THE CRITICAL SOCIAL MEDIA SPEAKER SERIES presents Dr. Whitney Philips, “Am I Why I Can’t Have Nice Things? A Reflection on Personal Trauma, Networked Play, and Ethical Sight”, on Tuesday, September 25 at 3:00 PM in Nicholson Hall Room 135. For more information, see below.
Critical Social Media Speaker Series
Dr. Whitney Phillips, Syracuse University
"Am I Why I Can't Have Nice Things? A Reflection on Personal Trauma, Networked Play, and Ethical Sight"
"Am I Why I Can't Have Nice Things? A Reflection on Personal Trauma, Networked Play, and Ethical Sight"
Tuesday Sept. 25, 135 Nicholson Hall, 3pm
In 2015, Whitney Phillips published her dissertation book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press). Although readers would have no way of knowing it, this book is a survivor narrative, forged from an experience of sexual trauma and intimate partner abuse that occurred during graduate school. In exploring the personal, political, and even methodological impact of these experiences, Phillips will highlight three broad takeaways. First is the deep interconnection between how people see and experience the world in embodied spaces, and how this embodiment influences what is seen, really what can be seen, on the internet. Second is the ambivalence of connection; the fact that our online networks are as capable of harming as they are of supporting. Third is the reciprocity of care, and the ways empathy directed externally cultivates empathy directed internally, and vice versa. Through these discussions, the talk will explore what can happen when we look beyond our screens, and open ourselves up to the lives of others.
Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Digital Technologies at Syracuse University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon, and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the author of 2015’s This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press), co-author of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), and author of a three-part ethnographic study “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Far Right Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators” (Data & Society). She is working on a third book titled You Are Here: Networked Manipulation in the Digital Age.
The Critical Social Media Speakers Series is supported through a Provost's Imagine Fund Special Events Grant. For accommodations or access information, contact Caroline Bayne at bayne016@umn.edu. For more information about the Critical Social Media Speakers Series, contact Laurie Ouellette at ouell031@umn.edu.
