Locating the Everyday: Black Women, Well-Being, and Digital Media
Public Deposited- Creator
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Cameron, Shanice Jones
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication
- Abstract
- Black women’s definitions and understandings of health are often obfuscated and silenced due to biomedical discourses that construct Black subjects as deficient. Similarly, Black internet users are often regarded as deficient and studied within the confines of domination and resistance. Hence, this dissertation explores Black women’s digital well-being networks to develop a nuanced understanding of Black women’s digital practice within health and well-being contexts. I focused on three Instagram hashtags: (a) #blackgirlsrun; (b) #therapyforblackgirls; and (c) #blackvegan, which constituted the digital networks for this research. I employed a critical qualitative approach to center the voices of the 28 Black women whom I interviewed for this study. The participants’ perspectives provided insight into the ways in which they navigated disciplinary power related to the well-being practices and how they leveraged the digital technologies, as savvy internet users, for their individual gain and collective benefit. The findings indicated that the participants in the study encountered and navigated disciplinary power as they engaged with running, therapy, and veganism. Their encounters with disciplinary power informed the content they created and distributed through the digital networks. I introduce the concept discursive barriers to describe the discourses that would discourage the participants from engaging with the well-being practices. Additionally, this study draws from Black feminist thought to center the participants’ agency as they engaged with the digital technologies. This perspective revealed commonalities between the affordances the participants leveraged from the digital technologies in relation to their immersion within the networks. I outline and contribute the user trajectory that the participants described as they immersed themselves within the digital well-being networks: (a) discovery; (b) connection/consumption; (c) active participation; (d) community/influence building. Decentering domination and resistance, I treat the participants as health advocates and savvy internet users who constructed digital spaces that enable Black women to access health and well-being more freely. This dissertation introduces the concept of enclaves of well-being to elucidate the rich and lively virtual spaces that the network users carved out within the neoliberal driven digital space. Rather than approaching Black women’s digital practice in health and well-being contexts from a place of deficiency and domination, the digital enclaves of well-being concept provides a framework for exploring the richness of these spaces by alerting scholars to key characteristics of the spaces: (a) Black joy; (b) the everyday as didactic discourse; (c) digital health advocacy; and (d) mobilization for collective action.
- Date of publication
- 2022
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
- Advisor
- Parker, Patricia S
- Berger, Michele S
- May, Steve
- Marwick, Alice
- Palm, Michael
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2022
- Language
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- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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