film’s reality and what knowledge can be gained from watching it. Jackson Jr. (2014) also advocated for
48 filmmaking as scholarship in that it expands the ways in which knowledge can be constructed in the academy by bridging theory with practice. The participants of this study are cultural producers who critically design and deploy visual artifacts that are meant to be interacted with and seen. The written form does not fully do justice to their vivid, highly detailed mediations. The visual anthropology yielded audio-visual data that supported the study’s ethnography and critical discourse analysis. Subsequent to the completion of the dissertation project, this audio-visual data will be developed in to a feature length documentary film. By producing a feature-length film, I intend to engage and inform wider audiences about the participants’ lives and creative work through compelling documentary storytelling. In addition to engaging wider audiences, by producing a documentary film this project contributes to a growing body of visual and multimodal research that privileges media making as a rigorous form of scholarly production.
GROUNDED ANALYSIS
The observations, interviews, social media and other materials gathered through the various methods described above were analyzed using a grounded, open coding approach. Grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss (1968) is an inductive methodology that challenged conventional thinking of the day that qualitative research was “impressionistic, anecdotal, unsystematic, and biased (Charmaz, 2006). While critical race theory provides a framework and a lens to examine the work of Black media makers, using a grounded approach allowed for the development of new theoretical ideas. Sociologist Kathy Charmaz (2006) wrote, “A potential problem with ethnographic studies is seeing data everywhere and nowhere, gathering everything and nothing.” Charmaz (2006) described how grounded theory could guide an ethnographer’s collection
49 of thick description as well as the development of substantial theory. Grounded theory also challenged epistemological basis of positivism that knowledge and truth could be validated through highly controlled experiments in which the researcher is an “unbiased and passive” observer (Charmaz, 2006; Rubin & Rubin, 2011) Glaser & Straus (1968) argued that qualitative research could in fact be systematic and rigorous and that theory and knowledge could be generated through the simultaneous collection and analysis of data in which the researcher is an active participant (Charmaz, 2006). While not all qualitative researchers or ethnographers have adopted grounded theory, it has become an integral methodological tool in generating theory from ethnographic data. Charmaz (2006) distills the process for ethnographers in three steps: “1) to compare data with data from the beginning of the research, not after all the data are collected, 2) to compare data with emerging categories, and 3) to demonstrate relations between concepts and categories.” By actively focusing the research through coding, categorizing and memo writing Charmaz (2006) explained the ethnographer could focus their attention to important questions and phenomena that arise from the active grounded process. By focusing on the elements that emerge from the grounded analysis, Charmaz (2006) explained an ethnographer could efficiently find thick description by the way of ethnographic data along with substantial theory developed from the analysis. I employed a grounded analysis throughout the data collection and analysis phases of this project to examine the ethnographic and audiovisual data in confluence with a critical discourse analysis of the participants’ media artifacts. After each field visit with participants I examined the latest field note with the larger collection to see what patterns emerged. I cross-referenced this data with the ongoing critical discourse analysis of each of the participants’ media as a way to develop a stronger understanding of the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of their work. For example, if a participant 50 discussed described during a field visit how one of their media artifacts offered a depiction of Black women that contested stereotypical representation, I crosschecked this by examining a of the original artwork on my own or with the participant if I needed further clarification. Through this process I began making broad categories such as “female empowerment,” or “motivated by personal experience,” to organize data that revealed information about the participants’ personal histories and creative processes. As patterns and themes for individual participants solidified, I then began comparing all of the participants’ categories to see what major themes and ideas emerged across the board. Additionally, in many cases my conversations with one participant would inform questions I asked other participants. Through this inductive approach, I was able to discern how the participants’ unique life experiences informed their work that was often informed by related motivations. Additionally by cross-referencing the grounded analysis of ethnographic and audiovisual data with the critical discourse analysis I was able to understand the intersections of their creative work by having an understanding of what motivated their processes. A grounded approach also allowed me to pivot a crucial theoretical element of this project. I originally considered the participants’ work as activism, though after several months in the field, it was clear that while some of the participants considered themselves activists and others contributed to activist causes, this was an inaccurate framing. A grounded approach allowed me to conduct several additional field visits and conversations that facilitated a more organic theoretical lens that emerged from the collected data.
51 SELF-REFLEXIVITY
Early ethnographic accounts of cultures were reported in the ethnographic present and as objective fact (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Researchers did not include their personal biases and subjectivities that influenced their observations of cultures (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). However, over the last several decades the field of ethnography as described by Clifford (1986) has taken a reflexive turn having been influenced by the social movements of the 1960s. Contemporary ethnographers are encouraged to be self- reflexive and explain how their personal biases and proclivities may affect the epistemic and ontological ideas they collaboratively develop with participants. I undertake this dissertation project while acknowledging the challenges and potential ethical issues my personal history, biases, and proclivities may cause. I reflect upon some of these potential issues below. The participants of this study already represent themselves through their visual mediations and thus do not need me to provide them a “voice.” In a connected world, according to anthropologist John Jackson Jr. (2013) it is important for ethnographers to acknowledge that it impossible to collect “thick description” that will serve as the primary knowledge about particular cultures. The work of an ethnographer is simply one of many ways of knowing especially when research participants are equipped with production and distribution tools to represent themselves. The participants of this study were aware of my enterprise as I am of theirs, and thus this project was an opportunity for us to collectively think about important issues and collaboratively produce knowledge. While I am person of color who sees value in the work and the lives of this study’s participants, I acknowledge that I am an interlocutor from outside the community I am researching within. This distinction is important, as I am not a Black American citizen and more specifically, a Black media producer. Through this admission I 52 acknowledge that while I am a curious and empathetic outsider there is potential to misrepresent this study’s participants. As a filmmaker and visual artist, I have a rich cultural understanding of creative production. In one sense my skills are a useful asset in the study of visual artists. However, it is important that I do not overstep my bounds by offering advice or critique that may have adverse effects on the relationship with participants. Another potential ethical issue related to filmmaking may arise when participants want video clips or finished works produced from the footage collected in support of this project’s visual anthropology. Jackson (2004) described how visual ethnographers can amplify existing asymmetrical power relationships with research participants by giving them gifts such as produced videos. Participants may not like the finished product or may be compelled to give more of their time, both which could adversely the goals of the project (Jackson, 2004). Acknowledging and reflecting upon the potential ethical issues that may stem from my personal history and biases was a recurrent exercise throughout this project. Writing thorough and thoughtful field notes and analyzing these notes guided this process to ensure as the instrument of this project, I was not causing harm and remained an asset. This project’s immersive methodology allowed for the collection of thick description that engaged the theoretical frameworks of existing literature and facilitated new theory formation. Through ethnographic methods, I collaboratively developed knowledge of how the research participants’ personal histories and identities motivate their creative activism. Through participant observation, interviews and collaboration I also developed an understanding of the critical ontologies that their work is premised upon. A critical discourse analysis of the participants’ work contextualized the oppositional visual discourse they seek to share in confluence with how they leverage 53 social media platforms to cultivate space. The CDA allowed me to engage Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice in confluence with scholarship about user-generated content, to understand how participants cultivated safe digital spaces to interactively construct material voice. Additionally, the CDA conducted for this study in confluence with ethnographic methods allowed me to understand the axiological underpinnings of the participants’ work, which was often a form of embodied citizenship. The ethnographic film produced in support of this project will offer wider audiences new ways of knowing about independent Black media producers and their work through compelling visual storytelling.
IRB AND PARTICIPANTS
I met several of this study’s participants while I was a field researcher on a visual ethnographic project called Doing Innovation founded by S. Craig Watkins of the Radio, Television, and Film program at the University of Texas at Austin. Our research team spent several months within different creative communities such as a weekly hip hop open mic night and a monthly gaming meet up, to understand the skills, dispositions and social networks young people need to thrive in Austin’s booming creative economy. This project also critically examined how the embrace of innovation and knowledge economies by cities like Austin may contribute to existing racial inequalities. This critique was developed in part upon the experiences of our study’s Black participants who largely felt isolated from Austin’s popular narrative as a land of opportunity. We have shared our research findings in the form of short documentary films, photo essays and written essays on a website that was designed to garner the attention of a broad range of audiences, including young people who we hope find our stories relevant to their own lives.
54 My time as a researcher and creative producer on the Doing Innovation project prepared me for my dissertation project in a few important ways. First, I developed a strong understanding of how to ethnographically examine media artifacts and the people that produce them in the same context. I also developed a strong understanding of how to theoretically and methodologically bridge the study of creative economies and digital media through ethnographic inquiry. My involvement in this project also afforded many opportunities to produce creative, critical scholarship that relied upon the design and production of media as a chief research activity. For these reasons my dissertation project is a natural extension of the Doing Innovation project. For the aforementioned reasons, the current dissertation project uses the IRB approval and interview protocol from the Doing Innovation project. The IRB allows me to conduct interviews, participant observations and collect audio-visual data for front-facing presentations such as films and presentations. The IRB also allows me to use the participants’ names and identifying information for this dissertation with their written approval. The interview protocol (found in Appendix A) from the Doing Innovation project examined participants’ personal history, their professional experiences in Austin, Texas and their views on the idea of innovation. I augmented the interview protocol for this dissertation project to include questions about race and the discourse within the participants’ media artifacts. One of the participants of the Doing Innovation project is included in this dissertation project. I met seven of the participants at local events and meet ups while conducting fieldwork for the Doing Innovation project. I set up individual meetings with each of them to discuss my dissertation study at which point each of these seven participants agreed to be part of the study. I watched a short documentary about the final participant, produced by a local production company and after an initial meeting he also agreed to be a participant in this study. The study’s sample reflects a theoretical-construct 55 sample (Tracy, 2012) in that I found participants who fit in to the conceptual framework of this research project. The participants of this project reflect an eclectic array of racial identities in the intersectional context of gender, sexuality and class. The participants’ work also reflects a wide variety of creative modes and styles. During my nearly two years in the field, several of the participants hosted film screenings and gallery art exhibits. While many of the participants of this known each other well, I focused my research on each individual, while addressing their collaborative projects and interactions when necessary to expound upon a theoretical consideration. Although the sample size of nine individuals is relatively small, by selecting a limited number of participants I was able to immerse myself within the lives of each of the participants. I was able to spend time with participants in their home studios, attend their events and collaborate on media projects with several of them. As reflected in Appendix A, over the course of my two years in the field I spent roughly 896 hours in the field conducting observation and fieldwork that this project is based upon. In addition, I spent a considerable amount of time examining data while not actively in the field. The participants of this project offer a wide range of perspectives, dispositions and identities that offer a unique portrayal of Black artists in Austin, Texas. While all of the participants agreed to have their full names and identities used in this project, I chose to represent them with pseudonyms to protect their identities. I offer brief descriptions of each of the participants below.
Pablo – Pablo is a visual artist whose work engages with historical and contemporary representations of race by state and media actors. He attained a bachelor’s in fine
56 arts from a prestigious central Texas university in 2014. Norman Rockwell, Mohammad Ali and his parents inspire Pablo’s work.
Micah – Micah is a photographer and designer who immigrated to Austin in 1996 from Nigeria. Micah co-founded a visual storytelling project with Simon that explores the African diaspora across through film, installation art and photography. Micah was a participant of the Doing Innovation project.
Simon - Simon is a photographer, art director, and during this project he was the special events coordinator for an organization that supported Black businesses in Austin, Texas. His work explores the African diaspora as well as masculinity, sexuality and gender in the context of race.
Flora – Flora is a classically trained pianist who and attained a masters in musicology from a prestigious central Texas university. Her music is a form of activism that explores contemporary social and racial inequalities.
Epiphany – Epiphany is a mixed-media artist. She was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2006 car accident, and she regained much of her mobility in her hands through the production of art. Her artwork is inspired by impressionism, realism, and surrealism and engages with her identities as a Black and Nigerian woman with a disability.
57 Laila – Laila is a filmmaker and art curator. As a curator, Laila seeks to create spaces for Black artists in Austin, Texas. Her film work engages with her own identity as an African American woman living in Austin, Texas as well as identity as a Nigerian American.
Adam – Adam is a mixed media artist whose work engages with his own identity as a Black man and representations of Black bodies. Adam also curates live events and founded an organization to support Black artists in Austin.
Todd – Todd is a visual artist whose work engages with a blend of Eastern and Western philosophies. Todd’s work is in service of developing a movement towards equality, peace and harmony. Todd’s artwork is heavily influenced by his personal experiences and is often created to the beat of his brother’s musical productions.
Diane – Diane is an artist and filmmaker. Diane’s artwork explores dominant representation of Black woman in popular media. Diane blends photography, videography and painting in her production processes and is often learning new skills and ways to make visual art.
Data Collection
Data collected from the methods described above was recorded and stored in the following ways. Data from participant observation and play participation visits were recorded through the writing of ethnographic field notes as described by Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, (2011). These field notes were recorded while in the field with pen and paper
58 and digitized using Microsoft Word within 36 hours of each field visit. A sample field note from my time in the field can be found in Appendix B. Data for the critical discourse analysis was collected in a few ways. To record visual art such as a paintings and installations produced by the participants, I photographed high-resolution digital images of these artifacts from multiple angles during field visits. These photos were transferred from the camera’s flash storage media to a password protected hard drive. I created password-protected spreadsheets that contained information on how to access the participants’ publicly available digital media artifacts such as digital films and photos. I examined this data by accessing the links stored on the spreadsheet to watch the participants’ visual media artifacts on the sites hosting them such as YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo. The data in support of the ethnography and critical discourse analysis was organized in to separate folders for each participant on a password protected hard drive. The data in support of the visual anthropology was collected with a digital video camera on high capacity flash media cards. Filming occurred during participant observations, play participation meetings and during semi-structured interviews. Subsequent to each audiovisual recording, video recordings from the SD cards were transferred using a secure software utility to a secure backup hard drive. Audiovisual recordings of interviews were sent to a transcriber and the digital transcriptions were stored securely on encrypted offline hard drives. PROJECT ORGANIZATION In the following chapters I address the guiding research questions of this study. In Chapter 4, I describe how the personal histories of the participants inform and motivate their constructions of oppositional visual discourses. I present how the participants often re-contextualized (Bock, 2009) unique discursive and spatial margins (Hall, 1996) in 59 service of developing new and counter material discourses in service of cultivating what Couldry’s (2010) described as voice. In Chapter 5, I examine how the participants leveraged digital production and distribution tools to cultivate on and offline spaces where their critical mediations could be democratically seen and heard. Developing upon existing literature and the qualitative data collected which reflected how participants often simultaneous constructions of race in physical and digital space, I introduce a new theoretical concept I describe as hybrid race assemblage. In Chapter 6, I illustrate how the participants’ critical media practices to produce oppositional, interactive media artifacts are forms of critical human centered design. This critical human centered design seeks to complicate rather than simplify meaning and is an active form of citizenship intended to empower oppositional citizenry. I describe this critical human centered design with a new theoretical concept, critical race design. I describe this new concept as critical race design and also present how this form of human centered design could be considered as active, embodied citizenship in service of equality.
