Books by Elizabeth Davis
Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda by Other Means, 2021
This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and... more This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and technologies exploit and capitalize on emotions, with particular focus on how social media are used to exacerbate social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nationalism.
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
Papers by Elizabeth Davis
Cultural Studies, 2022
The conversations collected in this Special Section speak to the events and
upheavals of 2020 and... more The conversations collected in this Special Section speak to the events and
upheavals of 2020 and the political climate that led up to these events,
particularly focusing on the shifting emphasis on emotion in politics that
emerged in so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse. The Covid-19 pandemic was
initially hailed as a unifying experience, but this conception quickly shattered
as the unequal effects of the pandemic were made visible. At the same time,
the highly publicized police murder of George Floyd and other black
Americans incited mass uprisings. The conversations collected here open up
a series of critical forays of thought concerning the long year of 2020 and the
inequalities and crises it made undeniably visible.
Cultural Studies, 2022
Herman: Of course we're here because of the public lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and... more Herman: Of course we're here because of the public lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in addition to ten days of demonstrations in all 50 states and around the world, the funeral of George Floyd yesterday and the continuing protests in the streets of the United States and around the world. In the time of Covid I think it's apt to raise this question of The Fire This Time. In opening this up we were kicking around a couple of phrases including the phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci around the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. So I want to propose that we begin with trying to think about this moment that we're in and I wanted to pull on the incredible insights and the incredible language of 'I can't Breathe' as a kind of opening comment. And both Imani Perry and Achille Mbembe have sort of talked about breath and breathing as a powerful expression of the conditions that define this moment of crisis and opportunity. So I think about breath in terms of environment and polluted air and the environmental degradation that poor and brown people have to live through. Breath and breathing as terms to understand the devastating kind of health impacts of the pandemic of Covid-19 which disproportionately attacks black and brown people particularly around respiratory systems and urban populations and vulnerable populations. But it also expresses the conscripted air available to black men, women and children at the hands of police through illegal tactics like choke holds and knees to the neck. Breath is constricted because of the stresses and strains that parents, grandparents, partners whose daily life is often relegated to kind of overcrowded and under resourced conditions or in detention centres where
Cultural Studies, 2022
Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, in 'The Biopolitics of Pandemics,' Ed Cohen discusses the co... more Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, in 'The Biopolitics of Pandemics,' Ed Cohen discusses the contradictions in medical, juridical, and popular thought that conceive of both disease and immunity as things that happen to individual bodies, belying our profound interconnectedness and interdependence.
Theory & Event , 2019
This essay explores the increasing salience of blackness in Anglo-American mainstream culture alo... more This essay explores the increasing salience of blackness in Anglo-American mainstream culture alongside persistent and increasingly mass-spectacularized violence against black people. Engaging Sylvia's Wynter's "deciphering practice" in place of aesthetic criticism, the essay argues that anti-blackness is instantiated as a "structure of feeling," and challenges the metrics of love and hate that frame contemporary anti-racist discourse. Rather, an analytic of taste and consumption guides the analysis of Jordan Peele's 2017 film Get Out, cannibalism in the Middle Passage, and blackface minstrelsy arguing that the politics of aesthetics requires an ethics beside(s) love and hate.
The Senses and Society, 2019
This essay draws on critical disability studies and blindness studies to rethink our commonsense ... more This essay draws on critical disability studies and blindness studies to rethink our commonsense understanding of vision and unsettle the normative sensory subject that is lodged in visual culture studies. Through a disability studies critique of visual culture studies and a juxtaposition of blind studies alongside the canonical images of the "male gaze" and the "white gaze" this paper argues that (visual) difference does not exist in the world waiting to be seen, but that difference is produced in visual power relations. This essay proposes that the possibilities of visual culture are determined by structures of seeing, rather than physiology or optics, arguing that as long as visual culture and social justice studies are lodged within a Cartesian conception of the subject, they falter in conceptualizing the social construction of perception and difference, for they have not destabilized the "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière) of their own epistemic tradition. Race, gender, and disability are apprehended here not primarily as identity categories, but as possibilities of the body that develop(ed) in tandem in complex socio-historical formations.
Emotion, Space and Society, 2018
This essay maps interdisciplinary lines of inquiry to assess current research on affect and emoti... more This essay maps interdisciplinary lines of inquiry to assess current research on affect and emotion in relation to digital and social media, in the context of the fractured news media landscape and increasingly visible emotionality in political life. The essay sketches the context of polarized emotionality and the crisis of truth characterizing current U.S. politics, centrally engaging Arlie Hochschild's concept of “feeling rules”. We explore the limitations of “affect theory” for researching mediatized politics, contending that the stark differentiation of “affect” from “emotion” reifies the rational, autonomous, liberal conception of the subject, and is of limited value for political communications research. Instead, we emphasize the relational nature of affect and emotion, and the value of feminist politics of emotion research. Our analysis evaluates the limitations of contemporary scholarship on affect, social media, and politics in the context of the grave challenges posed by algorithmic governance and computational propaganda. We conclude by suggesting the concept of “networked subjectivity” for understanding mediatized politics, and the importance of the “affective feedback loop” within the context of the social media “culture of likes.”
News Articles, Op-Eds by Elizabeth Davis
This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Tor... more This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com Facebook's algorithms are at last a trending topic, identified as a game-changer of public opinion and hence in politics and elections. Why do algorithms and the microtargeting strategies of companies such as Cambridge Analytica work so effectively? The elephant in the room is the role of emotion in contemporary politics. While marketing, advertising, cognitive and behaviour psychology, and neuroscience — have kept up with studies of emotion and affect, the humanities and social sciences have been asleep at the wheel. Still crushed under the pressure of Enlightenment conceptions of " Rational Man, " scholars have focused on evermore intricate debates about rationality, at the expense of developing more nuanced understandings of how emotion shapes behaviours, subjectivity and politics.
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Books by Elizabeth Davis
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
Papers by Elizabeth Davis
upheavals of 2020 and the political climate that led up to these events,
particularly focusing on the shifting emphasis on emotion in politics that
emerged in so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse. The Covid-19 pandemic was
initially hailed as a unifying experience, but this conception quickly shattered
as the unequal effects of the pandemic were made visible. At the same time,
the highly publicized police murder of George Floyd and other black
Americans incited mass uprisings. The conversations collected here open up
a series of critical forays of thought concerning the long year of 2020 and the
inequalities and crises it made undeniably visible.
News Articles, Op-Eds by Elizabeth Davis
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
upheavals of 2020 and the political climate that led up to these events,
particularly focusing on the shifting emphasis on emotion in politics that
emerged in so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse. The Covid-19 pandemic was
initially hailed as a unifying experience, but this conception quickly shattered
as the unequal effects of the pandemic were made visible. At the same time,
the highly publicized police murder of George Floyd and other black
Americans incited mass uprisings. The conversations collected here open up
a series of critical forays of thought concerning the long year of 2020 and the
inequalities and crises it made undeniably visible.