Black Beyond Data Reading Group Fall 2024 Kickoff!!
Friday, September 27 featuring Professor Shaka McGlotten!
First Speaker of the Fall 2024 Season: Dr. Shaka McGlotten (9/27)
Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies program. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with queer of color lifeworlds.
They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021) and Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY, 2013). They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, Palgrave, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, McFarland, 2014). Their work has been supported by Data & Society, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and The Andy Warhol Foundation.
Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life.
Credit: Cover concept and image by Raafat Hattab. Drawing by Jakob Lorenzo.
About the Reading Group
Black Beyond Data seeks to create an open resource for scholars to combat racial injustice through digital humanities.
The Black Beyond Data Reading Group is focused on exploring ideas around community-based data analytics (CBDA), a collaborative approach to data that involves community members in the collection, management, and analysis of data in their communities. The goal of CBDA is to increase knowledge and understanding of social issues that impact a given community and to integrate the knowledge gained with interventions for policy or social change benefiting community members.*
What is data? Data are facts, statistics, and other basic units of information about a people, place, or community. They are the building blocks elected officials, policy-makers, organizers, and educators use to draw conclusions about how a community functions. Data is collected all the time, often without our conscious awareness of it and it could be anything from your birth date on a form to social media likes on Facebook. However, data can be so much more. That’s what we hope to explore in the readings.
The aim of the Black Beyond Data Reading Group is to gather people (researchers, faculty, community activists) who have an interest in Black community-based data analytics to critically research and study social issues to initiate transformative change in Black communities.
Stay tuned for our next several guest speakers: Amber Sinha (10/25) & Chris Dancy (11/29)!
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