60 Chapter Four: Cultural Production from the Margins
The participants of this study are visual storytellers whose films, photos and illustrations collectively contest the treatment of Black people and the dominant representations of Black identities. By re-contextualizing and encoding their lived experiences into counter and new narratives about Black identity in service of equality and democratic ideals, the participants’ critical media practices provide a context for bridging Hall's (1996) idea of cultural production from the margins with Couldry's (2010) idea of voice. In bridging these theoretical constructs, this chapter engages with the first two research questions of this dissertation study. In the first section of this chapter I employ Hall’s (1996) conceptualization of cultural production from the margins to examine how the participants’ personal histories influence their creative processes and the narratives embedded within the media artifacts they produce. I build upon Hall’s (1996) framework by presenting a contemporary field study of Black cultural producers in the southern United States. From the ethnographic accounts of this project, I offer detailed accounts of two types of margins. I first examine the personal history of Pablo, a visual artist who described himself as a creativist, who used visual storytelling to address the social and racial inequalities he experienced growing up in an over-policed community in South Dallas. I also explore how Flora, a classically trained pianist, developed safe arts education spaces for young Black students in response to her own experience being on the spatial margins of her piano education. These examinations offer insight about the dimensionality of the margins such as the spatial and temporal factors that influence the discursive battles of representation. After discursively situating the participants in the context of their personal histories, I employ Bock’s (2009) re-contextualization model to examine their creative
61 processes of reinterpreting their lived experiences as counter and new visual knowledge about Black identities. Although Bock’s (2009) re-contextualization model was designed to study how video journalists construct news video, it offers a foundation on which to premise the meaningful examination of how the participants construct meaning through the production of media artifacts. I specifically utilize and expand upon Bock’s model to examine how participants developed new and counter meanings about Black identity in the context of gender, traditional authority and history. This section is built upon ethnographic data in confluence with critical discourse analysis. I conclude the chapter by exploring the ways in which cultural production from the margins is a form of what Couldry (2010) described as voice. Many of the participants reimagined their respective margins as spaces where visual political discourse could be produced from within. Through this exploration of the participants’ critical media practices as a form of voice, I offer a context to bridge the work of Hall (1996) and Couldry (2010).
CULTURAL PRODUCTION FROM THE MARGINS
In the following section I explore the personal histories of two Black media makers, Pablo and Flora. Through these examinations, I offer two distinct margins where their creative work emanates from within. Pablo’s media making is premised in his experiences growing up in poor Black South Dallas community that he described as over- policed and often portrayed as chaotic in local news coverage. Flora’s creative work is predicated upon her experiences as a young Black girl in arts education spaces where she felt spatially and discursively marginalized. Establishing the margins in this section is essential as it provides a context for understanding how the lived experiences of the participants influence their critical media practices.
62 Creativist Impulse
Although not all the participants of this study considered themselves activists, Pablo’s idea of creativism provides a context for understanding how the lived histories of media producers influence their production of critical visual art that addresses social and racial inequalities. Pablo is a visual artist garnered his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from a university in central Texas. He speaks gently and methodically with a slight Southern drawl and during our conversations he would sometimes soliloquy about his philosophical beliefs. During our time together he often wore paint-splattered jeans and t- shirts; indicative of the fact he had just been making art. Although he produced film, paintings and photography he considers himself an illustrator and aspired to work in the print or gaming industry. Pablo produces media in support of what he described as a new paradigm and on several occasions described his role as that of a creativist or a creative activist. The new paradigm Pablo envisioned is developed upon a dualism: producing media that challenges the treatment and representation of Black Americans but also producing positive media artifacts that support Black empowerment. The creativist, according to Pablo, produces art that contests the stereotypical representations of Black citizens seen in news and popular media and also contests systemic violence inflicted upon Black citizens by the state. Pablo developed the creativist idea upon his identities as a media maker and as a young Black man coming of age in a highly policed part of South Dallas. During his middle school years Pablo participated in a media production after school program that had a profound impact on how he interprets the media making process. As a participant of this program Pablo learned how to collaboratively produce video news packages. He not only learned media making skills but also learned how news workers construct visual stories through the production and postproduction processes such as 63 interviewing, cinematography and editing. This experience Pablo described from his youth greatly influenced how he interpreted the local news reportage of the largely Black community he was raised within. During one of our conversations he distilled this news reporting process using a hypothetical situation of a young Black man being killed by a police officer. Pablo said,
This is somebody laying in the street no longer on earth no more, that’s the first thing. The people in the community witness it, the people are angry, pissed off, they want to rally because they [police] just did this. Police write a police report about this, and then the media comes, second hand, and telephone, the second end, the media comes and all they can do is ask people what happened.
By describing local news reportage metaphorically as second hand knowledge in a game of telephone, Pablo presented how news media relies not on the truth but rather an interpretation of the truth. During the same conversation, he described the news media as gatekeepers who undermine the representation of Black people by portraying them in stereotypical ways such as prone to violence and morally corrupt. One afternoon when we were looking through a sketchbook that had several illustrations depicting scenes of police brutality, Pablo reflected,
Sometimes when I focus on the police officers it seems like I’m a police hater like I just hate police. I really approach things from a wider perspective and try to narrow it down. I’m not a judgmental person. I don’t really like judging people or specific people but I do like taking in and internalizing the truth of the matter or the truth of situations and try to interpret it from my own point of view or perspective.
Pablo’s reflections about the ontological underpinnings of video news production in confluence with his own position as a creativist offer important context about the margins his creative activism originates from within. By stating that his work is telling, 64 not interpreting the truth, Pablo is making a distinction that his creative activism is both spatially and discursively authentic. Not only is he physically located within the margin his work stems from but given his arts education as a creativist he is equipped with the media skills to encode new and counter knowledge that challenge media representations of his community and others like it. The creativist, according to Pablo, also is temporally located at the time an event occurs, such as the police killing of an unarmed young Black man as compared to the news media which arrives after an event occurs and relies on the testimony of law enforcement to develop their stories. The temporal placement is predicated upon his own experiences with law enforcement and news media within his community as well as how he perceived the news coverage about the deaths of Michael Brown and other young Black men who died at the hands of law enforcement in poor communities.
Spatial Margins
Flora is a classically trained pianist and during our time together she was attending a master’s in musicology program at a central Texas university. From an early aged Flora was encouraged to pursue the arts by her family, which she described to me as a “privilege.” Although she considers the private arts education she and her brother received as a privilege, she described the very nature of being a young Black girl in largely White arts education spaces as an often-stressful reality. Discussing the relationship she had with her piano instructors, Flora told me,
I have great opportunities, especially in music. But I was always a little bit tokenized 'cause I'm good at doing your type of music, your art, but there was never that moment, "What do you want to do?" Or, "Let's do music that reflects your history, your culture." That bothered me but I didn't realize that 'til much later. I always felt like I'm taking pride in someone else's work and validating that and putting it in this space. Devoting all this time and energy to learning about, 65 like, France or blah blah, Paris in 1912, blah blah blah. Whereas that's important but what, in that, reflects me? And vice versa. That got to me.
This quote reflects how Flora’s arts education spaces became margins where she experienced oppression in to two significant ways. By explaining she was tokenized for being able to play your type of music, Flora is describing being othered and fetishized by her instructors for being Black and also having acumen for playing classical piano. Later during this conversation she explained to me that during an audition for a musical performance master’s program she was interested in, an instructor said to her “You're black. You're special. Black pianist, blah blah blah. I know this other black pianist but they're better than you." She described how some instructors spoke to her as a form of violence, and left her feeling doubly marginalized as both a student and as a young Black woman. Flora’s quote reflects how the language used by her instructors and others who were in positions of power, rendered her at the margins of her arts education environment. The quote above also reveals that the epistemic underpinnings of Flora’s piano education spaces were situated in a White culture of music. In order for Flora to succeed she needed to learn what she described to me as “the canon” or the traditional lineage of classical piano. This however did not allow her to explore musicians and composers who she identified with as a Black woman. She was not only spatially on the margins as a young Black woman learning classical piano but also felt culturally marginalized having to learn a body of work that did not allow her to explore her own history. Based on her experience, Flora re-imagined arts and arts education spaces as safe spaces for Black musicians and students, an idea that resonates with the experiences of other subjects of this study.
66 Although Flora and Pablo have distinctively different life experiences, their critical media practices were informed by similar motivations. Taken together, their work addressed the discursive and embodied forms of racial inequality they had experienced firsthand. By returning to their margin through visual art and cultivation of space, Pablo and Flora reimagined these sites as spaces for resistance rather than domination. Their critical revisions of the margins are consistent with how other participants’ reflected upon racialized margins in the context of gender, disability and sexuality.
RE-CONTEXTUALIZATION AND ENCODING COUNTER-NARRATIVES
The previous section positioned the spatial and discursive underpinnings of the participants’ creative labor in the margins. In doing this, I provided a context for understanding how the personal experiences of the participants motivates and influences creative activism. In this section I examine the creative processes of several of the participants to contextualize how their work is rooted in their lived experiences within the spatial and discursive margins. To examine the creative work of the participants I employ Bock’s (2009) re-contextualization model that was designed to study how video journalists construct video news stories. However, there are some distinctive elements of Bock’s model that need to be altered in order to meaningfully study the creative activism of this study’s participants.
Re-contextualization Model
Bock’s (2009) re-contextualization model describes how journalists go through five stages in producing video news stories, which I explored in detail within the foundation of this study. The first step of this model, “preconception of the story and its elements,” provides that a video journalist exhibits a certain level of bias when assigned a story based on biases such as time constraints and how they’ve covered a similar story 67 beforehand. In the context of the creative processes’ of this study’s participants, this step should be altered to explain how the participants reflect upon their lived experiences when engaging with different mediated forms of Black representation. The participants’ deeply personal re-contextualization processes are perhaps best described by Pablo’s idea of a creativist. As a creativist, his personal experiences informed his critical media practices that were in service of offering new and counter representations of Black communities and people. While the epistemic nature of Pablo’s concept of a creativist was resonant with all of the participants’ creative processes, some participants were not primarily focused on re-contextualizing ideas surrounding Black citizenship. The second step in Bock’s (2009) model, “locating and gaining access to elements,” refers to the physicality and embodied nature of collecting story elements by video journalists. In the context of this project, this step is altered to reflect how some of the participants remix and re-appropriate existing media artifacts and styles as part of the production of new and counter knowledge. This step is also not vital to all the participants’ creative processes. The final three steps in the model (de-contextualization, narrative building, re- contextualization) are transferrable as they were originally conceived for the purposes of this study.
Re-contextualizing Visual Representation of Black Identity
Diane and Pablo engaged with and challenge visually mediated representations of Black identity depicted in news and popular media. Diane is a visual artist and during our time together she was producing a series of paintings titled Mysoginoir. The series challenges the objectified portrayals of women in 1990s music videos and represents them in what Diane described as positions of power rather than submission. During one of our meetings she walked me through re-contextualization process by explaining the
68 process of creating the Mysognoir series. During her preconception process Diane explained that she had wanted to engage with the visual representations of women as objects. The ontological basis of Diane’s series is rooted within is a discursive space in which Black women have been reduced to stereotypical representations as described by Collins (2004). Reflecting upon her own experiences during the preconception process Diane decided that she would photograph models in positions of power that contrast the submissive positioning of women in 1990s music videos. Once she had decided upon a concept for her story, Diane gained elements for her project by watching old music videos on YouTube to refresh her memory of how women were portrayed in these videos. During this process, Diane also used a freelance model website to hire Black female models to be the subjects of her series. During the de-contextualization process, Diane photographed several Black female models at her home studio “in positions of power instead of a position of being less than.” She added, “Because that's what I saw in the videos you know they were having champagne poured on them and stuff like that.” The decontextualization process was a way for Diane to reimagine Black women as powerful. During the narrative building process Diane manipulated her digital images using the photo-editing program Photoshop. During this process Diane explained to me “at one point I started scratching them out with the paintbrush in Photoshop and I thought okay well that could actually work.” By scratching out body parts on her digital images that were objectified in music videos such as Black women’s posteriors, breasts and faces, Diane sought to reclaim those body parts. During this narrative building process Diane’s interaction with her digital tools allowed for new meaning to be developed. Diane explained the final aspect of her process was saving the manipulated digital images on to her iPhone and using them as references images as she painted a larger version of
69 digital image on a canvas. Diane’s process of using reference images is reflected in the photo below.
Illustration 1: Diane’s creative process
In early February 2016, Pablo published an illustration to his Instagram account that depicted a police officer pointing a gun at an unarmed Black boy who held his arms above his head clutching a string attached to a helium filled balloon. In a voice bubble stemming from the police officer’s mouth Pablo wrote, “Put the weapon down.” The boy’s expression is one of confusion and fear as the police officer scowls back at him. Several of Pablo’s pieces depict similar scenes. During one of my visits to his home studio as we looked at these photos he told me that, “nobody I know has had good
70 experiences with the police.” Pablo himself had been arrested in Austin in 2015 for drawing a mural on an abandoned building. The ontological underpinnings of these pieces are premised in Pablo’s own experiences and that of the people in his community. These pieces reflect the reality Pablo knows to be true before the television crews arrive and present what he described as “the truth of the matter.” Pablo’s process in producing these pieces that provide what he explained as truth begins when he reads or watches a news story about violence against Black citizens. He decontextualizes the news through his creativist lens by reflecting upon his own experiences with law enforcement and as a media producer. He subsequently develops his final narrative by producing several prototypes and smaller sketches of his pieces as he decides the truth he wants the final media artifact to reflect. Once Pablo has decided upon the truth he wants to impart through his work, he re- contextualizes video news reportage of Black activism or police brutality through a media artifact that provides what he describes as a “visual metaphor” of what really occurred.
Re-contextualizing Space
As described in the first section of this chapter the margins as described Hall (1996) could be considered to have spatial and discursive dimensions. Some participants focused their creative activism on challenging representations of race by cultivating and reimagining spaces where new and counter forms of racial discourse could exist. I explore how the reimagination of space could be considered a form of re- contextualization by exploring the creative processes of Simon and Flora. Simon is a photographer and art director in his mid-20s. He was raised in a rural part of South Dallas and the church was prevalent in his family’s life. The church in his community set the tone for Black masculinity according to Simon. He explained to me,
71 “the pastor required all the men in the church to come to be the rock and the foundation, right. I remember having to perform the entire time, being masculine.” During this conversation he mentioned he had to perform many times, especially as a gay man growing up in an environment in which he was expected to live at odds with his personal ideals. During our time together, Simon had launched a photography series in an East Austin historically black cultural center titled, Hidden in Plain Sight. This series engages with the rigid view of masculinity he felt he had to uphold while growing up, while offering a counter reality that Black masculinity can be “sensitive” and “vulnerable.” Simon explained to me, “I wanted to introduce these conversations in my own narrative, in my own way. So, it's not just for me, I feel like for black men in general as far as black boys who are sensitive, it’s for them.” He added, “So I really want to create a space that is very authentic and honest.” Simon’s re-contextualization process for this series began in thinking about his own experiences performing in Black cultural spaces such as the church. He wanted to cultivate and decontextualize a Black cultural space where he and others like him did not have to perform but rather could simply be. He began by decontextualizing both what masculinity and masculinity in the context of Black cultural spaces meant to him. This process informed the narrative building process in which he took several self-portraits wearing earrings and headdresses that are traditionally thought of as feminine within his community and frankly in Western culture in general. The high-contrast monochrome photo below is from Simon’s show.
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Illustration 2: A photo from Simon’s gallery show
Simon collaborated with the gallery space director on a strategy for laying out each image to meaningfully engage audiences in the forms of masculinity he was offering. They also developed text that was pasted to the walls at the front of Simon’s gallery exhibit that would alert audiences as to the intended meaning of the space. One of these texts described Simon’s intentions in describing, “By emerging as such, he brings
73 attention to those men who are hidden in plain sight, who demand to engage with the formation of a new Black male hood.” In this case, the re-contextualization process involved both interventions to the body and space. By using his “muscular” physique as he put it to be the vehicle for his intervention, Simon was using his own Black male body as a canvas for re-contextualizing Black masculinity. Then by placing framed photos of these re-contextualized images on the walls of the type of space Simon described was intended for traditional ideas of Black masculinity, his project also re-contextualizes the space as a site where new ideas about Black masculinity can safely flourish. In the fall of 2015 Flora started a children’s choir hosted at a cultural center in a historically Black part of East Austin. Flora invited young children from the local community for an hour each Saturday afternoon at 2pm to learn about different aspects of music, Black history and to discuss their own experiences as young Black youth growing up in Austin. Flora explained to me “The kids’ voices matter in this space. I want the choir to be a safe space for them.” She also described how she wanted children to learn about different Black musicians that she felt she did not get to explore within her own arts education such as Nina Simone and Fela Kuti. More often than not during my visits, Flora spent a good portion of the hour sessions just getting the rambunctious youth to sit still. However, these more chaotic moments also reveal the tone and environment Flora sought to cultivate with the choir. During one of my visits, Flora was attempting to get the children’s attention and asked the rambunctious group to listen. One of the students responded, “Some people don’t have ears and can’t listen.” Flora used the opportunity to discuss with the children about the hearing impaired and how to be respectful of people with disabilities. In that moment, Flora not only validated her student’s ideas but also provided a way for the students to discuss an important topic with empathy.
