Digital Ethnic Studies

Digital Ethnic Studies is an undergraduate and graduate student-led working group that is oriented around critical issues and questions related to digital media and technology. Our focus on technology considers how interconnectivity with digital logics, practices, and infrastructures substantially transforms Ethnic Studies discourses around bodies, communities, histories, power, and movements. Drawing from multiple disciplines and fields, our diverse scholarly backgrounds bring together a wealth of knowledge across geographies, histories, and cultural traditions. Thus, this working group uses interdisciplinary methodological approaches to explore the dialectical interfacing between digitization and racialization along the axes of war and empire, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and gender and sexuality. 

Some central questions we ask are: 

How does a critical interrogation of the (de)territoriality of cyberspace disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about space, place, and movement? 

How might critical digital media studies approaches expand our theorizations of knowledge production and relations of power? 

How does digital media and technology reconfigure our relationships to bodies, environment(s), temporality, and matter?

How does digital media and technology complicate discussions of state power, violence, and surveillance?