Andre Brock

About

Dr. André L. Brock is an associate professor of Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech, with an interdisciplinary scholarly background that includes an MA in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research encompasses racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, with a particular focus on Black Twitter. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, theorizes Black everyday lives as Black joy mediated by networked digital technologies. Dr. Brock has published extensively in prominent journals and has been featured in major media outlets such as WIRED, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, and The Root. He has contributed to documentary projects and is a charter member of the NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. His work critically examines the intersections of race, technology, and digital culture, emphasizing the importance of understanding Black digital experiences and representations.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Media studies
• Art
• Multimedia
• Economics
• Art history
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Distributed Blackness

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 257 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. <italic>Distributed Blackness</italic> also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users fro…

  PublisherDOI

• Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures

  2020 · 233 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the mea…

  Publisher

• Black Technoculture and/as Afrofuturism

  Extrapolation · 2020 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This essay argues for a reboot of Afrofuturism: a thoughtful engagement with the Black everyday, enacted through technoculture, to ground continued speculation on possible Afro Futures. This approa...

  PublisherDOI

• Race, the Internet, and the Hurricane: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Black Identity Online During the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

  2007-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Structural Racism in Tech: Social Media Platforms, Algorithmic Bias, and Racist Tech

  2024-12-05 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access

  Abstract Covers key studies published over the last decade documenting the harmful effects of racist technologies, which include how algorithms are racially biased and produce harmful effects.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• P. Bryan Heidorn

  University of Arizona

  2 shared

• Muzhgan Nazarova

  2 shared

• Karen J. Lunsford

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2 shared

• David Linderman

  2 shared

• Bertram C. Bruce

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Ann Peterson Bishop

  2 shared

• Rajeev Ramprakash

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Brent E. Palmer

  University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Graduate School of Library and Information Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2007

• Master of Arts - English, English

  Carnegie Mellon University

  2003

• Bachelor of Arts, Center for Worker Education

  City College

  2001

Awards & honors

• ‘Best Tech Books of All Time: #18’ by The Verge
• Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding…
• Popular Culture Association Nancy Baym Book Award for Outsta…

Similar researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology

• Allegra Smithh-32
• Philip Auslanderh-28
• Richmond Wongh-20