Hello, and welcome to the digital alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association. My name is Moya Bailey. I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, and I'm the founder of the Digital Apothecary lab. For our first episode, I've invited three members of the lab to join me to discuss what exactly is digital alchemy and our plans for this podcast.
I'm Bailey Flynn, a PhD candidate and proud member of the digital apothecary lab at Northwestern University.
My name is Annika Pinch. I'm a second year PhD student in the Department of Media, Technology, and Society here at Northwestern. I'm also a proud member of the Digital Apothecary lab. I'm interested in studying digital inequalities, and I focus on the needs and experiences of marginalized communities in relation to technology.
Hello everyone, my name is Yena Lee. I'm a third year student of Media, Technology, and Society from the School of Communication. I'm also a proud member of digital apothecary. And I study network forms of social movement from processes of discourse building to policy production. I'll be the first one asking more questions. Let's begin with a question about the name, "Digital Alchemy." Can you tell us about what digital alchemy means and what you were thinking about when you were using that term?
I – although digital alchemy existed as a term prior to my imagining of it in this context – I was thinking about digital alchemy as the way that largely women of color, use different social media platforms for social justice, and really imagining those platforms beyond what the original creators of those platforms might have intended. So people have been able to use Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, in ways that actually further the goals of their movements and their own organizing, moving far beyond, you know, just sharing photos for family and friends. Social media has been a platform that has been leveraged for social justice. And I think that's a pretty powerful concept. So when I'm thinking about digital alchemy, that's what I'm thinking about. So in the context of this podcast, I really hope that we get the opportunity to talk to people who are doing that work, and creating what they need from the tools that are given to them.
I do have a follow up question. Very similar to 'digital alchemy' is the term 'digital apothecary,' which is the name of our lab.
Yes. So digital apothecary kind of speaks to my interest in both the past present and future. 'Apothecary' is kind of this throwback term used to think about the people who we now think of as pharmacists, so the people who create the medicines that herbs and things we need to live. And I was thinking about how the digital plays into that: how we use the digital to help us negotiate our social lives. But then also thinking about how the digital itself can be its own kind of poison and toxin that we might actually need some relief from. So I am thinking about the digital apothecary as an opportunity to both create the selves we need for the digital, and also thinking of the digital as its own self.
Great. I'm going to move on to talking a little bit also about the book you recently published, "Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance." And so I'd be curious if you could tell us a little bit more about this book and the meaning of the word 'misogynoir.'
So I coined the term misogynoir in 2008 while working on my dissertation, and one thing that you all are maybe starting to get closer to as you get to your dissertation is that there's a way that you write but is not necessarily accessible to people outside of the academy. When you're writing your dissertation, you're pretty much just writing for your committee, but my dissertation really offered me the opportunity to think about how words and language travel beyond academic spaces. So misogynoir was a term that really connected to both how black women were being treated in this historical context of these medical texts I was looking at from the 1910s. And how those stereotypes and negative images, I could still see something reflected in the media of today. And so I wanted to talk about that particular intersection, how is it that black women are being framed. So similarly, in almost, you know, 100 years had passed from the time of these materials I was looking at. So that's where I started to think about misogynoir. And as a graduate student, I was connected to a different blogging, a number of blogging collectives, and that allowed for the work to go beyond the dissertation itself. And misogynoir had its own life in the internet, moving through different social media platforms like Twitter, and blogger, and the term really exploded. So my book was actually a real pivot from the dissertation: picking up on this one word that I coined for the dissertation, and really changed the trajectory of the project completely, to looking at how black women were using social media platforms as a form of digital alchemy. And so that became the real impetus for the term. And then the book project, hopefully, I think has led to some really interesting questions in terms of my research and where I want to go from here.
Could you talk a little bit about why you decided to call your book "Misogynoir Transformed" with an emphasis on the transformed part of it.
So to talk about misogynoir – which is really honing in on the anti-black racist misogyny that black women experience – could be a pretty negative book to read, and also a negative book to write. I wanted to talk about how black women were transforming some of these negative representations, through the generative digital alchemy that they were creating, through the Twitter hashtags that they used, the YouTube, a web series that they created, and also through the tumblrs that they curated. So the transformation was a way to get away from emphasis on just the litany of negative examples of how misogyny or existence social media, but an opportunity to look at the transformation and what comes when people actively try to combat these negative images.
You mentioned in the book that you were initially planning on becoming a medical doctor. I'm curious, what shifted your path to now studying women's digital resistance?
