BKC Faculty Associate Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses public scholarship, social media, and the mission of being purposefully provocative.
"I want to take the most culturally-derided forms of production being done in the US right now—which are generally being done by black women and black queer youths who are in the internet culture—and see if I can tell that story in a way no one else has done yet. And that has nothing to do with white boys in Silicon Valley, who have absolutely overlooked the economic and cultural dominance of what those young people are doing on the internet. I’m really fascinated with that question and story, and it’s probably the more interesting and important technology story, because they did it without all of the economic power of Silicon Valley. They built platforms like Twitter. They built Instagram. And we’re in a moment where it’s going to be easy for that contribution to be lost."