Black Women's Media Experiences in Britain & the Rise of Brand "Woke-Washing": A Reading List by Dr. Francesca Sobande
Dr. Francesca Sobande’s teach-in on “Black Women’s Media Experiences & the Rise of Brand “Woke-Washing” is a part of Black Women Radicals’ School For Black Feminist Politics.
On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, Dr. Francesca Sobande led the teach-in, “Black Women's Media Experiences in Britain and the Rise of Brand "Woke-Washing". The teach-in draws on over five years of research related to the digital and media experiences of Black women in Britain. The session addresses how the lives of Black women in Britain are impacted by the specifics of this geo-cultural context, including power dynamics between Britain's constitutive nations (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales).
Focusing on Black women's various media and marketplace encounters, this teach-in also explores the rise of British brands trying to attract Black audiences and tap into discourse on anti-Black racism in opportunistic and surface-level ways. Put briefly, this teach-in considers questions concerning Black women's production of and engagement with media in Britain, as well as issues regarding the rise of "woke-washing" which involves brands attempting to align themselves with social justice positions to pursue profit and protect their brand image. Shaped by Black feminist thought and understandings of racial capitalism, this teach-in tarries with tensions between the communal, counter-cultural, and commercial qualities of the media experiences of Black women in Britain.
About the curator of the teach-in: Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in digital media studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. She is Course Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme and is an affiliate of the Data Justice Lab. Francesca's work focuses on digital culture, Black diaspora, feminism, creative work, and the experiences of Black women. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Francesca tweets at @chess_ess and more about her work can be found at francescasobande.com.
Reading List for Black Women’s Media Experiences & the Rise of Brand “Woke-Washing”
Akiwowo, Seyi (2018) “Amnesty’s latest research into online abuse finally confirms what Black women have known for over a decade”, Huffington Post, December 19.
Akpan, Paula (2020) “Black girls chillin is the digital pandemic hangout we all need”, Teen Vogue, December 18.
Akpan, Paula (2019) “How the stories of Black women in the UK are being reclaimed”, Refinery29, October 10.
Akpan, Paula (2020) “What exactly is shadow banning?”, Bustle, August 2.
Allman, Esme (2019) “The dark side of social media for Black women”. Black Ballad, February 14.
Amoah, Susuana (2019) “#NoShade: A critical analysis of digital influencer activism against shadeism in the beauty industry”, Academia.edu.
Bailey, Moya (2010) “They aren’t talking about me…”. Crunk Feminist Collective, March 14.
Bailey, Moya & Trudy (2018) “On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism”. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4): 762–768.
Bailey, Moya (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press.
Bassel, Leah and Emejulu, Akwugo (2018) Minority Women and Austerity:
Survival and Resistance in France and Britain. Bristol: Policy Press. [related suggested reading - Emejulu, Akwugo and Bassel, Leah (2018) “Austerity and the politics of belonging”. Journal of Common Market Studies, 56(S1): 109–119.]
Benjamin, Ruha (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bentil, Jade (2020) “Black Lives Matter, grandma and me: how our world changed during lockdown”, The Guardian, July 18.
Board, WPCC Editorial (2020) “Intersectionality went viral’: Toxic platforms, distinctive Black cyberfeminism and fighting misogynoir - An interview with Kishonna Gray”. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 15(1): 68–73.
Bruce, Keisha (2019) “Reflections: #DigitalWhileBlack”, In Search of Blackness: Digital Blackness, Ephemerality & Social Media, February 24.
Bryan, Beverley, Dadzie, Stella, and Scafe, Suzanne (2018 [first published in 1985 with Virago]) Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. London: Verso.
Clark, Meredith D. (2020) “DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called ‘cancel culture’”, Communication and the Public, 5(3–4): 88–92.
Clark, Meredith D. (2014) “To Tweet Our Own Cause: A Mixed-Methods Study of the Online Phenomenon "Black Twitter". Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School.
Dadzie, Stella (2020) A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance. London: Verso.
Emejulu, Akwugo (2018) “On the problems and possibilities of feminist solidarity: The Women’s March one year on”. IPPR Progressive Review, 24(4): 267–273.
Emejulu, Akwugo (2016) “On the hideous whiteness Of Brexit: ‘Let us be honest about our past and our present if we truly seek to dismantle white supremacy’”. Verso, June 28.
Everett, Anna (2009) Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. Santa Barbara: SUNY Press.
Fahiya, Danielle (2020) “Welsh working class activists of colour are refusing to be ignored in 2020”. gal-dem, December 8.
Gray, Kishonna L. (2020) Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Hammond Perry, Kennetta (2016) London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
hill, layla-roxanne (2019) “Why doesn’t our media look like this?”. The National, September 29.
hill, layla-roxanne (2019) “The failures of fortress Europe”. Bella Caledonia, August 18.
Jackson, Sarah J., Bailey, Moya, and Foucault Welles, Brooke (2020) #HashtagActivism:Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Johnson, Azeezat (2020) “Refuting ‘How the other half lives’: I am a woman’s rights”. Area. DOI: 10.1111/area.12656.
Johnson, Azeezat (2019) “Throwing our bodies against the white background of academia”. Ethics in/of geographical research, 52(1): 89–96.
Johnson, Azeezat (2017) “Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of Black Muslim women in Britain”. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(2): 274–287.
Knight Steele, Catherine (2018) “Black bloggers and their varied publics: The everyday politics of Black discourse online”. Television & New Media, 19(2): 112–127.
Mohammed, Wunpini Fatimata (2019) “Online activism: Centering marginalized voices in activist work”. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, (15).10.5399/uo/ada.2019.15.2.
Palmer Lisa Amanda (2019) “Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist.’”. The Sociological Review, 68(3): 508–523.
Sobande, F. (2021) “Spectacularized and branded digital (re)presentations of Black people and blackness”. Television & New Media, 22(2): 131–146.
Sobande, Francesca (2020) “Black women and the media in Britain”. In Sobande, F. The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, pp. 29–55. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sobande, Francesca (2020) “Black women’s digital diaspora, collectivity, and resistance”. In Sobande, F. The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, pp. 101–123. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sobande, Francesca (2019) “Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding ‘woke” bravery”. European Journal of Marketing, 54(11): 2723–2745.
Umoja Noble, Safiya (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.
The Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (republished 2017). Black Women Organising [compiled and re-published by past tense in 2017].
Walcott, Rianna (2020) “WhatsApp aunties and the spread of fake news”, Wellcome Collection, July 7.