74 The choir provided Flora an opportunity to re-contextualize music education spaces as safe environments for Black children. Flora like Simon reflected upon her classical piano education in preconceiving what an arts space is and what it could be. Her de-contextualization process was informed by her personal experiences and she re- envisioned art education spaces as places where the bodies of Black students were safely accepted but also as a space where these students could learn about music and musicians that reflected their own cultural interests and proclivities. In contrast to the narrative building of a front facing piece of media such as a film, Flora’s process was intended to rethink the epistemic climate of a pedagogical space. Flora wanted to develop a safe space in which Black youth had agency and also could learn about musicians and music that was important to the Black community. Once Flora had secured a space and found students, the re-contextualization of music education spaces space for Black youth was iterative. Flora explained to me that during a rehearsal session for an upcoming Christmas recital she found herself falling back in to the musical culture she sought to contrast with her intervention. During one of our conversations she explained how she overcame the situation,
I think I was talking to my mom and I kind of was just, like, "What is preparation? What is this level I'm expecting these eight-year-olds, or whatever, to be on? And is that necessary? Why does it have to be so perfectly curated and in tune? Why can't we just enjoy where it's at?" That really put me in check. I have these really high expectations that I say are me being a perfectionist, which is part of it, but also that comes from this tradition where I learned that I had to be above and beyond in order to be relevant, to be noticed, to be validated. I was like, "It's okay for these kids to have fun and to perform and it not be perfect and not be great in someone's eyes but they were enjoying it.
In this quote, Flora puts herself in her students’ shoes by reflecting upon her own musical education. It also reflects how in the space she has cultivated she does not want 75 to put the students in a situation where they needed to be relevant, noticed and validated. In other words by acknowledging her own painful experiences in musical education spaces, Flora was able to remember her mission as cultivating a space where Black youth can just be.
Re-contextualizing Under Accessed Margins
Within hegemonic societies according to Hall (1980, 1997) dominant actors mediate discourses with preferred meaning while selectively under accessing subaltern, oppositional voices. The work of Pablo, Flora and Diane reflect how racial minorities produce media that offers under accessed discourses about contemporary social issues such as police brutality, gentrification and the representation of Black women. However not all of the participants were primarily invested in producing oppositional discourses about race. Epiphany and Todd were often engaged in producing oppositional discourses that stemmed from relatively invisible margins. In other words, their visual mediations were rooted in under accessed identities non-existent in dominant discourses. Epiphany is a visual artist who was paralyzed from the waist down during a near fatal car accident in 2006. Producing art was crucial to Epiphany’s recovery and facilitated the improvement of mobility in her arms and hands. Epiphany also credited art making for restoring her sense of self, which is reflected in this emphatic statement on her portfolio website, “Not many people can say that a crayon saved their lives, but I can. It was a simple crayon and a sketchbook that helped me in my darkest days.” Epiphany’s paintings engage with her eclectic identities as a Black, Nigerian-American and female person with a disability. During our time together Epiphany explored these identities through paintings inspired by impressionism, realism and surrealism.
76 Epiphany’s creative examinations of disability happened on and off the canvas. In discussing her disability Epiphany explained to me that, “People view this chair as a death sentence. But the chair is what helps me move and get around.” As this quote reflects, Epiphany felt that people viewed citizens with disabilities as incapable. In response, Epiphany actively contested this perception through her self-presentation. During our time together she drove a specially outfitted van, often helping friends and her own caregivers run errands. Epiphany also explained to me that she never left her townhouse without fixing her makeup and hair, as she wanted to show people that citizens with disabilities have self-worth and are beautiful. Epiphany’s self-presentation could be considered a re-contextualization of existing discourses about citizens with disabilities that she had experienced firsthand. By using her body as the canvas for this re-contextualization, Epiphany provided an oppositional meaning of disability through live, visual construction. As she attested to me during one of our interviews, Epiphany’s embodied re-contextualization aimed to present people with disabilities as citizens deserving of equal rights and visual representation. The epistemic underpinnings of Epiphany’s re-contextualization through self- presentation were also reflected in her paintings. Epiphany’s Creation series engaged with several issues important to her including mobility, disability, identity and the cosmos. The paintings in the series depicted three female figures connected to the cosmos. The image below depicts the third painting in the Creation series.
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Illustration 3: The third painting in Epiphany’s Creation series.
In describing her creative process to produce the series Epiphany explained, “When I see it I see my many identities merging. For the most part I want other people to see themselves. I still want to feel like I’m relatable. I feel like in my everyday life I’m invisible, but when people look at the piece, it makes me feel like part of the human experience.” Epiphany’s quote reflects how she viewed her art as a vehicle to relate her personal experiences to other peoples’ lived experiences. Her media making like her self- presentation reinforced the idea that disabled people share similar values, fears and aspirations as those without physical disabilities. Through abstract empathetic representation, Epiphany developed a visual discourse that presented disability in the context of equal citizenship. Along with more abstract representations of disability, Epiphany also produced several paintings that examined her identities with more pronounced, oppositional visual language. Her painting titled A Crown Compromised depicts a bare chested Black woman straightening a single strand of her curly hair. Epiphany posted an in-progress photo of 78 the piece to her Instagram account. The text accompanying Epiphany’s image reflected an informal syntax common in social media postings and stated, “She is beautiful because her hair can be straightened long and flowing if you want?..rise Queens and reclaim your essence..these curls and that melanin are a celebration not a curse! (sic)” The painting and accompanying text offer a critical response to White beauty standards and re- contextualized a Black woman’s skin color and natural hair texture as symbols of beauty and power. I offer examples of Epiphany’s self-presentation in confluence with her abstract and more pronounced artwork to appropriately locate the under accessed margins her artwork emerges from within. During one of our early conversations Epiphany explained, “I don’t want to be considered only a Black artist or a disabled artist.” Rather, she wanted to be considered as a multi-faceted artist unshackled by specific labels. By locating herself as an artist first, Epiphany explained to me that she had the freedom to grow as a storyteller and engage wider audiences with her work. Although Epiphany engaged with dominant discourse of race, disability and gender in her work, her core mission was to re- contextualize the discursive and physical space she occupied as a space for multifaceted political discourse. Todd is an abstract artist in his early thirties who lived in East Austin. His abstract paintings and drawings were often filled with abstract glyphs fashioned in to concentric or linear patterns. While painting, Todd listened almost exclusively to his twin brother’s latest musical productions either live or through recordings. His brother was a music producer who combined sampled loops of songs from yesteryear with live and electronic instrumentation that were distilled in to meditative tracks. Todd described his abstract art as a reflection of his previous life in which he was
“playing the game.” He described “the game,” as a socially constructed apparatus that 79 confines people to their labor and constantly demands their monetary and emotional resources. Todd explained to me that he barely scraped by for several years when working in food services and taking on odd jobs to support his budding art career. During this time told me that he developed an addiction to an ADHD medication that was prescribed to him in his youth. Todd explained that his early paintings lacked meaning as they were often created while he was in a fugue state brought on by his addiction and sleep deprivation. During our time together, Todd was able to overcome his addiction and his artwork began to actively engage with “the game.” This was perhaps best illustrated by the dramatic change of his abstract aesthetic. His early works were comprised of multicolored globules of paint, whereas his more recent work reflected more defined patterns, mappings and symbols. Todd described that he wanted to “create a movement that brought people together,” through his newer abstractions. He also wanted to offer audiences the same revelation he experienced about “the game,” so they could also free themselves and pursue their dreams. Todd’s artwork could be considered an abstract critique of how neoliberal economies organize civic life in service of corporate interests. His critical re- contextualization process was often reflective of his experiences “playing the game”, but also was informed by his consumption of news and social media. Following the murder of a student on the University of Texas at Austin campus, Todd said to me, “Why are we still doing this? And that type of shit, is what I put in to my art, it’s the only type of thing. I’m a very emotional person. I feel things even when I’m not present. Even after I had my friends say they were safe after the stabbing on Facebook.” Through art making, Todd intended to illustrate how events such as murder organically manifest in the current social order that is designed to separate people. His intervention is to re-contextualize
80 pernicious social events through visual abstractions that unify citizens in a collective mission and consciousness. During one of our conversations Todd pinched his skin and explained, “this is just a vessel for this life.” This quote reflects how Todd’s worldview is in part premised in Eastern philosophy. His statement also reflects his views on race. He explained to me that while he was conscious of racial inequality and was very supportive of activist artists such as Diane and Adam, he had a different purpose. However, Todd was also conscious of the fact that as a Black abstract artist, his very existence transgressed against prevailing art world norms. Although his work did not directly engage with prevalent racial discourses, Todd’s socially conscious art and very existence are indicative of an embodied re-contextualization of an abstract artist. His artwork also reflects how socially conscious art could be considered as emotional and abstract visual meditations.
POLITICAL VOICE
The ethnographic accounts detailed in this chapter illustrate the participants’ deeply personal critical media practices. Taken together, the participants’ creative processes reflect upon and offer new ways to consider Hall’s (1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins. Pablo, Diane, and Flora’s critical mediations are resonant with Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization and offer contemporary contexts of how cultural producers from the margins leverage narrative tools to deploy oppositional discourses. Epiphany and Todd’s critical media practices offer new ways to consider the margins, as discursive and physical spaces that engender critical cultural production not primarily focused on oppositional racial discourses. The participants’ work also offers new context to the construct of the documentary voice examined by scholars of documentary film (Nichols, 2010). In ways similar to the documentary productions in the
81 wake of the civil rights era, the participants’ visual or documentary voice engages with and actively challenges dominant representations of race and culture. Additionally the participants’ critical media practices reflect how they experienced intersectional forms of racial inequality. Simon’s cultivation of safe space reflected upon how he felt othered as both a Black and gay man. Diane’s series of paintings was informed by how she felt Black women were objectified in the context of their bodies. Their gender, sexuality and class informed the participants’ media practices in confluence with their unique experiences as Black Americans. While Hall’s (1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins provides a fitting framework to consider the ontological underpinnings of the participants’ work, additional theoretical structure is needed to further locate their critical media practices in the context of racial and social inequality within the United States. The participants’ work largely illustrated how representational and embodied violence manifest in contemporary American society to erode equal citizenship. Many participants’ critical mediations reflected how the racial project of White Supremacy is designed to deny equal citizenship to Black Americans. Taken together, their visual explications exposed how social and racial inequalities erode true democracy. In other words, their documentary voice as visual storytellers aligns with the political voice they seek to cultivate. When the participants’ critical media practices are considered as pro-democratic visual discourses they are in service of what Couldry (2010) described as voice. The participants’ axiological motivations are also resonant with Couldry’s (2010) concept of voice as many of them were ultimately concerned with supporting equal citizenship through their critical media practices. The participants’ work is perhaps best described as political voicings that often addressed firsthand accounts of inequality. Flora’s cultivation of safe spaces challenged 82 existing power structures while providing Black arts students a nurturing environment that valued their contributions. Diane, Simon and Epiphany created nuanced representations of Black identities in the context of gender, sexuality and disability outside the confines of dominant stereotypical, harmful representations. Pablo’s illustrations and paintings represented his hometown with empathy and respect in ways that that challenged reductionist portrayals of Black communities by local news media and law enforcement. These individual contributions reflect a wide gamut of artistic modes and critical perspectives. Their work cannot be reduced to a few core elements. Rather, the participants’ stories present a more textured, nuanced way to think about oppositional cultural production in the context of race. Each of their critical media practices offers its own unique voicing or articulation of oppositional political discourse. As I explore further in the following chapter, all of the participants intended for their critical mediations to be seen and heard, and was often intended to empower and engage specific audiences. Although Epiphany produced artwork as a way to creatively express her own story, she was also deeply motivated to create artwork that empowered other people with disabilities. Similarly Simon’s exhibit was intended to offer gay Black men a meaningful, inclusive representation that celebrated rather than hid the existence. The participants produced artwork with specific audiences in mind and also with specific agendas and objectives. In other words, their work was in service of empowering subaltern voices by presenting critical visual discourses in ways that could be seen and interacted with by others. The participants were not making art merely for themselves. Rather, their critical mediations were produced in modes and with specific critiques that would foster interaction. The axiological basis of their media making processes could be considered in service of voice as they intended for their work to be seen and heard by others. 83 This ethnographic evidence that this chapter is developed upon provided a unique opportunity to bridge the work of Hall (1990, 1996) and Couldry (2010). This chapter offered renewed ways to consider Hall’s (1990, 1996) concept of margins while also presenting how oppositional visual media production could be considered a form of political discourse in service of voice (Couldry, 2010). It is important to note that this chapter focused on only one aspect of voice, which was how participants constructed visual discourses embedded with different forms of oppositional meaning. However, according to Couldry (2003, 2010) for voice to exist, there must be space where material discourses can be shared and equally valued. In the next chapter, I focus on how participants leveraged digital production and distribution tools to construct safe spaces for their work, and thus cultivate voice.
84 Chapter Five: How Digital Affordances Support Material Voice and Hybrid Race Assemblage
In the previous chapter I examined how the participants’ personal histories motivate their critical mediations, frequently the process of re-contextualizing hegemonic representations of Black identity in to oppositional media artifacts, self-presentation and safe spaces. Their re-contextualization processes were essential to cultivating voice, evidenced by how they leveraged narrative tools to produce critical, material discourses. Voice, according to Couldry (2010) is both the act of speaking but also the capacity to be heard. The participants were exceptionally skilled visual artists who leveraged their high levels of media and digital literacies to cultivate spaces on and offline where their critical mediations could be seen and heard. Developing upon the qualitative evidence garnered through critical discourse analysis and ethnographic observation, in this chapter I examine how the participants leveraged digital technologies to produce and distribute critical re-contextualizations within on and offline spaces constructed for oppositional discourses. The chapter is guided by Shaw’s (2017) definition of affordances. Shaw’s (2017) adaptation of Hall’s (1973) encoding and decoding model to examine the ways in which audiences engage with the affordances of new media tools provides a fitting construct through which to examine how the participants of this study use digital media tools in service of constructing material, visual forms of oppositional material voice. Shaw’s (2017) intervention to extend Hall’s (1973) framework to the study of new media is also resonant with the epistemic framework of this study developed upon Hall’s (1996, 1997) ideas on representation of race and cultural production from the margins. Employing Shaw’s (2017) framework I explore how digital affordances supported interactive production processes, self-publishing and branding, and a temporally fluid form of citizen 85 witnessing. Through these individuals examinations I make contributions to Gee’s (2005) construct of affinity spaces and scholarship about citizen witnessing (Allan, 2013; Anden-Papadopoulos, 2013). I also examine how interactive affordances of social media platforms exposed participants to distinctively digital forms of racism. By exploring inequality and racism in digital space I offer renewed context to Papacharissi’s (2002) construct of a virtual sphere and Nakamura’s (2008) study of how people from marginalized groups navigate and combat racist discourses on the Internet. I conclude the chapter by exploring how digital affordances often facilitated by mobile technologies seamlessly and simultaneously situated participants in physical and digital space. I describe this hybrid presence to produce material forms of voice as hybrid race assemblage. This new theoretical construct develops upon this study’s ethnographic accounts and critical discourse analysis in confluence with Sharma’s (2013) construct of digital race assemblage, Omi & Winant’s (1986) theorization of racial formation and Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice.
