Hi everyone! I’m Camden, a rising sophomore from Georgetown University, studying Government and Computer Science. This summer I’ll be broadly looking at digital circulations of race and culture. The project will investigate the ways that the power to express is conditionalized, tangled, and performed across communities and identities. Beginning specifically from the repression and increased criminalization of Drill artists in the United Kingdom, I’ll work through a couple questions: What do the racialized expectations of authenticity determine in performance? How do the experiences of surveillance and digital-community reproduce struggles for authenticity across borders? And, what does it mean to be seen?
Over the course of this summer, I’m hoping to build some foundation for how we can begin to reconcile a ubiquitous but disembodied cyberspace as the center of cultural production. We can see how non-digital spaces bleed into the ordering of the digital and increasingly the ease with which the digital manipulates the world beyond itself; however, the social movements of the digital (for example the importance of disembodied race in digital interaction) stand to be more fully explored. Within a broader context, I also want to think through cyberspace as a development of nouveau techniques of colonial practice. If we consider the transition from the postcolonial moment to the present as one defined not by decolonialism but by neocolonialism, that movement is marked by the adoption of new techniques of imperialism. The extent of digital techniques in that practice is something, in a small way, I’m interested in exploring. Looking internally then to the United Kingdom, especially as a continuing metropole, I’ll explore the aboveground technological systems that repress exploited groups. What is done publicly has no reason to be diminished in private.
On a personal level for this project, I’m really excited to work on my own individual research for the first time. Getting to build whole networks on my own in the US and the UK has been and will continue to be a really engaging challenge. I’m really grateful for all the support I’ve received so far, and I’m looking forward to meeting new people across the Laidlaw community! Please feel free to reach out and connect, I’d love to meet everyone!