Raven Maragh-Lloyd on Black Networked Resistance

How can communities creatively adapt and reshape online practices to forge resilient digital publics? In episode 162 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews media studies scholar Raven Maragh-Lloyd about the historical contours of Black digital resistance. The Ideas on Fire team was honored to work with Raven on her new book Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age, which is an insightful analysis of how Black technology users adapt and reshape resistance strategies and forge Black publics in the digital age. The book is out now from the University of California Press. In their conversation, Raven and Cathy chat about how digital resistance is best understood as a creative process rather than just an outcome of digital practices and how Black communities create and sustain that process across time periods and platforms. They dive into a bunch of different examples, from Instagram archiving around Juneteenth and Black women’s online networks of care to the politics of cancel culture and where the migration of Black Twitter in the wake of the platform’s demise. The episode concludes with Raven’s vision for critical hopefulness in digital spaces, a critical hopefulness that reckons with the violences of the past and forges more just futures. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/162-raven-maragh-lloyd