Search
Program Calendar
Browse By Day
Browse By Time
Browse By Person
Browse By Room
Browse By Division
Browse By Session Type
Search Tips
Personal Schedule
Sign In
This paper examines how racism and nationalism flourish in participatory media spaces by analyzing user comments and images posted on the reddit community r/ImGoingToHellForThis in the week following widespread news coverage of the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose dead body was photographed on a beach in Turkey. The community is dominated by racist nationalist discourse that combines textual commentary with photographs and other visual media that have been remediated into offensive visual jokes. Through an in-depth study user-submitted comments and visual jokes, this paper argues that the ‘cloaks’ that obscure online racism can be at once obvious and highly effective. Rather than unmasking obscured racist online ideologies, scholars must also examine how these ideologies flourish while hiding in plain sight by tracing how racist discourses assemble in participatory media communities.