The Notorious M.S.G.: Making Race in Online Food Cultures

Speaker

Dr Kerry McInerney (née Mackereth) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute, a leading AI policy thinktank in New York. Kerry founded and co-chairs The Global Politics of AI research stream on how AI is impacting international relations. She co-hosts The Good Robot Podcast on feminism and technology and has co-edited two books on the topic: Feminist AI and The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism.

In this work in progress presentation, Dr Kerry McInerney discusses a chapter from her forthcoming book on how the Internet is reshaping our racial identities. This chapter examines how racial identities are conceptualised and challenged through online food cultures. From the pervasive whiteness of ‘clean eating’ culture and online conflicts over cultural appropriation, through to spicy food challenges and contemporary ‘foodie’ cosmopolitanism, she shows how retrograde racial tropes are given new salience in the Internet age. However, she also examines how content creators of colour are pushing back, using social media platforms as digital storytelling tools to foreground alternative narratives about race, food and identity.

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Host or Publisher Cambridge Digital Humanities