I am in Atlanta, Georgia for the 2016 Southern Sociological Society conference. I’ll be doing a couple of talks while here. The first is a discussion of Kishonna L. Gray’s “Race, Gender and Deviance in Xbox Live”. Kishonna’s book contributes to what I hope is a growing literature that bridges sociology of race and digital sociology. I am really excited to be a discussant for this panel because:
Gray’s book is an example of how we can theorize and study these new iterations of capital formation and exploitation. There is a great deal more work to be done theorizing social processes when space and place cannot necessarily be operationalized the same. There is also work to be done among those in the sociology of race: black social movements like Black Lives Matter dominate the small subfield here of race and digital sociology. But, there is also room to consider structural inequality in access and returns from digitally-mediated labor arrangements, educational attainment, and public goods. This work should, as Gray does here, consider race as a social construction that is mutually constituted by gender and class. In closing, this book builds on Choo and Ferree’s imperative that intersectionality become process orientated and attend to unmarked categories. It extends classic social theory into the age of datafication. And, it is in conversation with trends in stratification and inequality that are studying race and racism after the datalogical turn.
You can see a draft of my thoughts on Kishonna’s important work here.
And, if you’re at Southerns, be sure to say hi!