About the lecture

While STEM fields possess the capacity to analyze the technical and organizational properties of digital interfaces, services, and their associated user practices, they are underequipped to evaluate or interrogate the cultural mediation of design, discourses, and meaning of digital technologies.   This presentation describes a methodological intervention I developed: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA). CTDA employs critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) with philosophy of technology and science and technology studies to interrogate digital artifacts, their practices, and the beliefs of the users employs them.  
 
CTDA integrates semiotic interface analysis with critical discourse analysis of the interface’s users. This talk outlines this technique, providing examples of how its methodological flexibility applies to examining varied ICT artifacts while maintaining a hermeneutic perspective on design and use. I designed CTDA especially for researchers interested in minority groups and digital practice as it foregrounds critical cultural theories while examining digital technology, grounded in user perspectives and real-world practices.
 

About the speaker

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, and Black  cybercultures; his scholarship examines race in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media. His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, (NYU Press 2020), the 2021 winner of the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.