Sarah Florini

Bio: Sarah Florini is an academic researcher from Arizona State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Racism & Identity (social science). The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 8 publications receiving 225 citations. Previous affiliations of Sarah Florini include Old Dominion University & University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on “Black Twitter”

Abstract: This article explores the use of the Black American cultural tradition of “signifyin’” as a means of performing racial identity online. In the United States, race is deeply tied to corporeal signifiers. But, in social media, the body can be obscured or even imitated (e.g., by a deceptive avatar). Without reliable corporeal signifiers of racial difference readily apparent, Black users often perform their identities through displays of cultural competence and knowledge. The linguistic practice of “signifyin’,” which deploys figurative language, indirectness, doubleness, and wordplay as a means of conveying multiple layers of meaning, serves as a powerful resource for the performance of Black cultural identity on Twitter.

The Podcast “Chitlin' Circuit”: Black Podcasters, Alternative Media, and Audio Enclaves

Abstract: This article explores how an informal network of Black podcasters, some of whom refer to themselves as the “Chitlin' Circuit” or “urban podcasters,” functions as a contemporary digital iteration of enclaved Black social spaces. The conversational nature of these podcasts and their use of Black American cultural commonplaces, combined with the intimate qualities of radio-style audio, reproduce a sense of being in Black social spaces such as the barber/beauty shop or church. Mobile technologies not only allow listeners to listen anywhere, but listening via headphones also potentially adds an element of immersion through the practice of sensory gating.

This Week in Blackness, the George Zimmerman acquittal, and the production of a networked collective identity

Abstract: The night of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, This Week in Blackness (TWiB!) went livestreaming online with an unscheduled broadcast of their flagship podcast TWiB! Radio. To many, the verdict laid bare the systemic racism that the dominant neoliberal racial discourse of colorblindness works to obscure by emphasizing individual over collective racial identity. TWiB!, which functions simultaneously as both a broadcast-style network and a social media network, created an interactive, multi-media, trans-platform space where listeners and TWiB! staff came together to express their grief and anger. Drawing on longstanding Black traditions of both public and private counter-discourse production, TWiB! rejected colorblindness and reified a Black collective identity at a moment of racial turmoil.

Recontextualizing the Racial Present: Intertextuality and the Politics of Online Remembering

Abstract: Remembering is never an end in its own right, but a means of asserting power and legitimizing social hierarchies. Thus, voices that seek to interpret the past in contradictory ways are often silenced (Zelizer, 1995). No part of the U.S. past is more called upon to legitimize contemporary racial relations than the Civil Rights Movement, which is constructed as the end of the nation's systemic racism. Institutionalized racism is thereby relegated to history. Troubling aspects of the past that might lead citizens to interpret the contemporary U.S. as anything other than an egalitarian meritocracy are erased or rendered ideologically safe. This article examines how the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), one of the largest contemporary Black Nationalist organizations in the U.S., uses its website to challenge the notion of a “post-racial” U.S. by undermining the history upon which this conception is built. The MXGM's website recontextualizes contemporary events within marginalized accounts of the past to de...

Enclaving and cultural resonance in Black "Game of Thrones" fandom

Abstract: Because of the ways fandom is constructed as white, Black fans are often overlooked or marginalized. Black Game of Thrones (2011–) fans create a parallel culturally resonant fandom organized around an African American Vernacular English–inflected iteration of the show's title, Dem Thrones. Through podcast recaps and the use of nonstandard hashtags for live tweeting, these fans draw on the affordances of digital media to create enclaved fan spaces. In addition to creating parallel and sequestered fandoms, Dem Thrones fans also engage in culturally resonant fan practices that use Black cultural commonplaces and center Black experiences. Dem Thrones fans draw on vernaculars and Black cult media to interpret the show through Black cultural lenses. They also use strategies for reading otherwise absent Black cultural specificity into the text. Seizing on resemblances to Black linguistic, aesthetic, or social practices, Dem Thrones fan map Black culture onto a text, creating opportunities for identification despite a dearth of Black representation.

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Abstract: Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States

Abstract: As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”

The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection.

Abstract: We investigate how annotators’ insensitivity to differences in dialect can lead to racial bias in automatic hate speech detection models, potentially amplifying harm against minority populations. We first uncover unexpected correlations between surface markers of African American English (AAE) and ratings of toxicity in several widely-used hate speech datasets. Then, we show that models trained on these corpora acquire and propagate these biases, such that AAE tweets and tweets by self-identified African Americans are up to two times more likely to be labelled as offensive compared to others. Finally, we propose *dialect* and *race priming* as ways to reduce the racial bias in annotation, showing that when annotators are made explicitly aware of an AAE tweet’s dialect they are significantly less likely to label the tweet as offensive.