Social Media Project
The Center's Social Media Project studies the locations and practices of gender and sexuality in new media and social media. We define new media broadly to encompass technologies of the past 40 years including video, internet, mobile phones, and other communications technologies, particularly as they have become media for cultural expression and forms of social life. We define social media to occupy a continuum: from the narrowest sense (current social networking sites and practices) to the broadest sense in which it might suggest a whole range of social technologies, both old and new. Social, political, and aesthetic questions to be addressed include surveillance and privacy, performance, pornography, political organizing, and the construction of sexual practices and communities.
In academic year 2011–12, the project will host a series of lectures and workshops and will begin preparation for a major conference to take place in 2013. Coming up: Mary L. Gray, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington and a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England on "Queering the Digital Divide: Or, What Rural Youth Teach Us about the Boundaries of a Networked Public Life." See calendar »
Rebecca Zorach, Director