A talk by Dr Akane Kanai (Monash University)
Tuesday, May 18th from 10.00 to 11.30 (UK time)
Abstract
In recent times we have seen a rise in concerns on how to act ‘ethically’ as a political subject. In agonisations over how to ‘use one’s platform’ appropriately and how to engage with problematic public figures, artists, creators, there are significant anxieties over one’s authority to know, how to make claims and dispute them. These difficulties take place in a context of heightened affective-discursive attempts to ‘de-authorise’ feminist and antiracist claims at the same time that feminist and antiracist thought has gained significant momentum in its circulation and takeup online. In these events, social media has been noted to play an essential part in heightening the stakes of personal action. In this paper, I reflect on some projects on online and mediated feminism in the context of ongoing feminist debates about truth claims and the place of the personal in relation to the political. I suggest that we might productively approach and understand these concerns by thinking through online political cultures as ‘knowledge cultures’ (Knorr Cetina 1997; 2007) in which attempts to find ‘epistemic community’ are yet unresolved.
Speaker Bio
Dr Akane Kanai is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Her research areas include gender, race, and the politics of affect and identity online and in popular culture. In 2021, she was awarded an Australian Research Council fellowship to explore the everyday uses of online feminism by young women.