DuBois, Digitality and The Color Line in the 21st Century

Here’s where I’m going this weekend:

The Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston is excited to host a two-day conference March 24-25th, 2017. The theme of the 12th Social Theory Forum will center on interdisciplinary scholarship on race and the legacy of American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. During his long and productive life as a scholar and activist, Du Bois was instrumental in founding both the Atlanta school of sociology and the NAACP, and developed theories, research methodologies, and approaches to political organizing. The 12th Social Theory Forum provides an important opportunity to revisit and extend Du Bois’s work on race. 

Here is a paper I am presenting:

I intend to argue that the field of sociology can no more neglect the systematic analysis of technological change as it has been enacted on and through black lives than it could credibly ignore the formerly enslaved in the 19th century. The construction of the color line in the 21st century must engage digital technologies, digitally-mediated geo politics, and technological change in economic relations. Second, I aim to sketch out a set of critical sites of inquiry related to these technological and digital social processes that are particularly critical to understanding what I will call the a DuBoisian sociology of Black America in the 21st Century. The argument advancing these two aims begins with a summary of the three characteristics of a DuBoisian sociology of black life. Next, I make the case that technology is a central social process for the organization of capital and the construction of self. Based on this, I then sketch a set of organizing themes for bridging the empirical and theoretical focus of the DuBois school of sociology to the study of social problems created by technology. These themes center black people as theory and method for examining social structure and stratification.

It is a very, very rough paper.

Soldiering on.