INTERACTIVE AFFORDANCES
The participants of this research project often leveraged the digital affordances of social media platforms to support the production and distribution of their critical media artifacts. In this section I explore how interactive affordances supported the production and distribution of material discourse in service of voice.
Voice as a Social Process
During one of my visits to Diane’s home studio, she and Flora were collaborating on a music video project. Flora stood in front of a green screen wearing a sparkling gold dress as Diane and her husband directed and filmed her. At one point Diane asked Flora to twirl and after Diane had captured her movement on her dSLR camera, she then said, 86 “Ok now once for Instagram.” Without hesitating, Flora obliged and twirled again. Diane then used the iPhone application Boomerang to take a series of images that were automatically processed and stitched in to a stop motion video. During their next production break, Diane posted the stop motion video of Flora twirling to her Instagram and Facebook accounts. Her post included the text, “Spent the day working on a multimedia art project,” and she included Flora’s social media handle. Diane explained her impetus for this usage of social media during her production process by saying,
I find it important to use social media in the process just because it lets people out there know what I'm working on. And it also, it's a way to get instant feedback as well. So it's kind of cool to give people a glimpse into what's going on in my studio in the garage. And also it's cool to post a new work once it's finished. Just to get that feedback, what people think. And also just ... last year when I was working on one of my pieces I would post little snippets of where I'm at in painting the piece and then finally I posted the finished piece and I heard from other people that they were actually, they actually appreciated seeing the behind the scenes and the process of making the painting so I thought that was interesting that people were actually interested in it or cared. This quote reflects how Diane viewed her production process as interactive. By leveraging the interactive affordances of social media platforms, Diane was able to garner feedback about her in-progress and finished artwork. She also garnered insight about what her audiences liked to see such as the “behind the scenes and process.” As illustrated by Diane’s interaction with Flora in which she stated, “Ok now once for Instagram,” participants were well versed in the types of social media vernacular that would engage audiences as evidenced by Diane’s usage of the popular Boomerang application. In addition to stop motion videos participants also published time-lapse photography and micro documentaries depicting their creative processes in addition to slideshows of their finished pieces to inform audiences of their processes. Facilitating meaningful, intimate interactions was often its own creative process and participants
87 frequently tinkered with their social media strategies to strengthen relationships with their audiences. Diane’s usage of social media to connect with audiences also reflects how the productions of oppositional visual discourses were often social processes. By inviting audiences inside the studio, Diane and other participants gave audiences the opportunity to collaboratively think about artwork about race, gender, disability and sexuality. These interactions frequently informed the participants’ current and future critical mediations. Like Diane, Pablo often published images and videos of his in-progress and finished pieces to strategically engage audiences. In September 2015, during the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, he published a sketch (shown below as Illustration 1) that depicted a politician posing for a photo during a scheduled stop in a generic community. Specifically, the politician is posing for a “selfie,” which is a photo a person takes of himself or herself often intended for sharing on social media platforms.
88 Illustration 4: Pablo’s sketch of a politician posing for a “selfie.”
In the accompanying text published below the image, Pablo reflected how politicians disingenuously pose with communities to garner votes, “but don’t really care or support the issues or concerns of the neighborhoods or the people in the community they visit.” In follow up comments accompanying the image, Pablo addressed a prominent Black community organizer pleading with him not to “take the hearts of our people.” Pablo used the “mention” feature of social media platforms that allows a user to link and associate other accounts to the publication of a social image, video or text. His strategy worked as the community organizer responded to Pablo, thanking him and stating that his work spoke for itself. Pablo responded by letting the community organizer know that his work had inspired Pablo to produce more artwork with positive themes. By leveraging the “mention” feature of the Instagram platform Pablo centralized a digital conversation about the often-tenuous relationships between politicians and communities, around his own artwork. Pablo’s experience also reflects how the social media postings of other users, such as the community organizer, inform the epistemic concerns of Pablo’s and other participants’ creative processes. Diane and Pablo’s usage of digital technologies to interactively engage audiences in the visual construction of race offers renewed context for Sharma’s (2013) construct of a digital race assemblage. By leveraging existing digital architectures, illustrated by Pablo’s usage of the mentions feature of Instagram, participants and their audiences collaboratively constructed race as material visual discourses. Participants also leveraged other digital assemblages to facilitate interactive constructions of race, such as the tagging and hashtag features, which I explore further in a following section.
89 Cultivating Hybrid Space
Participants also leveraged the interactive affordances of platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to construct unique spaces for interactive production. Adam is a multi-skilled visual artist who produces paintings, photography and film. During my time in the field he lived in a house with several other men in their twenties pursuing careers in the arts. Adam’s bedroom, which had a large vaulted ceiling, was the site of his home studio. On many occasions Adam invited his digital contacts to view his late night painting sessions using his smartphone and Instagram’s live broadcast feature. He had amassed a following of over 4,000 Instagram contacts largely by finding likeminded people he described as his “core audience,” which he later described as Black people between the ages of eighteen and forty. As I witnessed while watching one of his live broadcasts, Adam set up his smartphone in his bedroom to live record and broadcast a late night painting session. On this particular evening he painted a large-scale portrait of his girlfriend as part of a series that explore race, gender and identity. The live broadcast feature of the Instagram platform allowed Adam to cultivate a unique space for his fan base where participants witnessed his critical media practices. Additionally, the interactive affordances of Instagram allowed audiences to interact with Adam in real-time through text messages. The space Adam cultivated through his live broadcast loosely resembles what Gee (2005) theorized as affinity spaces. Adam cultivated unique digital spaces that connected likeminded people for the production and appreciation of media artifacts. However in contrast to the spaces Gee (2005) theorized, Adam’s live broadcast space focused on the media practices of an individual rather than that of an informal community. Additionally, Adam’s live broadcasts space could be considered a hybrid form of an affinity space. Adam was physically present in his room and also digitally present on the Instagram 90 platform, as interactive affordances allowed him to interact with participants in real time throughout his broadcasts. Diane also leveraged existing digital architecture to cultivate spaces for her work. Diane often employed hashtags in the text messages accompanying the photos and videos she posted to Instagram and Facebook. Hashtags are assembled with the “#” symbol followed by a unique phrase, such as “#blacklivesmatter.” Social media users employ hashtags in their postings to catalogue and link their individual media artifact to larger digital conversations about a specific topic such as a news story, a natural disaster or a sporting event (Hermida, 2010). Diane employed hashtags such as #blackwomen, #feminist, #blackart when posting her work to social media. She also posted her work or works-in-progress with the hashtags #austinartist, #painter to spatially and professionally situate her work. Diane’s usage of hashtags reflects how participants leveraged digital affordances to connect to existing spaces where conversations about race, art and gender were already occurring. In other words, these affordances allowed participants a certain level of autonomy to choose and potentially disrupt existing digital spaces to engage audiences, garner feedback and present their visual media artifacts. Todd used hashtags in ways similar to Diane. He also employed hashtags as digital shorthand to represent his own identity and the epistemic concerns of his work. As described in the previous chapter, Todd often listened to his twin brother’s live or recorded hip-hop beats while producing his own art. During one of our conversations about the relationship of music and his art, Todd described his work to me as visual interpretation of hip-hop. This was reflected in his usage of hashtags when publishing digital copies of his abstract art on social media. In the accompanying text below several of his images he used the following hashtags: #art, #austin, #hiphop, #abstract,
#contemporaryart. In one sense, these hashtags served a functional purpose as they 91 connected Todd’s abstract art to existing digital spaces and conversations about art, hip hop and the city of Austin. When Todd’s usage of hashtags is considered in confluence with the ethnographic accounts detailed above, hashtags also provided Todd the capacity to express his identity through digital shorthand. I offer this nuanced example to illustrate how digital affordances such as hashtags serve functional purposes such as facilitating unique digital spaces while also affording social media users the capacity for unique self expression.
Self-Publishing and Branding
Several of the participants were actively pursuing creative careers in film, photography and design. The production and distribution of material voice was often simultaneously deployed with personal and professional branding by the participants. Laila, a lifelong Austin resident founded her own video production company that specialized in what she described as “guerilla filmmaking.” She described this style of filmmaking as very low budget and required her to wear several hats on set. Laila was often the cinematographer, director and editor of her films. During our time together she had been producing the second season of a comedy web series based on her experiences as a Nigerian American woman working as an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. In describing her impetus for creating the series, she explained to me, “There is no representation of Nigerian Americans on television or in the movies.” By producing this series, Laila sought to mediate a visual representation of the Nigerian American experience through whimsical storytelling. Laila promoted the series through several social media postings from her personal and professional social media accounts. After launching the trailer for the her series, Laila posted an excerpt from the video to her professional Instagram account with the
92 following text beside it, “The Trailer is out! Click the link in the bio to watch the full video! Tag your friends!!!” Laila’s Instagram posting marketed the new season of her web series and also encouraged her audiences to spread the word through “tagging.” The tagging feature of social media platforms is similar to the mentions feature discussed earlier as it allows a person to link other social media accounts to a digital image or video posted on Instagram or Facebook. When tagged, a person receives a message on their mobile phones, which alerts them to the social media posting to which they have been linked. By encouraging users to tag their friends, Laila leveraged existing interactive affordances of the Instagram platform to exponentially expand the reach of her original message. Laila’s promotional Instagram posting also illustrates how she concurrently promoted her latest project as a filmmaker and mediated a new visual representation of the Nigerian American experience. The sharply edited trailer presents the major plot points of the web series. In the beginning of the trailer, the main character’s mother suspects Nneka is driving a taxi and implores her other children to find out the truth. During one of our conversations Laila explained that Nigerian parents like her father want their children to pursue successful careers as doctors or engineers. In the trailer, she playfully engages with parental pressure in ways familiar to her and other Nigerian Americans. By employing promotional dialectic, Laila’s trailer provided a representation of Nigerian Americans that were familiar and not othered. Her usage of tongue-in-cheek visual storytelling, upbeat African music and motion graphics to represent Nigerian Americans is resonant with how cultural producers from the margins (Hall, 1996) leverage narrative technologies to spatially and temporally relocate African heritage to the here and now.
93 Although Laila aspired to produce higher budget films in the future, in the short run digital media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube afforded her free distribution of her films and promotional materials. Laila explained to me that she appreciated the ability to freely self-publish as she could maintain full creative and distributive control over her films as she built a library of work that could lead to potential grant funding or a sponsored series in the future. In the context of Laila’s creative endeavors, the ability to digitally self-publish meant that she could not only fill a representational void by distributing and promoting her web series but could also position herself as capable filmmaker who was telling important stories about her community. As several scholars have warned (Fuchs, 2012; H. Jenkins & Deuze, 2008; Couldry, 2010) the corporations that own social media platforms such as Google and Facebook encourage users to incessantly use their free services to garner valuable data about citizen behavior and attitudes. Couldry (2010) suggested that digital media companies such as YouTube were “performance spaces for publicizing and normalizing neoliberal democracies’ demands on its people.” In other words by providing people the ability to self-brand and self-publish while making money for their digital wares, companies such as YouTube were disingenuously facilitating voice pastiche that commoditized citizenship. While not completely rejecting these important critiques of neoliberalism and the relationship of user-generated content and the large corporations that facilitate citizen media production, my time in the field suggested a more nuanced narrative. As media producers who were trying to make a living from their creative work, the participants had to market themselves to potential audiences. As Flora explained to me during one of our interviews, “I have to get mine too.” Social media platforms afforded participants the capacity to share their media productions with wider audiences for free in hopes of 94 selling their media wares. Several participants described their difficulty selling work and finding financial opportunities in their local context of Austin, Texas. In describing his professional experience in Austin Adam explained to me, “As a black artist, it's hit or miss. The black population is definitely diminishing, and so it's hard to find black spaces. At the same time, the people that buy our work are usually middle-aged white people. It's a double-edged sword.” Pablo shared a similar sentiment with me and offered that he felt his political messages would not resonate with local art buyers who he described as largely White. The ability to self-brand and self-publish allowed several participants to garner audiences from afar and sell their works outside their local context. Pablo and Adam, who actively promoted their businesses on their Instagram accounts, sold several of their original pieces to audiences from afar who had seen their work online. For Pablo and Adam, self-branding in digital space allowed them to overcome racial inequality they experienced in their local context in support of their livelihoods. Although the critiques mentioned above remains relevant, the ethnographic accounts from this project suggest that digital affordances can help media producers overcome inequalities and barriers within their local context by providing them access to wider and welcoming audiences. These critiques also do not fully appreciate the intentionality and agency of the people who leverage social media for their personal enterprises. While the participants were motivated to produce oppositional visual media, they also recognized social media could help them build their brands as artists. Platforms such as Instagram afforded participants the capacity to share their artwork but also improve their own financial standing. In this way, social media platforms supported a tangible and transactional form of voice that allowed participants like Pablo and Adam to find the people and places online that monetarily valued their artwork in exchange.
95
By leveraging the interactive affordances of digital technologies participants were able to cultivate unique spaces, find likeminded collaborators and audiences and build their personal brands. The ability to host intimate live broadcasts and employ hashtags facilitated the very spaces where oppositional discourses could be fairly materially seen and heard. In many instances while I was in the field, digital affordances supported voice rather undermine it.
WITNESSING
As explained in the foundation of this study, recent scholarship about citizen witnessing spatially and temporally locates citizen media producers within a conflict such as a warzone or natural disaster, where traditional media is often also present (Allan, 2013; Anden-Papadopoulos, 2013). Scholars have studied how citizen media producers seek challenge state and traditional media reportage and share important logistical information with collaborators (Allan, 2013; Anden-Papadopoulos, 2013; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Allan (2013) also noted how digital media production and distribution tools such as mobile phones connected to the web facilitated the distribution of citizen media. Reflecting upon my time with Pablo, I offer an alternative lens to consider witnessing that is spatially and temporally located within the lived experiences and consciousness of this study’s participants. In the days following the deaths of two unarmed Black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in July 2016 at the hands of law enforcement, Pablo posted over a dozen digital versions of his artwork to the Instagram platform. In several of the images Pablo depicted law enforcement as aggressors and murderers of Black people and in others he depicted Black people fighting back against
96 the police. One image depicted the news media as a puppeteer controlling the strings of a police officer wielding a gun and an unarmed Black man with a bullet hole through his chest. Accompanying this image was a caption Pablo wrote that stated,
Beware of the controlled press that will paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the public think that Negros in the Negro communities are criminals and in rage which in turn will cause a high level of martial law and enforcement. This is just another way to oppress the people and to put the blame on people of color.
As I explained the in the previous chapter, Pablo’s creativism stems from a truth developed from his own experiences as a young Black man growing up in South Dallas and as a student news producer. Although Pablo was not physically present during Alton Sterling’s final moments, as his social media postings suggest he was certain that Sterling was unlawfully killed by police officers and this fact would be whitewashed by visual news media that would be complicit in blaming Sterling for his own death. By publishing publically available digital versions of his work about police brutality, media misrepresentation and Black empowerment Pablo offered counter truth that challenged media and state reportage of Sterling and Castille’s deaths. Pablo also published his pieces with hashtags such as “#Blacklivesmatter,” “#wakeup,” and “#truth,” as a way to expand the reach of the counter-knowledge he was presenting. Pablo’s creative intervention stemmed from the same premise as citizen journalists who Allan (2013) described as witnesses. He contested reportage state and traditional media reportage by leveraging digital affordances to deploy counter knowledge about racial inequality. However Pablo like other participants in this study witnessed from the vantage point of a Black American who had experienced inequality rather than as a citizen journalist present in a developing conflict. Additionally, digital tools such as mobile phones and social media platforms were essential to Pablo’s process. His mobile phone and the Instagram
97 platform allowed Pablo to distribute his existing paintings and illustrations as evidence to support the truth he sought to share.
