Toward Critical Amplification: #Sandra Bland, #Breonna Taylor, and Transmedia Storytellers on Twitter

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Creative Antiracist Activisms: Critical Race and Feminist Interventions

Abstract

Social media users narrate stories of police violence inflicted on Black women and girls. This qualitative study conducted over 16 months uses critical discourse analysis and digital ethnography to comparatively analyze the ways narratives of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor’s deaths were transmediated on Twitter. We found Twitter users engage in what we term critical amplification, a process of intentional repetition and sharing of content to combat dis- mis- and mal-information and shift power relations and structures. Specifically, storytellers shift from criminalization of Black women and girls to calls for police accountability for their misconduct. Over time, Twitter users increase their critical amplification of intersectional experiences of Black women victims of police brutality on the social media platform.

Authors

• Nalya Arabelle Fenella Rodriguez, University of California - Irvine

• Aaminah Norris, California State University - Sacramento

• Dale Allender, California State University - Sacramento