​The Power of Popular Culture - 10 am

From music to movies, television series, blogs, and books, how have people of color leveraged popular culture and social media to create content centered around their interests and needs? What role do these platforms play in advancing racial justice?


We will hear from popular culture and Black digital scholars and bloggers including:
Damon Young & Panama Jackson of VerySmartBrothas.com, Nancy Yuen, Brian Foster, and Catherine Knight-Steele

PANELISTS

Damon Young is writer, critic, humorist, and satirist. He's a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas, a columnist for GQ Magazine, a contributing editor and columnist for EBONY Magazine, and a founding
editor of 1839. He is also the author of a collection of essays to be published by Ecco (HarperCollins), and currently serves as a member of ACLU Pennsylvania's State Board.

Nancy Wang Yuen (Ph.D, UCLA 2008) is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Biola University. Her book, Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (2016, Rutgers University Press), examines the barriers actors of color face in Hollywood and how they creatively challenge stereotypes. She is a sought-after expert on race and media by news outlets such as Associated Press and the New Republic. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. With a research team, Nancy pioneered the first policy report on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in primetime television in 2006. She is currently conducting a 10-year follow up study. Nancy is also co-curating an exhibit on Hollywood's Pioneering Asian American Actresses for the Japanese American National Museum in 2019.

Brian Foster is a writer and scholar of the Black American South. His work draws both on his formal training in sociology (UNC-Chapel Hill) and from methodological and theoretical paradigms in history, historical and cultural geography, and cultural studies. Currently, his work centers on “Post-Soul” (i.e., post-1970’s) black life in rural and small-town southern communities, and is motivated by the question: how have black communities in the rural South sustained themselves, organized, and protested in the fifty-plus years since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements? Beyond folk life in the rural Black South, he studies how race and region are represented and embodied in public culture, from “disneyfied” renderings of the Delta Blues to the countrified flourishes of southern rappers. His work has been recognized and supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the Carolina Population Center, the National Science Foundation (GRFP 2012-15), the American Sociological Association (Minority Fellowship Program Cohort 42), the Association of Black Sociologists, the Graduate School at UNC, and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professorate.
 
 

​Dr. Steele is a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. Her research has appeared in the Howard Journal of Communications, Social Media + Society, and the book Intersectional Internet (S.U. Noble and B. Tynes Eds.) Her doctoral dissertation, Digital Barbershops, focused heavily on the black blogosphere and the politics of online counterpublics. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Dr. Steele also serves as the first Project Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded College of Arts and Humanities grant, Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture.