Teachable Moments

About Teachable Moments: Examining TikTok social drama as a productive site of Black Feminist intellectual production

We often frame drama and conflict online in terms of its negative impacts, such as harassment and bullying. While these aspects of drama are important to consider, drama can also be a productive discursive space through which communities negotiate norms, boundaries, and the limits of acceptable behavior. In this presentation, I apply this latter approach to examining online drama by drawing on Victor Turner’s (1980, 1988) concept of ‘social drama’ – dramatic social events marked by conflict, antagonism, and competition through which communities articulate social norms – to examine how TikTok users engage in drama to negotiate the intersecting race, gender, and sexual power dynamics. Through an analysis of two U.S.-based TikTok social dramas, I demonstrate how the technological affordances of the platform shape how users respond to drama and argue TikTok’s predominantly younger use- base utilizes the platform to discuss, negotiate, and put in place socially progressive norms around racism, sexism, and homophobia. I further argue that these dramas create opportunities for Black and of color women, femme, and queer TikTok users to engage in digital Black feminism by drawing on their lived experiences and using platform affordances to comment on the situation and educate other users. The talk concludes with a broader discussion of the role of digital platforms and online drama in bringing both opportunities and harm to marginalized users.

About The Speaker

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin’s research focuses on the culturally specific ways marginalized communities, most often Black women, femmes, and queer folks, engage with mass and digital communications technologies to seek information, produce knowledge, and build community, and how the infrastructure of these technologies helps these communities to overcome or continue to replicate systemic barriers to equity. Her research has been published in several high-ranking peer-reviewed journals, including but not limited to Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, Information, Communication & Society, and Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Her research has received scholarly recognition from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and funding support from The Russell Sage Foundation. Currently, Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin is working on a book project on Black feminism and popular media. Chelsea received her MA and Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University and her BA in Political Science and Media Studies from Vassar College.

Before pursuing a career in academia, Dr. Peterson-Salahuddin worked at CBS This Morning as an Editorial Producer. During her tenure at CBS, she received a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award, which recognizes exceptional professional journalism, for her role in the network’s coverage of pharmaceutical companies' price hikes on EpiPens.

About Antisocial Media: How Users, Creators & Designers Respond to an Adversarial Internet

The early days of social media were filled with optimism about its democratizing potential and ability to bring people together. But more recently the focus has shifted to problems, ranging from doom scrolling to threats to national security. What has gone wrong? How can we fix it? This lecture series will explore many controversial facets of social media, from misinformation to radicalization, along with the strategies and systems that users, creators, and designers have developed to respond to them.

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