This talk traces the history of women of color’s participation in online gaming forums, anti-racist social media posts, and Zoom meetings as examples of community defense. Black and Latinx female Xbox players who engage in “resistance griefing,” to use game scholar Kishonna Gray’s formulation, Generation Z women who post video documentation of their encounters with racism and xenophobia in public places, and women of color resisting racist zoombombing share an understanding of their efforts as digital diversity work. This talk argues that women of color online were engaging in community defense models as alternatives to traditional policing and the carceral state years before the mainstream left in the U.S. deployed them as part of a populist politics.

Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Lisa Nakamura is a member of the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network along with André Brock, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Catherine Knight Steele, and Remi Yergeau. She is also the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. Lisa Nakamura wrote books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies. In November 2019 she gave a TED NYC talk about her research called “The Internet is a Trash Fire. Here’s How to Fix It.”

Comment:

Doris Allhutter, Institute of Technology Assessment, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Moderation:

Levke Harders, Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck (CGI) und
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäische Ethnologie