DIGITAL RACISM
While social media platforms provided interactive affordances that facilitated the participants’ critical media practices, sites such as Twitter and Instagram also exposed participants to material forms of abuse such as digital racism. This is best exemplified through an experience Adam had while engaged on the Twitter platform. During one of our conversations Adam explained to me he tweets statements about race, pop culture and politics on his Twitter account and engages with other users about these tweets. These digital engagements inform his creative process and the topics explored in the media artifacts he produces. One evening in August 2016, Adam had been watching the now canceled sketch comedy television show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace. After hearing one of the characters use the n-word, Adam tweeted, “I was enjoying the show ‘World Peace,’ on Adult Swim until the white dude said nigga. That wasn’t cool.” Over the next two days he received over a dozen responses both in support and against his statement and his tweet was shared thirty eight times. Adam recounted to me, “my mistake was hashtagging it… and I was getting messages non-stop and for two straight days. It was bad. I got into an argument with most of those people, and then my friends joined in. I caused a mini-race war or something. It was bad.” One Twitter user responded to Adam’s tweet by writing, “didn’t white people technically invent that word??? it’s OUR word.” Another user asked, “were you triggered??? want a tampon to slide in?” Adam also received multimodal responses in the form of text messages with embedded photos, both of which belittled his identity as a Black person, which other users could access by looking at the profile photo attached to his account.
98 Adam’s experience reflects how digital citizens negotiate racial meaning within what Papacharissi (2002) described as the virtual sphere. Adam’s oppositional reading of a television program that he published to the social media platform Twitter and the visceral responses from users who reinforced a dominant reading of race reflects a distinctively digital experience. Adam was at the epicenter of what he described as a “mini race war,” with virtual strangers who felt compelled to attack him with racist messages, which in many cases were deployed as combinations of text and visual media. The fact that Adam received messages over the course of two days reflects the temporal fluidity of conversations within the virtual sphere, which are often facilitated by tools intended to share digital conversations with wide audiences such as hashtags. Adam’s experience also shows how digital affordances cut both ways in that they enable voice to both sympathetic and combative audiences. Adam explained that during the “mini race war,” he and his friends responded to hateful tweets and defended his original oppositional reading of the television program. One of Adam’s tweets defending himself stated, “white supremacy is rampant I see lol.” Adam’s experience offers an additional context for understanding how racial minorities leverage digital tools to combat digital forms of racism in ways described by Nakamura (2008). Adam and his digital contacts leveraged the very tools used to deploy material forms of racist discourse to mount a defense of his original statement. In other words, Adam leveraged Twitter as a platform to deploy oppositional discourses about race.
HYBRID RACE ASSEMBLAGE AND MATERIAL VOICE
The previous sections of this chapter contextualize how participants of this study leveraged digital affordances as described by Shaw (2017) to produce and distribute material forms of oppositional voice. Material forms of voice according to Couldry
99 (2010) support the viral spread of voice rooted in a common, democratic language. Narrative tools are crucial to the passage of material voice according to Couldry (2010) as they facilitate citizen storytelling that may contest the hegemonic ontologies. Social media platforms, smartphone technologies and other narrative tools were crucial to the participants’ critical media practices. As explored throughout this chapter, in many cases the participants’ critical mediations resulted in new and counter representations of race and identity. Their efforts to cultivate voice through the passage of oppositional material discourses about race and identity were neither completely digital nor analog but often a hybrid of the two modes. I describe this often-seamless construction of material voice in physical and digital space as hybrid race assemblage, which I explicate upon further in this section. Sharma’s (2013) theorization of digital race assemblage in confluence with Shaw’s (2017) construct of digital affordances present an appropriate framework to examine the participants’ usage of narrative technologies to materially construct race in digital space. The digital affordances of the Instagram platform allowed Diane and Pablo to publish works-in-progress and garner feedback in the form of textual messages that were adjacently located to their published films and photos. Within these text messages, audiences and the participants’ interactively constructed race through material discourses centered upon the participants’ films, photos and studio art. Diane, Todd and Adam leveraged the interactive affordances of social media platforms such as the ability to employ hashtags and live broadcast to amplify the reach of their digitally published work. Existing digital architecture provided participants a certain level of autonomy to construct and disrupt digital spaces where critical conversations about race could occur. Adam’s experience on Twitter offers important context as it reflects how the usage of digital affordances also may connect participants to uninviting digital spaces without receptive 100 audiences. In Adam’s case, race was materially constructed through caustic digital discussions that exposed him to multimodal forms of racism. Participants leveraged digital affordances and appendages to interactively construct material discourses and spaces in the context of race. While Sharma’s (2013) theorization of a digital race assemblage locates an essential aspect of the participants’ work, it is not designed to address the more embodied aspects of the participants’ media practices in physical space. The participants’ interactive, digital production processes that facilitated digital constructions of race were often in service of more embodied forms of oppositional cultural production within physical space. Diane and Epiphany often used their smartphones to access digital information and garner feedback from audiences in real time to support their creative processes in physical space. Adam’s live broadcasts that invited audiences in to his home studio, supported his media making process that resulted in large scale paintings intended to be shown at gallery shows. There were also several instances, during my time in the field, in which participants simultaneously constructed oppositional representations of race in physical and digital space through interaction. Laila’s production company frequently hosted film screenings and art gallery events. During these live events, she would often post images or live videos to her social media accounts from her smartphone. On several occasions these live events featured visual media projects by Diane, Simon and Pablo. Their critical visual discourses about race developed meaning in the physical world through social interaction in ways described by Omi & Winant (1986) and simultaneously developed meaning online through digital interaction in ways described by Sharma (2013). I describe the participants’ usage of digital technologies to simultaneously develop material forms of oppositional voice about race in both physical and digital space as hybrid race assemblage. 101 Although the participants were not actively engaged in a specific protest during my time in the field, their usage of hybrid race assemblage is resonant with how media scholars have described the axiological motivations of subaltern groups who leverage new media tools for activism. Digital production and distribution technologies facilitated participants the capacity build community, interactive with audiences, and cultivate space in digital space. Moreover, digital technologies provided participants’ the narrative storytelling tools necessary to develop networks where oppositional constructions of race can take root and spread virally. However, in contrast to existing scholarship about new media activism (Allan, 2013; Anden-Papadopolous; Bennett, 2013) the participants’ usage of hybrid race assemblage to develop oppositional constructions of race was often in service of temporally fluid racial projects rather than during a specific conflict such as the Ferguson protests in 2014. The participants’ racial projects, such as Pablo’s usage of hybrid race assemblage to conduct a temporally fluid form of witnessing took place over months and in some cases several years. In one sense, the production of in-depth material discourses such as studio art and photography exhibits are labor-intensive endeavors that involve long-term investments of time and energy. This epistemic nature of the participants’ critical mediations, as evidenced by Pablo’s witnessing, also often engaged with longer-term discursive battles of representation. Their longer-term racial projects to combat neoliberal and White Supremacist representation are resonant with how Hall (1996) theorized that cultural production from the margins must engage in an enduring discursive fight as hegemony is constantly reinvented and deployed through mediated forms. Digital affordances facilitated many of the participants’ longer-term racial projects that combatted hegemonic mediations, by allowing them to establish their individual oppositional voices through hybrid race assemblage.
102 Participants’ employment of a hybrid race assemblage was essential to their individual pursuits to foster voice as well as their communal efforts to develop voice in their local context of Austin, Texas. As I expounded upon in the foundation of this study, Austin’s Black population has fallen dramatically during its rise as an innovation economy (Tang, 2014). As exemplified by Flora’s cultivation by safe spaces, several participants felt as though Austin’s history of segregation followed by rapid gentrification had limited the amount of spaces for Black creative producers to present their art and meet collaborators. Laila, Adam and others viewed this disparity as an opportunity to employ hybrid race assemblage as a means of cultivating community for Austin’s Black creative population. As described earlier, Laila’s production company hosted gallery shows that featured Diane, Simon and Pablo’s photos, film and paintings. Leading up to these events she used her professional and personal social media accounts to promote the artists who were part of her events. The photo below was taken by Laila and published to her Instagram account to promote Diane’s work and the gallery show at large.
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Illustration 5: A photo Laila published on her Instagram account
Laila also published several short digital documentaries about Black artists in Austin that she published through her social media accounts. Adam also hosted several events that featured Black artists in Austin and used his social media feed to promote these events. Towards the end of my time in the field, he had started a “management and lifestyle brand,” that promoted artists of color. In a post promoting his new company 104 Adam described their mission, “Our goal is to bring awareness and give an even louder voice to local artists of color in Texas!” Participants also promoted one another through social media postings more informally. After purchasing two of Todd’s abstract pieces, Diane published photos of the paintings to her Instagram account with the following text, “Just purchased these two paintings…Can’t wait to hang them!” Participants also promoted Austin as a city where Black art was produced and consumed by employing hashtags in their social media postings. In several of Diane’s postings to the Instagram platform she included the hashtag “#austinartist,” in combination with various other hashtags such as “#nigerianartist,” and “#blackart.” The participants social media strategies reflect a counter-narrative about Austin in the context of its accessibility to Black media producers. Diane’s usage of hashtags presents Austin as a space where Black and Nigerian art is made. Laila and Adam’s enterprises were in service of giving voice to artists who may not otherwise be recognized for their work. Their digitally distributed material discourses offered new representation about race in the context of Austin. As exemplified by Laila and Adam’s usage of narrative technologies, participants’ social media postings featured footage from community events and inside the home studio of Black media producers, where oppositional constructions of race was being constructed. By illuminating the work of other Black media producers, Laila and Adam showed Austin as a physical space where oppositional political discourses about race were created. The participants’ usage of digital technologies resulted in a hybrid race assemblage that reconstructed and reimagined the city of Austin through new and counter narratives. The participants’ re-articulation of Austin through hybrid race assemblage presents a fitting opportunity to consider their contributions in the context of political voice. The participants not only leveraged digital technologies to establish and promote 105 their individual enterprises, but many of them were also concerned with developing the hybrid networks and spaces where the oppositional discourses produced by other Black media producers could flourish. In other words, participants were concerned with both facets of Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice: the capacity to speak and truly be heard. Austin, like other rapidly growing cities, will most likely continue to expand at the behest of the highest bidders. While acknowledging this reality, it is also important to consider how members of a historically marginalized population may leverage narrative storytelling technologies to stake their claim in a city’s present and future. Several scholars have examined how citizen access to narrative technologies is crucial to combat hegemony in service of democratic ideals (Couldry, 2010; Allan, 2013). Narrative technologies supported the construction of new pathways and networks that at least offered participants a way to present the city as a space that can be welcoming and nurturing of its Black creative population. It is important to note that the focus of this chapter was about how digital production and distribution technologies facilitate the participants’ oppositional media practices. During my time in the field and while examining the participants’ social media usage, there were several instances in which participants leveraged digital tools to share jokes, memes or new music. Although much of these postings were amassed during data collection, I intentionally chose not to pursue examination of these artifacts as to limit the scope of the project. I offer my reasoning for this intentional omission in case the data examined in this chapter appears to fit too neatly to the theoretical foundation. In the previous chapter I explored how the participants’ re-contextualization processes reflected deeply personal experiences that offered new and counter ways of knowing about race, disability, neoliberalism, gender and sexuality. In this chapter I examined how participants operationalized their re-contextualization processes through 106 hybrid race assemblage, evidenced by the participants’ material constructions of discourse and space in digital and analog spaces. By cultivating space in confluence with producing critical media, this project’s participants developed the capacity to be heard, which is essential to the cultivation of voice. The participants concerns with the production of material discourses in confluence with the cultivation of space offer a unique case study to consider political voice along with scholarship about new media activism and user-generated content. In Chapter 6, I examine the intersections between critical media production and human centered design to locate the participants’ critical mediations as a form of critical design.
107 Chapter Six: Critical Media Production as Critical Race Design
Many of the participants of this study were deeply invested in disrupting White supremacist representations of African Americans through the production and distribution of critical media artifacts and spaces that provide oppositional meanings of Black identities. As explored in the previous chapter, the participants’ creative interventions were often the result of interactive processes facilitated through the manipulation of digital affordances found within social media interfaces and digital production technologies. In other words, the participants’ critical media artifacts develop meaning through interactive processes within larger economies of representation in digital and physical space. The concept that artifacts and spaces develop meaning through collaborative processes is resonant with critical race and cultural studies as well as the study of human centered design. In this chapter I strengthen the existing linkages between critical race, critical cultural and human centered design studies by situating the participants’ creative media activism as a form of critical human centered design, which I describe as critical race design. The construct of critical race design is a form of oppositional cultural production that challenges existing hegemonic ideology by engaging audiences and citizens through interactive, immersive storytelling and action. The participants’ critical media practices provides a fitting case study for this theoretical bridging as the design of objects and the production of media artifacts have become increasingly similar enterprises. The theoretical construct of critical race design, developed through ethnographic immersion with this study’s participants, is premised upon three core ideas, which I explore in this chapter.
108 The first core idea distinguishes critical race design from other forms of human centered design by locating its ontological underpinnings within critical race and critical cultural scholarship. I borrow and develop upon Bardzell’s & Bardzell’s (2013) construct of critical design in confluence with ethnographic accounts from my time with the participants as a way to establish the first distinction of critical race design. The second concept designates the contributions of critical race designers as discourses within a larger vernacular that seeks to disrupt dominant representations of racial identity. In contrast to other forms of human centered design, which simplify meaning through metonymy, I describe how the collective visual language evidenced within this study actively complicates meaning through critical re-articulations (Krippendorff, 2005) of Black bodies, histories and identities. I conclude the chapter by examining the intersections of critical race design and forms of active citizenship, as a way to locate the participants’ work as a civic activity that seeks to improve the lives of African American citizens through creative interventions. I locate critical race design at both the discursive and embodied levels, in that its practitioners contribute to an oppositional language that provides visual representation of existing inequalities and also provide human centered design solutions to solve racial inequalities.
