Stories of Dissent: Rereading #Ferguson

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

In the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting in August 2014, protests erupted on the streets of Ferguson, in cities across the country, and on social media, an increasingly popular space for digital dissent. Though the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” was first coined by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi in July 2013, only after Brown’s death did it gain significant traction, revealing a rapidly developing relationship between social media and racial justice that provided new platforms for expression, political organization, counternarratives, and conversations about systemic racism.

Social media data from this time period provides a rich document of this historical moment through the diverse perspective of thousands upon thousands of people. Thanks to quick-thinking archival efforts, from projects such as Documenting the Now, much of this data has been captured and collected. But data, as N. Katherine Hayles has argued, is “helpless to interpret or explain” itself. In this spirit, our interdisciplinary panel hopes to tease out the many conflicting and converging narratives within #Ferguson social media data from the diverse methodological approaches of social work, communication studies, journalism, literature, and history. This panel will be a roundtable dialogue between Sarah Jackson, Desmond Patton, Meredith Clark, and Melanie Walsh —scholars from these varying fields who have all worked at the intersections of social media, race, and dissent—that will explore such questions as: What are the gaps and overlaps between these methodological approaches? How do large-scale computational tools play into qualitative, humanistic research? How can we ethically build and preserve digital archives of potentially vulnerable communities? What political and ethical obligations do we have to these communities and their causes?

This panel hopes to better understand #Ferguson, as both a locally situated and globally consequential event, and to explore the continued significance of social media as a platform for, and response to, political protest.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Melanie Walsh, Washington University in St. Louis

Panelists

• Sarah J. Jackson, Northeastern University

• Meredith Meredith D Clark Clark, University of Virginia