I've told this joke a couple of times, which is that I visited medical school, when I was a senior in undergrad, and medical students were really depressed. I didn't know that graduate students were also depressed. So I had this thought that "Oh, graduate school would be better." Little did I know that, you know, depression is equal opportunity for those pursuing higher ed, higher education.
So could you tell us a little bit more – in addition to your medical school origins – about your career journey, and what other values it has shaped in your work in the lab?
I started as a young little person really being concerned about those who are marginalized, those who are sometimes on the margins of our society. So I definitely have this sense of trying to draw attention to people who are usually not in focus. And that has animated a lot of my research and a lot of my interest, trying to center those who often are not at the center of conversations, but are doing a lot of the work that makes the main stream function. So that has been sort of a raison d’etre for a lot of what I do. And social justice has been something I had done on the side. But digital humanities as a field was an opportunity for me to see connections between the digital organizing that I was doing in grad school. And my actual graduate work in education, those two things coming together through these old conferences that we used to have, which were called THAT Camps. THAT Camp really provided an opportunity to learn different digital tools and take some of the digital tools I was already using in organizing spaces. And think about them in the context of my dissertation and research. So having the opportunity to bridge those two things as a grad student really helped propel my interests and a lot of my scholarship.
I'm curious about how this podcast is a next step for you in that journey, particularly because the podcast is a form is something that is sort of outside and inside the academy.
That's what this podcast is allowing people a little bit of an insight into, what are people doing to actually enact digital alchemy in the world, we are taking the time to pull back the curtain, and really make the ivory tower a little bit more permeable, by exposing some of our thought process and ethical considerations as we move forward as researchers. And I think that's a really important step, especially as we're entering this moment where the urgency of what the Academy can give to the world becomes more and more apparent, we're entering a time of crisis, I would say, where the end of the Anthropocene seems very, very real to me, humans are not doing what they should be doing in terms of trying to make this world last for the generations that are coming after. So I am really thinking about doing whatever we can to make clear our intentions and to share as much knowledge as possible to as many people as want to listen, and I see this podcast as an opportunity to do that. And to think about it within the context of our digital world.
I would love to hear a bit of a preview of what kind of concepts issues, ideas and guests that listeners can expect to hear about in future episodes of this podcast. Yeah, well,
I'm hoping that we'll get the opportunity to think about the digital infrastructure that supports and sustains our digital research. So I remain curious about the people who mined the minerals that power our smart devices, the people who create those devices. And also, you know, what else is connected to the sustainability of our digital world. So I think that this podcast will give us an opportunity to think through some of those issues, in addition to interviewing some people who have been really part and parcel to expanding what digital alchemy looks like, given the campaigns and organizing that they've done on these different platforms. I'd be curious also to hear from you all about who you want to hear from on future episodes of the podcast,
I think I'd be really excited to hear from members of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective, which you are a part of, and is full of so many great researchers and community workers who I think would have a lot to add to these conversations about the digital as well.
Thinking about how the digital connects to health is really an important piece of what we're doing. Also part of that digital apothecary, digital alchemy sense that there's something happening at the level of health and healing with the digital that we need to consider.
I very much second the idea of bringing in people who are doing on the ground social justice work, as well as academics, as well as other stakeholders to talk about their visions for what they see for the future.
Yeah, I'd also like to hear about fellow grad students write their journeys, would research through the meta elements of doing research going through grad school that we don't really get to hear about and polished research papers.
And I'm thinking to that what we're also offering by exposing the process and talking a bit about how we do the work that we do is that we're offering a counter narrative. So in this context, the digital alchemy podcast, gives people a window into what lab culture could be that challenges perhaps what lab culture has been, and is imagined to be in more traditional sciences and gives a window into what's possible?
Yeah, a phrase that I have heard you use before was a lab for the lab-less and is a space where we can think and imagine, and work in new ways together and in ways that are less damaging and extractive than a lot of university environments can sometimes be.
So much of the academic experience is solo are designed to be independent. And what I really love is the idea that we're not doing this, or we're not in this on our own. And for those of us in the humanities, and even some of the social sciences, there isn't that same identification with a lab space. So the lab for the lab-less is also a way to talk about those who have interdisciplinary interests that perhaps keep them from naturally affiliating with some of the current constructions of labs that aren't humanities or social justice inclined.
Well, thank you so much for speaking with us Moya. And thank you – Annika and Yenna – for being here as well with me. And thank you listeners for tuning in.
Digital alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Nick Song. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Thanks to Bailey Flynn, Yena Lee, and Annika Pinch for research related to this podcast. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests and Digital Alchemy overall. Thanks so much for listening.