MEDIA PRODUCTION AS HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN
Several aspects of the participants’ creative labor practices resembled how Krippendorff (2009) described the work of human centered designers. As I observed during visits, the participants’ work was deeply empathetic of the people who interacted with their artifacts they produced and the spaces they cultivated. Developing empathy for end users through ethnographic inquiry is crucial to human centered design (Kolko, 2012;
109 Krippendorff, 2005). Flora’s safe arts education space developed as a response to her own arts education was designed with empathy as she privileged the ideas and dispositions of her students. Flora also expressed that an empathetic design allowed her to meet the needs of her students and change course accordingly. Adam’s process of making a visual art installation that explored the representations of Black women also closely resembled an empathetic human centered design. Adam described his impetus for undertaking this project by saying, “I feel like black women in society get a bad reputation for just all these different types of stereotypes, and I want to go against that and show that there's a diverse group of individuals within the black woman community.” He developed his existing empathetic understanding of Black women’s experiences garnered through his interactions with friends and relatives by conducting on camera interviews with several Black women he knew in Austin. He explained to me that, “they're students, they're athletes, they're journalists. They do so much within the community. They've been hurt. They've been happy. I just want everyone to see that these are beautiful people.” Adam then painted several portraits of the women he interviewed and intended to showcase his large-scale paintings alongside the video interviews he conducted at an upcoming gallery show. This critical visual mediation was developed through an empathetic design process intended to present visual constructions of Black women in ways they may want to be represented. Adam’s project also reflects how the visual design and meaning of media artifacts develop seamlessly through interaction, which is resonant with how scholars have described human centered design (Krippendorff, 2005; Bardzell, 2013). As described in the previous chapter, participants often developed their ideas on and offline within what Krippendorff (2005) described as “design communities.” In the context of this study, design communities were the online and offline social networks participants sought 110 feedback that informed their creative processes. While Adam developed an original idea through interaction with Black women, participants also developed new meaning for works-in-progress or fully finished media artifacts through interaction with their design communities. For example after Pablo had published a digital version of an illustration depicting a group of Black youth building a space ship on the Instagram platform, one of his Pablo’s friends suggested that he turn the single image in to a cartoon series. Pablo’s friend also suggested this series could show “smart kids from the hood that they don’t show every day.” Pablo responded to his friend through a text message by stating he had been thinking along the same lines and offered, “I think that would be fun to watch! They would be super smart kids!” Through the interactive affordances of Instagram, Pablo and his friend collaboratively constructed a potential design and new meaning for his existing artwork in service of empowering Black youth through positive imagery. The ways in which participants constructed and deployed their critical mediations intended for interaction also reflect the concerns of human centered designers. Diane, Pablo and Todd often distributed visual media artifacts embedded within social media platforms or what Krippendorff (2005) described as interfaces. According to Krippendorff (2005) digital interfaces provide computer users interactive, dynamic and autonomous navigation of a computer system. By deploying their critical discourses on social media platforms, this study’s participants intended for audiences to not only watch but also interact with their content. Pablo frequently tested his social media strategy by using different combinations of hashtags and also different storytelling forms such as time lapses or multi-part stories. His strategy to engage audience is reflective of how designers test and rapidly prototype ideas before settling on a final design. Micah and Adam produced physical structures such as installation art that were designed to engage audiences in embodied, interactive experiences. As I saw during my time in Micah’s 111 studio, his production process was iterative often involving several prototypes before he developed a product that would elicit the interaction with audiences he envisioned. Human centered designers are ultimately concerned with engaging users of artifacts and spaces in meaningful interaction. This study’s participant’s empathetic, iterative creative processes to develop oppositional material discourses and spaces closely resembled human centered design.
DESIGN AS A CRITICAL RESPONSE
The preceding section provided a thorough context for locating the participants’ work as a form of human centered design. In this section, I employ the ontological premise of the re-contextualization model introduced in Chapter 4, to examine the participants’ media practices in the context of human centered design. In Chapter 4, I described how many of this study’s participants’ re-contextualized dominant and stereotypical representations of Black identities, cultures, and bodies by producing media artifacts that offered new and counter knowledge about race in the context of gender, class, and sexuality. Taken together these oppositional mediations were critical responses to hegemonic constructions of racial representation. Bardzell & Bardzell’s (2013) concept of critical design is premised in the idea that designers produce artifacts as critical responses to hegemonic discourses as defined by feminist, queer and other critical theories. By producing critical objects, designers challenge existing hegemonic power and knowledge structures according to Bardzell & Bardzell (2013). This framework provides a fitting context by which to consider the current study’s participants as human centered designers who develop and design critical media artifacts. While this location appropriately acknowledges the critical nature of the participants’ work, a theoretical pivot is necessary to more specifically situate their design processes. The participants’
112 empathy was deeply rooted in their lived experiences as Black American citizens. Pablo’s visual explorations of police brutality stemmed from his and his community’s experiences with local law enforcement. Flora cultivated safe arts education spaces for Black youth based on her own experiences as a young Black girl learning a predominantly White canon of music. Simon and Diane’s respective examinations of masculinity and beauty standards of Black women emanate from their own experiences as Black American citizens. Collectively the participants’ deeply personal media practices that shed light on systemic racism and representational violence are resonant with critical race scholarship. Bardzell & Bardzell’s (2013) described how critical design provided a methodological dimension to critical theories and offered a way for marginalized voices to be seen and heard. Developing upon this framework I offer that the participants’ critical media practices constituted a human centered design process that offered a methodological dimension to critical race theory, which I describe as critical race design.
Micah’s Racial Project
Another example of critical race design can be found by analyzing Micah’s creative process. Micah is a designer and visual artist originally from Nigeria who immigrated with his family to the Austin area in 1996. Micah is technologically savvy, fashionable and often immersed in several visual storytelling projects. During my time with Micah, he and Simon had developed a storytelling project and exhibit that presented visual representations of Black people affected by the diaspora through photography, filmmaking and installation art. The ongoing project was in service of developing a collective identity amongst Black citizens from around the globe through explorations of African histories, contemporary traditions, and styles. Micah and Simon had developed
113 relationships with other creative media producers throughout Africa and South America during their travels and their work was also in service of developing a collective narrative about the African diaspora with their peers in other countries. I visited Micah several times at his home studio in January 2017 as he prepared a visual installation piece for an upcoming exhibit showcasing his and Simon’s storytelling project. The installation was made up of several rectangular wooden photo frames that were placed together to shape an aerial view of the African subcontinent. The piece began as simple sketches in Micah’s notebook and then he formalized the design with software that allowed him to select the precise dimensions of each box. Finally, Micah cut, stained and glued each frame in a makeshift woodshop in his garage and placed assembled the frames to make the final shape. When the installation was presented Micah and Simon’s gallery show, the frames were stained varying degrees of brown as Micah felt that it was important to acknowledge all shades of skin color as equally beautiful and important. In each of the frames were high-resolution printed photos Micah and Simon had taken throughout their travels. In the center of the installation was a long, thin frame that spanned and anchored the entire piece. During the opening event of the exhibit Micah took Polaroid photos of several of the attendees and asked them to place their photos on the anchor. In doing this, Micah was inviting people to physically touch a visual representation of the African subcontinent and see themselves as part of the African diaspora story through embodied interaction. The image below depicts Micah’sfinished project and shows how it is laid out to resemble the African subcontinent.
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Illustration 6: Micah’s interactive installation piece
While we were discussing the underpinnings of his installation piece, Micah bluntly offered that, “we have a history before we were in chains.” Micah was reflecting upon the fact that his American and Nigerian identities had been discursively and intentionally dislocated. During the same conversation Micah also described that prior to chattel slavery, African people had been royalty and worn intricately woven fabrics and jewelry. Representations of Africans as “powerful” and “having style” according to Micah were largely absent from existing African American histories. Micah’s reflection is resonant with Hall’s (1996) assessment that White histories of the African diaspora discursively dislocates African people from their homeland and relocates their origins within a dominant narrative. The underpinnings of Micah’s deeply personal project are also resonant with the work of critical race scholars who have explored how reductionist White supremacist histories of African Americans stripped them of deserving equal citizenship (Collins, 2004; Omi & Winant, 1986).
115 Micah’s installation piece was in service of challenging the discursive separation of his American and African identities through interactive, visual design. This piece also reflected a feeling of disconnection expressed by Black Americans Micah spoke with in Austin and during his travels to African countries. In other words the installation piece and exhibition as a whole reflected an empathetic design developed through interaction with audiences and perhaps more appropriately potential users of the completed media artifact. Additionally, Micah’s personal experiences as a Nigerian American with histories and identities located in distinctively separate physical and discursive spaces that he sought to bridge through visual art informed his this critical race design.
CRITICAL RACE DESIGN AND METONYMY
Micah’s installation piece illustrates one of the many racial projects that participants were engaged in during my time in the field. As described earlier, many of the participants sought to disrupt the racial project of White supremacy through critically designed media artifacts and spaces. Although the participants’ individual mediations stemmed from unique perspectives, their media practices shared a common feature that further contextualizes and distinguishes critical race design from other forms of human centered design. While human centered designers traditionally simplify meaning of artifacts through metonymy, the participants of this study sought to complicate existing meaning about African Americans through the mediation of critically designed visual discourses. Participants often centered their discursive battles upon the representation of Black bodies. For example, Diane’s painting “Workhorse,” depicted a profile view of a woman’s legs suspended in air with her buttocks scratched out with white paint. In describing this painting Diane told me, “it's just about Black women often being the butt
116 of jokes, the butt of memes and things like that. And also I do feel like especially now by creating work that focuses on black women for me it's just sort of maybe my small way of resisting a little bit.” Diane’s quote reflects that she sought to illustrate how Black women are discursively reduced to powerless stereotypes through depictions of their bodies. The piece conversely sought to shatter existing tropes about Black women through nuanced visual design. The women’s legs are muscular and appear to be in mid stride of a run, while wearing stiletto high heels. Reflecting upon the name of the piece Diane explained, “Horses are powerful animals. She can run and gallop.” In describing the scratched out mid-section Diane explained to me, “I scratched the model out so that the scratch looks like skirt, to cover her up. I wanted it to look like a modern day Josephine Baker.” Diane depicted a Black woman as beautiful, powerful, athletic and capable while rejecting the idea that Black women were merely the butt of jokes. Diane’s critical design affords the consideration of how dominant representations of Black bodies and identities could be defined within the context of human centered design. I offer that dominant representations of Black bodies such as those described by Diane are metonyms of White Supremacy deployed to simplify meaning about African Americans. Although metonyms are traditionally deployed by human centered designers to simplify a user’s navigation of an artifact, in the context of this study, I offer a context to consider metonyms as visual discourses that reduce racial identity to stereotypical meaning. I offer this nuanced understanding of metonyms to strengthen the earlier connections made between critical race theory and human centered design and further locate the participants’ critical media practices. As exemplified by Diane’s design process, participants sought to disrupt White supremacist metonymies by actively complicating the visual representations of Black bodies. By depicting the woman in her Workhorse piece with several positive attributes, 117 Diane’s visual representation offered multiple meanings of a Black women’s body that are suppressed by dominant representation. I evidenced similar discursive battles within the work of other participants. Simon’s exploration of black masculinity was in part a response to the dominant representations of Black men as sexually aggressive and hyper masculine. Pablo’s KING series, inspired by the work of Norman Rockwell, depicted Black youth happily building robots and playing sports. He explained to me that this series was a way for him to offer new representation that contested the stereotypical depictions of Black people aired on cable television programs. One of the collaborative media artifacts that came out of this study was a music video for Flora’s song Flowers. Simon art directed the video and I filmed and edited the piece. In one scene of the video, Flora laid on the floor of a cemetery holding a bouquet of flowers with her body contorted in a way similar to the victim of a violent crime. Flora sought to rearticulate the representation of young Black Americans whose lives ended in violence as flowers who were violently plucked from the earth. By locating her body directly upon the grassy earth, Flora explained to me she wanted to visually rearticulate Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and others who had been killed too soon as delicate and important human beings who had roots in the earth. The video offered a way to think of these young Black people as deserving and loved human beings rather than simply as nameless victims of violent crimes. Flora’s body positioning is depicted in a frame from the music video in the photo below.
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Illustration 7: A frame from Flora’s music video
As critical race (Collins, 2004; West, 2002) and critical cultural scholars (Hall, 1997) have argued, reductionist representations of Black people rooted in difference are deployed in state and news media to rationalize racial injustice. Many of the participants’ collective racial project was in service of disrupting this paradigm. Their work often responded to the intersectional deployment of damaging racial discourse in ways that challenged the idea that identity was confined to a binary descriptors rooted in difference. By designing empathic, respectful representations of gay Black men, Black women and victims of racial injustice the participants’ offered visual representations of Black citizens that did not fit within the confines of a White supremacist racial design. While designers generally simplify meaning, the participants of this study actively complicated racial meaning as a way to value and give voice to suppressed and marginalized people. If White supremacist metonymy is the language of injustice and inequality, then the participants’ individual contributions were discourses that contributed 119 to a complex vernacular in service of equality. The participants’ collective racial project is resonant with Krippendorff’s (2005) theorization that designed artifacts develop meaning through interaction and language.
Trayvon’s 21st Birthday
In February 2016, Flora and Simon hosted an event at a small, independent art house in East Austin to celebrate what would have been Trayvon Martin’s 21st birthday. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed Florida teenager who was killed in 2012 by George
Zimmerman. Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal for second-degree murder were the catalysts for protests and rallies across the United States, as citizens felt justice had not been served. Simon and Flora’s creative process offers another example of the complex language of critical race design. The event brought together several of Flora and Simon’s friends, which included several Black creative producers who lived in Austin. Organized on a refreshment table were several types of alcohol, drink mixers, snacks and a birthday cake. Also, on the table was a framed photo of Trayvon Martin and his father. Above the table was a large sheet of brown paper, where people were asked to write about their 21st birthdays. The overall mood was festive, as one would imagine of a 21st birthday party. In recounting how Simon and her developed the idea for the party, Flora told me,
So we think of Trayvon Martin, we think of this really painful, violent, horrific act. That's how we remember him. What if we took this space and thought of him as a 21-year-old? Like partying and having fun and that person. Because I can assume that, at 21, he would be having fun. He might be drinking. He'd be doing whatever. During the party, Simon also described the event was a “space” to reimagine what Trayvon Martin symbolically could mean. By cultivating a safe space, Simon and Flora designed an embodied experience in which their community of friends could 120 collaboratively re-contextualize what Trayvon Martin represented. The party challenged the stereotypical connection between young Black men and violence and offered ways to think about Trayvon Martin as an individual citizen who had talents, aspirations, and relationships. Additionally, the party offered attendees an opportunity to consider how Trayvon Martin may have spent his 21st birthday. Flora and Simon’s event reflects a critical race design in several ways. The original idea for the event developed through interaction between Simon, Flora and other friends. Flora explained to me she did not want to offend people by throwing the party and designed the party with a high degree of empathy for people who may still be mourning Martin’s death. By constructing a space with all the trappings of a 21st birthday, Flora and Simon provided an inviting, celebratory atmosphere that facilitated joyful interaction. As I witnessed throughout the evening attendees toasted one another, danced and ate birthday cake. Through embodied action attendees were part of a discourse that relocated Trayvon Martin to symbolize celebration rather than violence. This collective celebration of Martin also served as a collaborative embodied discourse that responded to and aimed to complicate stereotypical representations of young Black men.
CRITICAL RACE DESIGN AND CITIZENSHIP
Designers solve design problems. The participants’ re-contextualization processes were in many ways empathetic, iterative human centered designs that addressed and attempted to solve societal design issues of racial and social inequality. Their interactive, collaborative creative processes were intentionally designed to inform and engage wider audiences both in their local context and from afar. Their creative processes to empower other citizens often resembled or contributed to other forms of citizenship such as
121 activism and community organizing. In this section I examine the intersections between citizenship and critical race design.
