Invited Speakers

Zizi Papacharissi is the keynote speaker for the 2019 CRDM Symposium, and is Professor and Head of the Communication Department, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and University Scholar at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published nine books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oculus and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. She is presently working on her 10th book, titled After Democracy, with Yale University Press. Follow Zizi on Twitter.

Keynote: Affective Publics: News Storytelling, Sentiment, Democracy

Social media excite the public imagination with their potential for democratization, newer forms of news storytelling and social change. Digitally aided waves of civil unrest invite speculation on whether social media make or break the pace of revolutionary movements. Drawing from analyses of the unfinished revolutions and interrupted movements of the past few years, this talk begins by examining the role of social media in introducing a new political. Data from recent studies undertaken at the University of Illinois at Chicago are presented in explicating the relevance of the platform for contemporary news storytelling, framing, and gatekeeping. The talk concludes with an emphasis on the concept of affective publics, and how these public formations sustain all forms of mobilization, including recent waves of populism.

Blair L.M. Kelley is a speaker at the 2019 CRDM Symposium, and is Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Right to Ride won the prestigious Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Kelley is currently at work on a new book project called Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class under contract at W.W. Norton and Company.

Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry Show, NPR’s Here and Now, and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine. Kelley seeks to make historical scholarship more responsive to lay people interested in history and scholars from other fields, responding in new ways and in multiple formats to contextualize the past and preserve our histories. Highlighted as one of the top-tweeting historians by History News Network, Kelley was among the first generation of historians active on twitter. She has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than ten years and she has over 38,000 followers. She created the #StudyingSegregation to track the interdisciplinary work of scholars and journalists studying racial segregation in the past and present. Additionally, she is at the beginning stages of a digital history project looking at Confederate monuments in the South, mapping the placement of monuments, layering their presence against black population statistics drawn from the census, maps chronicling the locations of lynchings, the passage of segregation laws, and laws disfranchising black voters.

Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is a proud resident of Durham, North Carolina where she lives with her husband and two children. Follow her on Twitter!

Dr. Kelley’s talk for the 2019 CRDM Symposium is entitled: “The Historian’s Guide to Black Twitter: Navigating Discussions of Race on Social Media.”

Dylan Marron is the kickoff speaker for the 2019 CRDM Symposium, and is an IFP Gotham Award & Drama Desk-nominated writer, performer, and video maker. He is the voice of Carlos on the hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, an alum of the New York Neo Futurists, and the creator of Every Single Word , a video series that edits down popular films to only feature the words spoken by people of color.

Marron hosts & produces Conversations with People Who Hate Me, a podcast where he calls up the people behind negative comments on the internet. It was selected as a Podcast Pick by USA Today & The Guardian, named “the timeliest podcast” by FastCompany, and won a Webby Award. He recently gave a TED Talk and is currently writing Snowflake, a book about empathy on the internet, difficult conversations, and wielding softness as strength. His talk for the 2019 CRDM Symposium will be about similar topics. Follow him on Twitter!