I’m #notracist Exploring Ambient Racism on Twitter
Studies of online racism tend to focus on visible and ‘extreme’ forms and practices. This work is significant, yet it can over look the techno-cultural materiality and affordances of social media, and how this produces less visible, ‘everyday’ online racism and racialized talk. Much less is known about the less visible, ‘long tail’ modes of online racism, which can be analyzed as ‘ambient racism’. This paper explores everyday racialized talk on Twitter via an examination of the use of the hashtag #notracist.
Sanjay Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at Brunel University in London. His research is located in the areas of racialization and difference, cultural politics and new media, which critically consider questions of representation, radical pedagogy, subjectivity and materiality. These interventions operate through thematics of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘technologies of race’. In particular, his work is concerned with bridging conceptual and political issues, especially in relation to the production of racialized knowledge and material culture.