Keynote: Catherine Knight Steele
Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland – College Park, where she directs the Black Communication and Technology Lab (BCaT) and the Digital Studies in Art & Humanities graduate certificate program at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on race, gender, and media, specifically emphasizing Black culture, digital communication, and technology. She moves beyond examinations of representation in the media to consider the relationship between resistance and joy as technologies of liberation. Catherine’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, Feminist Media Studies, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Her award-winning book, Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S. Her latest book, Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, was published in 2023 with Routledge.