Activism
I conducted my fieldwork during a period of time in which there were seemingly daily news reports of a young Black person being killed by law enforcement. This period was also marked by the rise of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and the ensuing reemergence of White nationalists groups. Many participants were deeply affected by the racial unrest happening throughout the country and saw it necessary to employ their creative dispositions in service of activist causes. As described in Chapter 4, Pablo considered himself a creativist, who believed his work offered citizens the necessary truth to empower and inform them. In addition to providing his form of truth through artwork, Pablo also wanted to educate youth with creative skills and life lessons. During my time in the field, he led several art workshops and taught children at community centers in Austin how to paint. Additionally, he illustrated a children’s book his parents co-wrote titled, “Future Leaders: What Kids Need to Know to Become Successful Adults.” Through activist pedagogy, Pablo explained that he wanted to empower “the next generation,” such as his nieces and nephews with the necessary storytelling skills so they too could become activists. During my time with Adam, his creative process became increasingly motivated by the political zeitgeist of the 2016 election. In describing his work in the context of activism Adam told me, “I've seen so many people, so many younger people get more involved in social activism, and just wanting to make a difference. I feel like I want my work to be a part of that.” Adam expressed axiological motivations resonant with more mainstream forms of activism as reflected in the following quote,
122 I definitely want people who might not like my work to see it, just to plant that seed in their mind of just, "People feel like this." I feel like that's the start coming changing somebody's perspective. That's why I'm not shying away from making this gruesome work. I feel like my work is at times can be dark, and I'm not shying away from that. Even if they hate it, they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, I saw this terrible thing. Here, go check it out." They send somebody else to see it. This quote illustrates how Adam wanted his artwork to inform wider audiences about what Black American citizens may be feeling during a period of political and racial tumult. This is reflected in his “We can’t breathe,” series of paintings that depicted Black citizens turning blue in the face with hands squeezing their throats. In ways similar to other forms of activism, Adam’s critical race design was intended to disrupt dominant ways of thinking about race while also providing meaningful representation for what he described as his “core audience.” This quote also illustrates how Adam, like other participants, wanted potentially adversarial audiences to interact with his work by viewing with it and sharing it with their networks. In other words, potentially adversarial audiences whose minds he could potentially change with what he described as “gruesome work” informed Adam’s critical media process. Diane described her work as a form of “resistance,” and as “a form of activism.” Diane’s work in part was motivated by the absence of Black women’s stories in news reportage about violence inflicted upon Black Americans. She explained to me that, “the burdens that black women have to deal with are still kind of overshadowed by the burdens that the black man has to deal with. So I think that in some way that kind of plays into my desire to paint more. To paint more black women in power.” This quote reflects two important elements to her resistance. First, Diane sought to fill a discursive void in contemporary media coverage about racial inequality, by focusing her work on the representation and treatment of Black women. Secondly, she filled the representational void of Black women by depicting them in “positions of power.” Like
123 Pablo and Adam, Diane intended for her work to be shared and interacted evidenced by how she often posted in-progress and finished versions of her creative process on social media platforms. She wanted her representations of Black women as powerful to be seen and shared by wider audiences. Prior to starting her master’s education, Flora had spent a year as a field organizer in support of Black activist causes. During one of our interviews Flora explained to me that she became jaded by the hierarchal structure of activist organizations and social movements. This is reflected in the following quote from Flora,
Movements need to be creating space for people's talents, skills. That's the only way they're effective. Thinking about that I started to feel myself consciously, or not even consciously, I just started to feel my role change and move back and focus on my music and really making sure, "Hey, I want this to be my contribution. I don't have to be that person organizing or doing this and that and fulfilling all these roles. That's not where I'm best served. Flora’s cultivation of safe arts spaces is a redesign of traditional social movements. Her redesign of social movements solved a problem for herself while also providing empathetic spaces for other media producers to contribute their voices to the collaborative construction of oppositional discourses. This is evidenced in the 21st birthday party she co-hosted for Trayvon Martin as well as her cultivation of safe arts spaces. Participants’ critical race designs were often motivated by the same axiological concerns of activists. By constructing interactive material discourses and spaces, many participants addressed and contested hegemonic discourses through their critical mediations. Furthermore, these participants’ critical race design processes resulted in interactive media artifacts and spaces intended to inform and empower audiences.
124 Community
In the previous chapter, I described how participants leveraged storytelling technologies to digitally rearticulate Austin as a space where Black artists existed and where oppositional discourses were produced. In several sections I also addressed how Flora, Simon and Laila cultivated spaces that facilitated embodied oppositional discourses in the form of parties, art gallery shows and photography exhibits. These examples reflect how the participants’ digital and analog social activities were frequently in service of cultivating community. The participants’ creative processes that were intended to bring citizens together reflect a mode of embodied critical race design. In describing his collaborative storytelling project with Simon, Micah explained to me that he wanted to cultivate “community through art.” As described earlier, at the heart of Micah’s creative design process was a democratic sensibility that valued all people. At one of their exhibits titled “Community”, Micah and Simon reimagined a part of the gallery space as a living room that showcased Micah and Simon’s family heirlooms and photos. Short films from their travels were projected on the wall and were made to look like Super 8 old home movies. Micah and Simon’s immersive experience invited audiences to join their creative journey that explored shared histories of the African diaspora. By constructing an immersive space in which audiences became part of the art and were equally valued, Simon and Micah reimagined what community meant through a critically designed, interactive experience. During my time in the field, Simon worked as a special projects and communication manager for organization that promoted Black-owned businesses in Austin. His office was located in a historically Black area of Austin. Attached to his building was a small yellow house that was built in 1880 by one of the earliest freed slaves in the Austin area. The house became a hub for Austin’s Black creative 125 community as it was used as a performance and art gallery space. Laila, Diane, Pablo, Micah as well as Simon showcased their work at the historical house and over time, participants began referring to it simply as “the yellow house.” Considering the house was used semi-regularly for events, it served as a local epicenter for oppositional cultural production where representations of Black identity in the context of sexuality, gender and history could be seen and heard. I visited the yellow house during and prior to events over twenty times while in the field. As I observed during my visits, the house often brought together several of the same people including participants of this study. In this way, it was an integral space for participants to foster community. During one of our conversations Simon explained to me that he first realized his “Blackness,” when he began his undergraduate studies in Black studies at a central university in Texas. As he explained it, Austin provided a fitting local context for him to recognize how systemic racism manifests as racial inequality, evidenced by the rapid gentrification that followed decades of segregation. While renting the yellow house was part of Simon’s full-time job, it was important for him to design the house as a communal space where oppositional cultural production could be seen and heard. His critical race design to support community was informed in part by the lack of safe spaces for Black media producers and audiences to regularly congregate. Participating in activism, developing safe spaces and cultivating community are integral forms of citizenship that support a healthy democracy. This study’s participants were regularly engaged in these democratic processes through their critical race design practices. At the heart of this form of critical, creative citizenship was an understanding that embodied, institutional violence inflicted upon Black American citizens was justified through reductionist, stereotypical representations. In other words, racial inequality is real and denies Black citizens’ equal citizenship. At the discursive level, participants sought 126 to rearticulate the representation of Black bodies and identities through a more complex visual racial language. These intersectional rearticulations were designed with complex, nuanced imagery that recast suppressed voices such as those of Black gay men as deserving of equal value and citizenship. Similarly, through rearticulations of space and by reimagining community, participants designed embodied, experiences in service of equal citizenship. For design to have meaning, according to Krippendorff (2005) it needs to be rooted in language. The participants of this study contributed critically designed artifacts and spaces that constituted a language at the discursive and embodied levels. This language, which I describe as critical race design supports equal citizenship by addressing how social and racial inequalities are pernicious to democracy. For language to take root, it must be expressed in material forms that can be shared through interaction (Krippendorff, 2005; Couldry, 2010). Critical race design is also concerned with how critically designed spaces, artifacts and experiences engage audiences through different forms of interaction. As illustrated throughout this chapter, the participants were profoundly invested in producing critical work that empowered and in some cases challenged intended audiences. Pablo and Flora shared their knowledge of media production to empower young people to tell their own stories. Micah and Simon’s exhibit informed audiences about hegemonic historical record by facilitating an embodied interaction with what Hall (1996) described as “hidden histories.” Several of this project’s participants were concerned with producing oppositional discourses and also facilitating the capacity for others to produce and share their own critical mediations. These examples reflect how the participants’ critical work was in service of producing critical visual discourses and the necessary channels where these ideas could take root through interaction. 127 The participants’ citizenship rooted in their ongoing critical race designs offers another context to consider how their collective work is in service of voice (Couldry, 2010). In Chapter 4, I described how the participants’ re-contextualization processes offered new and counter discourses in service of voice. In Chapter 5, I described how participants’ leveraged digital technologies to produce material discourses and spaces where these discourses could be heard. This chapter reflects how the participants of this study contributed to a citizen-focused voice. By informing, educating and cultivating community through their creative processes, the participants contributed to a design vernacular that interactively empowered other citizens to engage in their own critical race design processes. As I observed several times during my time in the field, this citizen- focused voice was ultimately in service of democratic ideals and equal citizenship.
128 Chapter Seven: Conclusion
In the opening chapter of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (2015) book Between the World and Me, the author penned the following words to his son, “I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store.” Even when undertaking the most quotidian tasks, as Coates’s (2015) a-matter-of-fact words express, Black Americans are killed simply for existing. Coates’s (2015) words echo those written by James Baldwin (1963) in the The Fire Next Time, published over fifty years prior. Coates’s (2015) essay like Baldwin’s (1963) offers a deeply personal account of how social and racial inequalities remain insidiously embedded within American society. Coates’s (2015) words also reflect how oppositional cultural production remains a crucial tool for marginalized voices within the United States to contest hegemonic representation and authority in service of equality. As Baldwin (1989) put it, “artists are here to disturb the peace.” During a period of rapid technological advancement and social unrest in which citizens engage with visual media at an unprecedented rate, the oppositional cultural production of film, digital photography and interactive art have been essential in presenting new and counter representations of racial and social inequality. Much of the existing literature about oppositional cultural production during the latest era of racial unrest in the United States has focused on media production and distribution during times of conflict. Moreover, there remained an absence of an immersive, qualitative study of oppositional cultural production that examined critical media artifacts and the lives of visual artists who produce them, within the same context. Through the qualitative examination into the lives and creative labor of nine independent Black media producers
129 in Austin this study addressed an absence in scholarship about recent oppositional cultural production. This study also provided renewed contexts for existing theory and methodology, while also presenting new theoretical constructs developed upon the qualitative evidence of this study. The ethnographic evidence examined in Chapter 4, revealed the participants’ deeply personal critical media practices that often reflected their life experiences. The qualitative analysis of the participants’ personal histories and their critical media practices presented renewed context of Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins. By adapting Bock’s (2009) re-contextualization model, this study presented how the participants decontextualized hegemonic representations of the margins and re-contextualized these margins as spaces for oppositional cultural production. Although the participants’ visual constructions of oppositional discourses and safe spaces were informed by diverse life experiences, their creative labor was often in service of the same objective: seeking equal citizenship through critical mediation. Their work collectively reflected how social and racial inequalities erode democracy and deny equal citizenship. Additionally, several of the participants’ media practices engaged with intersectional forms of racial inequality that examined race in the context of gender, sexuality and class. Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice presented an appropriate lens through which to consider the collective epistemic and axiological underpinnings of the participants’ work as material discourses in service of political voice. Furthermore, Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice offered a way to extend Hall’s (1990,1996) theorization of cultural production from the margins to the struggle over political voice within a 21st century Western democracy. Voice is not simply speaking, but also the capacity to be heard (Couldry, 2010).
In Chapter 5, I examined the ways in which participants leveraged narrative tools to 130 produce material discourses and cultivate spaces where they could be heard. The production and distribution of oppositional visual discourses were frequently interactive processes facilitated by what Shaw (2017) described as affordances of digital technologies. Participants leveraged interactive affordances to garner audience feedback, cultivate space to showcase their work and develop their personal brands. As evidenced by Pablo’s usage of social media, digital affordances also facilitated a temporally and spatially fluid form of witnessing in response to news reportage about violence against Black citizens. Additionally, Adam’s experience on Twitter reflects how social and racial inequalities experienced in the physical world manifest through digital interaction in what Papacharissi (2002) described as the “virtual sphere.” Adam’s usage of digital tools to combat White Supremacist discourses also reflect how racial minorities leverage narrative technologies to counter digital racism in ways consistent with Nakamura (2008). The participants’ employment of narrative technologies to construct oppositional material discourses frequently situated them in a hybrid presence, simultaneously on and offline. Participants constructed race materially online in ways consistent with Sharma’s (2013) construct of a digital race assemblage, while also constructing race offline through embodied interaction in ways consistent with Omi & Winant’s (1986) theorization of race as a social construct. I defined this simultaneous construction of race as hybrid race assemblage. Participants constructed hybrid race assemblage to cultivate space for their own enterprises and also to cultivate space for the Black media producer community of Austin, Texas. Many of the participants were concerned with cultivating communal, local voice by materially reimagining Austin as a space where Black media producers and their oppositional cultural production could thrive.
131 Many of the participants were not only interested in being seen and heard, but also wanted to empower oppositional citizenship through their critical media practices. In Chapter 6, I described the participants’ empathetic, iterative critical media processes as a form of human centered design I introduced as critical race design. This new construct is rooted in the ontological undergirding of critical race theory, as its practitioners seek to complicate racial discourse by contesting stereotypical metonymy deployed through hegemonic representations of Black bodies, histories and communities. Critical race design provides a methodological and theoretical foundation to understand how cultural production from the margins actively seeks to disrupt intersectional forms of racial inequality that manifest in lived experience and visual representation. The theoretical construct of critical race design also develops upon Bardzell & Bardzell’s (2012) construct of critical design in confluence Krippendorff’s (2005) theorization of a semantic turn in design, as it is a critical response to hegemonic materiality deployed through interaction. The axiological underpinnings of critical race design is rooted in Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice. Participants strategically deployed their visual mediations and spaces in ways that empowered other citizens, such as through media activism, community building, historical restoration and critical pedagogy. They regularly informed citizens on how to use narrative tools and deploy counter knowledge as a way to virally cultivate voice in service of equal citizenship. The participants of this study were not satisfied to merely produce art for arts sake. While media making provided a creative catharsis for participants to reflect upon their own histories, their processes were often developed with specific audiences in mind. They produce critical visual art about racial and social inequality in ways that engage, inform and empower different audiences. Through interaction often facilitated by digital technologies, participants were able to share their work and cultivate space while also 132 garnering valuable feedback that informed their critical processes. It is within these interactions and collaborations with audiences that oppositional voice takes root and has the capacity to be heard.
PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK
Upon near completion of this dissertation project, I sent each of the participants a digital copy of the full study. Seven of the nine participants sent me e-mail responses and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Most of the responses were single sentences, such as Todd’s response in which he wrote, “Hey man, Looks pretty spot on. Thanks again.” Adam had messaged me through Facebook while he was reading the full report and let me know I had used his actual name in a few stops, which I corrected immediately. Epiphany offered the most thorough feedback. She noted that I had incorrectly identified her work as “abstract” in an earlier draft, which I subsequently corrected. She also commented on my description of people with disabilities. She wrote, “it's best to use people first language so ‘disabled person’ becomes ‘person with a disability’ and disabled Nigerian woman becomes Nigerian woman with a disability.” I edited my description of Epiphany in the final study to reflect her commentary, as not to unwittingly marginalize her further. Her note ended with positive feedback and she wrote, “Your description of my intention regarding my artistic expression was on point by the way! :)” Receiving the participants’ positive feedback gave me a tremendous sense of relief. When I had originally conceived this study, prior to spending time with many of the participants, I had described them as “Black activist media producers of Austin, Texas.” However, my time in the field revealed a much more nuanced narrative. First off, not all the participants considered themselves activists. Additionally, as evidenced by
133 Epiphany and Todd’s creative processes, not all of the participants were primarily focused on producing visual art about race. In short, my original theoretical construct needed to be reevaluated. Hall’s (1990, 1996) theorization of oppositional cultural production provided an appropriate framework upon which to pivot the study’s ontological foundation. Embracing Hall’s (1990,1996) construct in confluence with critical race theory offered a broader ontological premise upon which to consider my interactions with participants. This theoretical pivot led to many more visits with participants than I had originally anticipated, as I wanted to ensure that we had collaboratively generated an epistemic foundation that truly reflected their personal histories and creative processes. The result was a more thoughtful study informed by the data collected and guided by existing theoretical constructs. Had I continued down the path of fitting participants in to a mold, I would have unwittingly marginalized and stereotyped the participants and their respective creative labor. With a broader theoretical foundation, I was able to meaningfully examine each of the participants’ critical media practices within their own personal context and then draw connections between their personal histories and work. I was deeply concerned with producing a document that presented participants in ways they wanted to be represented. After receiving many of the participants’ feedback I feel as though this goal was achieved.
STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS
There are several strengths to the theoretical and methodological approach of this dissertation project. The project offered a unique case study for the renewed understanding of existing theory such as Hall’s (1990,1996) construct of oppositional cultural production, critical race theory and Couldry’s (2010) construct of voice. While much of the existing literature about voice in the context of media production focuses on
134 activism and citizen journalism, this project presented how the deeply personal critical media practices of visual storytellers and artists could also be considered in service of voice. The data revealed that the participants were often motivated by the same considerations of activists and citizen journalists, which provided the necessary foundation upon which to consider their work as in service of voice. Producing critical visual media was crucial to the participants’ sense of self and citizenship. While all of the participants produced visual media because they truly loved making art, they were also deeply concerned with the meaning of their artwork and how their work would engage audiences. This is reflected by how participants often approached media production as a dialogic, interactive enterprise in which different audiences were stakeholders throughout the process. In Adam’s case he made art for his “core audience,” while also engaging with adversarial audiences on the Twitter platform to inform his critical disposition. As reflected by Simon and Diane’s creative processes, the voice or voicings the participants sought to cultivate was often in service of empowering a specific community or identity such as gay Black men or Black women. Laila and Pablo’s social media experimentations to brand themselves reveal how the production and distribution of oppositional visual discourse was often a product of trial and error. In the context of scholarship about voice, this project offers how the cultivation of voice can be in service of multiple audiences, the result of experimentation with digital technologies and deployed through myriad visual modes such as film, photo and studio art. As evidenced by several of the participants’ processes they proactively developed space on and offline where their creative works could be displayed and seen by wider audiences. The participants’ proactive cultivations of physical space were often informed by inequality in their local context of Austin. This project makes another important contribution to scholarship about
135 voice by addressing how the cultivation of space by artists of color could be considered a political strategy to circumvent existing power structures. This study also provided opportunities for the development of new theory. The participants’ hybrid constructions of race on and offline presented a way to develop upon existing scholarship about racial construction, user-generated content and new media activism to introduce the new theoretical construct of hybrid race assemblage. This study also strengthened the theoretical connections between human centered design and critical media production, which generated another new construct, critical race design. As noted in the previous section, embracing a relatively broad theoretical foundation also allowed for the study’s epistemology to emerge from the data. This study’s three-pronged methodological approach allowed for the meaningful study of the participants’ personal histories in the same context as their critical media practices. I was able to collect diverse pools of data such as transcribed interviews and audio-visual footage that allowed me to effectively cross-reference information gathered through various methods. For example, Adam had disclosed to me in an interview his experience on Twitter being subjected to digital racism. I was able to cross-reference what he told me by finding the digital archives of his Twitter conversation, which also informed follow-up questions I had for Adam. Considering the participants frequently mediated their own creative processes through visual storytelling, they were always receptive to my audio-visual documentation of their creative processes. In accordance with Pink’s ethical typology (2007) my usage of video and photo cameras to collect audio-visual data was consistent with how the participants constructed their own narratives and histories. Although I did not go in to detail about my collaborations with participants, this ethnographic method provided rich detail about their creative processes. I collaborated on media projects with Flora, Pablo, and Laila and 136 began planning a project with Epiphany towards the end of my time in the field. As a collaborator, I filmed and edited a music video, animated prototypes for a comic series and filmed a short-film aired on the Snapchat mobile platform. Through these immersive, embodied experiences I garnered a unique understanding of how participants distill their critical ideas in to visual mediations. The media projects I collaborated on with participants were published on their social media feeds and were in service of their careers. In a few instances there were deadlines set by participants of when our collaborations should be completed. In these cases, collaborative methods provided a way to level the power dynamic between the ethnographer and participant, while also leading to the meaningful collection of data. There are a number of limitations to this study. As a qualitative, exploratory study based upon the study of nine participants, this study is not generalizable. This study offers a small glimpse of the cultural production by media producers that may not even represent the broad range of Black media production happening in Austin, Texas. Even with its small sample size, it should be noted that conducting an immersive study like this is extremely labor intensive both in the field and during analysis, as there are multiple collections of data to comb through and examine. In other words, a study of this scale may be time and cost prohibitive as compared to other forms of scholarship. Although this study garnered rich understanding of the participants’ personal histories and their critical media practices, this study’s design did not garner the same level of rigor about the local context of Austin, Texas. While the collected data did reveal how the participants’ leveraged their creative skills and narrative technologies to cultivate space in Austin, the information garnered was mostly anecdotal. Future studies of a similar nature should employ a mixed-methods social network analysis that combines anecdotal
137 evidence with data visualization to offer a more robust account of the participants’ efforts to cultivate space.
IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
This dissertation project was developed upon a broad theoretical foundation and was operationalized through an immersive and thorough methodological strategy. Considering the extensive amount of data that was collected, this study will yield several scholarly papers. This future scholarship, developed upon the current study’s findings, will make important contributions to critical research about race, design, documentary and new media activism. There are also several important findings generated from the qualitative data, outside the scope of this study, which will yield new scholarship. As I mentioned in in some detail within the accounts of my time with Epiphany, Flora and Simon, participants often used their own bodies as canvases for their artwork which deserves much more thorough analysis. Additionally, the collaborative process of making oppositional media artifacts with participants merits further inquiry, especially in the context of the relationship between the researcher and the participant. As visual storytellers, the participants leveraged documentary and narrative affect in their critical and often-interactive mediations intended to engage audiences. Although I attempted to illustrate the participants’ creative processes and describe their critical mediations through vivid and detailed writing, a truly visual account of this project is needed to complement the written report. The audio-visual data collected for this project will be distilled in to a feature length documentary film that conveys the participants’ stories using a similar visual language they employ in their work. The participants are auteurs of their own stories and use rich visual storytelling techniques in their work. By producing a documentary I hope to contribute a meaningful representation of the
138 participants’ lives and creative work in a medium they are familiar consuming and sharing. Moreover, by producing this front facing media artifact, I intend to share the participants’ stories with wider audiences beyond the academic community. Beyond the scope of future projects I will undertake, this study has several important implications for future research. This project and others that may take a similar theoretical and methodological approach are crucial to the understanding advancements in technology manifest in different forms of citizenship. In accordance with the work of Gee (2005) and Jenkins (2006) this project considered interactive media production as a civic, human centered design activity that connected, informed and empowered citizens. In many cases, making visual art and cultivating space was not only analogous to the participants’ citizenship, it was their citizenship. While acknowledging the profit-seeking agendas of companies who make free narrative technologies, participants leveraged social media platforms and mobile phones to design where and when civic engagement occurred and whose contributions mattered within the interactive experiences they created. By strengthening the theoretical connections between scholarship about human centered design, media production and citizenship this study provides researchers a foundation upon which to examine interactive storytelling forms such as virtual and augmented reality which are becoming more widely adopted. Additionally this study offers scholars a way to critically examine oppositional, interactive cultural production could be a form of political visual discourse in service of equal citizenship. This study also provides a methodological framework upon which to study oppositional cultural production by other marginalized groups during a time of great political and social unrest in the United States. During the 2016 United States presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump premised his candidacy in racist, White nationalist rhetoric that was often amplified by mainstream cable news outlets and 139 independent news outlets. These media outlets such as the Fox News Channel appeared to reject their role as watchdogs of democracy and chose rather to traffic in conspiracy theories and patently false statements about the Muslim religion, Mexican immigrants and the Chinese government. These falsehoods often originated from Trump’s soapbox diatribes. It cannot be understated that Trump and the media that openly supported his candidacy promulgated White Supremacist ideology that created hysteria about the threat of the local and foreign other. Moreover, since Trump’s inauguration the specter of deportation or the ban on immigrants from Muslim nations has sent shockwaves through Muslim and Mexican communities in the United States. Additionally, the Trump administration’s embrace of War on Drugs era policies and resistance to police reform greatly threatens recent progress made to the justice system for Black and Hispanic Americans. As evidenced in the days and weeks following Trump’s inauguration, women’s groups, racial minorities, scientists and immigrant communities staged mass rallies across the country to contest how the Trump administration’s policies would further marginalize people and ideas already at risk of being suppressed. This dissertation project presents a framework to study how other marginalized groups such as Muslim and Mexican Americans construct and deploy oppositional artifacts in service of cultivating voice, especially during a period in which the spread of misinformation seems ceaseless. While the current project is not generalizable, it does provide a context for future exploratory studies that examine how and why storytellers from other marginalized communities leverage narrative technologies in service of cultivating oppositional forms of voice, especially during a period of political and racial unrest. Studying how the personal histories of cultural producers from marginalized groups in the United States produce oppositional discourses is a small but important step in considering their stories
140 as truly American experiences while also considering these stories as equal to all others that may exist. As a filmmaker and critical scholar, I privileged my creative skills to facilitate collaborative research activities. This study’s design allowed for the co-production of media artifacts with participants in ways that truly valued their aesthetics and critical perspectives. I hope this project inspires more creative scholarship beyond the written form that engages wider audiences in important research happening within the academy. By believing and privileging the deeply personal experiences of cultural producers from the margins in ways similar to this project, researchers will not only generate important scholarship but perhaps more importantly they may contribute their own forms of oppositional cultural production in service of voice.
141
Appendix A: Participant Table
Name Age Education Level Background Media Production Visit Time Spent s
Pablo 25 BA in Fine Arts African American Painting, illustration, video 35 150 hours production, photography
Flora 25 MA in African American Classical piano, musical 20 125 hours Musicology composition, visual art direction
Epiphany 32 BA in Business, Nigerian American Painting 25 120 hours Minor in Fine ARt
Laila 30 BA in Business Nigerian American Video production, photography, 16 108 hours cinematography, promotion, art curation
Todd 32 Some college African American Mixed-media studio art, glyph art 15 80 hours
Diane 36 BA, JD Nigerian and African Painting, video storytelling, 7 35 hours American photography
142 Adam 24 BA African American Painting, photography 6 40 hours
Micah 30 BA in Marketing Nigerian American Design, video and photo production 18 138 hours
Simon 26 BA in Black Nigerian and African Photography, video storytelling, art 16 100 hours Studies American direction, art curation
143 Appendix B: Interview protocol
Personal history questions
• Introduction: name, where are you from, and what you do. • Inquiries related to social class, education history, access to capitals, personal social and educational trajectory:
• Where did you grow up? • What kind of career did you imagine pursuing when growing up?
• What did you go to college for and what did you do after college? • How and why did you become a filmmaker/photographer/artist? Does your upbringing influence your creative work?
• Where have you found support along the way? Who were some of your mentors? • Who are the people that have helped you the most in your career? • What are your professional aspirations? Where do you go from here? What do you consider success?
Production Questions
• What tools do you use to produce your artwork? • Where did you learn how to use production equipment (through school, jobs, online forums, friends?)
• Where do you produce your art? Why do you produce your work here? • How do you distribute your work? Do you hang your work up in physical space, share it in digital space, etc? How do you select where to showcase your work?
• How do you sustain yourself? Do you take on high paying jobs to offset the cost of your personal projects? Do you work part time?
144 Content Questions
• What is your creative work about? What are the narratives or types of stories you seek to tell?
• What influences your creative work? Are there specific artists or pieces of media that inspire you?
• Are there specific personal experiences that have shaped the work you do? • Do you view your work as a form of activism? If so, how? • Tell me about the production process for specific pieces (I may ask to speak about specific pieces)
• What do you want your artwork to say? What messages do you want people to receive from your work?
Austin
• What has been your experience as a creative person in Austin? Do you feel it is a nurturing space for you and your work?
• How important is having an artistic community to you? If it is important, have you found it in Austin?
• Why are you pursuing life as a creative person in Austin and not another city such as Los Angeles, Houston or New York?
Race
• How do you identify as a person? How do you identify as an artist? • How does your work engage with race or racial issues? • Have you personally experienced racial inequality? If so, how? How has it affected your life? Has it impacted your work? 145 • How has the recent racial climate in the US affected you? Has it affected your work or how you approach your work?
• What historical ideas of race and racial inequality does your work engage with?
146 Appendix C: Sample Field Note
1/6/2017 Pablo meeting 2:20pm
I stopped in to see Pablo as I wanted to speak to him about the Obama Age animation we had discussed months ago over pizza. I arrived wearing my backpack and camera bag, and Pablo greeted me at the door with some art in his hand. We shook hands, and he told me had just been cleaning the place up. He often is apologetic for the state of his apartment, but I felt like it was pretty clean.
We talked about the holidays and I told him I had gone to SD and he shared that he had made a trip home on Christmas Day. I felt bad as he said he arrived after all the presents had been opened. He also discussed how he had worked on NYE but had the day to himself.
After catching up briefly, Pablo pulled me up a chair as we started talking. He discussed wanting to be an illustrator at a print shop or gaming studio and he referenced a quote he had put on his Facebook. Micah had similarly spoken in person about something he had recently posted online and this is perhaps a testament to the fact that a certain idea or thought was on their mind they wanted to continue sharing. Pablo showed me his art he made for a Grand Theft Auto Texas that takes place in a city like he grew up in. I wonder if he feels being an illustrator will also be lucrative. Money was certainly on his mind when I came to see him as he’s been struggling to make ends meet with the $12/hr concierge job he works.
As we spoke Pablo sat in his seat often reaching for his backpack to grab sketch books out of it. The sketch book he really wanted to show me was at the print shop where he was receiving prints. Pablo spent quite a bit of time discussing Obamics. This is the idea that had started as “the Obama Age,” and has since become Obamics. He spoke passionately as he discussed this world he had created in which Barack Obama is a leader for the black community and is still a force after his presidency. In this world Pablo talked about three characters (no longer Vini, Vidi and Vichi) a musician, artist, and a hustler who make stuff happen. As he speaks, he either makes eye contact or looks through his sketchbooks as he talks, while he flips through them looking for the newest idea he wants to show me. I wondered if these are three facets or corners of a triad Pablo envisions are the keys to success. The hustler in this scenario, according to Pablo isn’t scheming for bad but rather just to make things happen. This world takes place in a place similar to where he group up in Dallas. Dallas came up a few times, including how much his family love the Cowboys and how the Cowboys identity is engrained in to the family.
147 Pablo as usual had a positive outlook on his situation. I wonder if it is even fair for me to call it a situation. I asked if he gets frustrated having to work so much at the concierge desk and he said it depends on the shift. He says he has to be attentive and polite when people come during normal hours but during the night hours he can use the supplies of the print center to make his own art prints and work on his craft. He says he sketches so much while sitting at his job, so he sees it as helping his creative endeavors. Another way he described how his job helps him is that he has to file hourly reports of the happenings at work and he wants to use a similar model to organize his life.
Pablo sees 2017 as a time when he organizes his life. We discussed financial security, and I offered advice on how to come up with a rate for his artwork. As I arrived several of his prints were in plastic sleeves and were numbered. He has a huge amount of art work in his house that he called his inventory. He explained that very recently his instagram posts of his work have led people to inquire about buying his art and so he is making a more concerted effort to build his digital base.
As we spoke, I sat on a chair and Pablo was at his desk. As he mused about not being deterred about his financial situation, he offered that he’s a Christian and he believes he was sent to earth to make art and be a messenger. He feels art was the skill he was given and it has shaped his character because he has focused so much time and energy on his art.
Towards the end of our conversation I asked Pablo about the two worlds he lives in. The Obamics world that keeps expanding and the world his body inhabits. He said he wants the Obamics world to be the one his body lives in. The Obamics world is both what he hopes but it is also an escape, a place he can create, much like a Sims game. We discussed this as he was holding several sketchbooks and revealing new places, people and situations he had created for his Obamics world.
We discussed the animation project I want to help him with and he is building scenes for that. He showed me how he had taken a hawk from an ancient Egyptian drawing and incorporated it in to his world. Essentially we’re going to make a comic book that comes to life and maybe is a trailer for Obamics. Pablo seemed really thrilled about this idea and I’m hoping it can come together in the next couple months.
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