Sentences that come directly from the article are in quotation marks. CSUN students, faculty, and staff can access most articles through the University Library using CSUN credentials. Please use the library’s interlibrary loan services if an article of interest is not available.

 

Brock, A. (2011). Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception. New Media & Society, 13(7), 1085–1103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810397031

• Blackbird, a browser built on Firefox aimed at African Americans, was released in 2008. This article examines the racial and technological discourses surrounding Blackbird’s release on technology and cultural blogs. Findings indicate that racial ideologies play a role in the reception of this culturally themed information and communications technology (ICT) artifact.

 

Brock, A. (2018). Critical technocultural discourse analysis. New Media & Society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532

• Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) adopts critical theory—critical race, feminism, queer theory, etc.—to incorporate the epistemological standpoint of underserved information and communication technology (ICT) users so as to avoid deficit-based models of underrepresented populations’ technology use. Utilizing CTDA, Brock found that “Black discursive identity interpellated Twitter’s mechanics to produce explicit cultural technocultural digital practices—defined by one investor as ‘the use case for Twitter.’”

 

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2020). The Whiteness of AI. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 685–703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6

• This paper focuses on the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is predominantly portrayed as White—in terms of color, ethnicity, or both. The authors “illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television.” They offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on CRT, particularly the idea of the White racial frame.

 

Chon, M. (2000). Erasing race: Critical race feminist view of internet identity-shifting. Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, 3(2), 439–474.

• This article asserts that race matters on the Internet. With some legal examples, the author challenges the already conventional and unexamined wisdom that virtual identities are racially unproblematic. “While these are an admittedly non-random sample of Internet interactions, they demonstrate quite clearly that negative impacts of race are very much alive and well in a digital environment. A critical race feminist perspective is skeptical about the claim that the looseness of virtual identities will reduce the effects of material identities (gender or race) either on- or off-line.”

 

Hamilton, A. M. (2020). A genealogy of critical race and digital studies: Past, present, and future. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 6(3), 292–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220922577

• This paper delineates “a genealogy of critical race and digital studies by mapping the intellectual terrain of the field.” Hamilton reviews key areas in the field of critical race and digital studies, including colorblind studies of the web, digital divide studies, and Black Twitter. She concludes “with a focus on the ways that this body of literature can be brought forth to critically understand the implications of emerging areas of academic debate on studies of race and technology.”

 

Hanna, A., Denton, E., Smart, A., & Smith-Loud, J. (2020). Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 501–512. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372826

• This paper examines the way race and racial categories are adopted in algorithmic fairness frameworks. The authors turn to CRT and sociological work on race and ethnicity “to ground conceptualizations of race for fairness research, drawing on lessons from public health, biomedical research, and social survey research.”

 

Liebermann, Y. (2020). Born digital: The Black Lives Matter movement and memory after the digital turn. Memory Studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020959799

• Liebermann uses a CRT lens together with discourse analysis to examine media artifacts around the Black Lives Matter movement on such social media as Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube. The author maintains that social media platforms “can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power.” Memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not.

 

Maragh, R. S. (2018). Authenticity on “Black Twitter”: Reading racial performance and social networking. Television & New Media, 19(7), 591–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476417738569

• This article “investigates the complex rhetorics of racial authenticity online, intermixing ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to understand African American users’ investments in enacting race in their social networks,” especially on Black Twitter. The piece “uncovers ‘acting white’ as a significant discourse that shapes online identity and group performances.”

 

McMurria, J. (2016). From Net Neutrality to Net Equality. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5931–5948. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4654

• Drawing from CRT, McMurria locates “the ways in which legal and economic structures of discrimination have historically inhibited people of color from gaining access to employment, ownership, and decision-making power in the media and telecommunications sectors.” He discusses how CRT can inform media policy scholarship to challenge race-neutral thinking and develop conceptual foundations for supporting what advocacy groups representing people of color have called “net equality.””

 

Moran, R. E., & Bui, M. N. (2019). Race, ethnicity, and telecommunications policy issues of access and representation: Centering communities of color and their concerns. Telecommunications Policy, 43(5), 461–473. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2018.12.005

• The authors examine “how and why activist groups representing marginalized communities of color are increasingly engaging in communications technology policy issues, particularly in relation to issues of digital access and representation.” The three case studies explored center around the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Free Press, and the Tribal International Carrier. This paper serves as an example of how sociohistorical research into telecommunications policymaking battles can utilize CRT “to more acutely analyze the current structures endemic to lobbying and policymaking around communications technologies.”

 

Ross, M., Hazari, Z., Sonnert, G., & Sadler, P. (2020). The intersection of being Black and being a woman. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 20(2), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377426

• This quantitative study (N = 3,206) leveraged inferential statistical methods to examine (a) the similarities and differences between the social computer science-related experiences of Black women, Black men, and non-Black women in the U.S.; (b) the relationship between these experiences and computer science career choices; and (c) the activities during which significant social experiences might occur. This study focuses on the intersection of race and gender.

 

Scheuerman, M. K., Wade, K., Lustig, C., & Brubaker, J. R. (2020). How we've taught algorithms to see identity: Constructing race and gender in image databases for facial analysis. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW1), Article 58. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392866

• By adopting critical race studies, gender studies, infrastructural studies, and identity scholarship, this paper examines “how race and gender are defined and annotated in image databases used for facial analysis.” The authors critiqued current approaches in image databases for their lack of critical engagement with racial and gender histories.

 

Walker, P. & Laughter, J. (2019). Shoaling rhizomes: A theoretical framework for understanding social media’s role in discourse and composition education. Computers and Composition, 53, 60–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2019.05.005

• The authors describe a theoretical framework for discussing social media in relation to composition instruction and critical discourse analysis, entitled shoaling rhizomes. They evaluate specific examples from Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr through the concept of shoaling rhizomes. They then discuss “how instructors can use social media discourse study in the composition classroom to identify and use social media as a tool for activism, identity formation, and inclusion.”

 

Waseem, Z., & Hovy, D. (2016). Hateful symbols or hateful people? Predictive features for hate speech detection on Twitter. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, 88–93. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N16-2013

• The authors provide a list of criteria founded in CRT “to annotate a publicly available corpus of more than 16k tweets” to identify racist and sexist slurs. They analyze “the impact of various extra-linguistic features in conjunction with character n-grams for hate-speech detection.”