The Social Justice Institute Noted Scholars Series presents Dr. Danielle Wong, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia on “Algorithmic Protest and Politics of Disaffection on TikTok.”
In August 2020, Donald Trump announced an executive order banning the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok, citing national security concerns. Described by North American journalistic media as an app that is “more machine than man,” TikTok is often compared to other American-owned social media platforms for its foregrounding of machine learning over self-representation. In this talk, I analyze techno-Orientalist discourses about the app, and the ways it has been used to critique China’s Uighur concentration camps and anti-Black state violence. I consider how TikTok engenders modes of algorithmic protest– a genre of protest that entails memetic forms and affects that emerge within, and potentially expose the violence of, capture systems.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching interests focus on race, Empire and “new” technologies. Her current book project, Racial Virtuality: Asianness and New Media Life, considers historical and contemporary relationships between Asian racialization and shifting discourses about “the virtual” by turning to racial form, objects and bodies in social media, film, theatre and web art.
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