Research
At the University of Maryland, I am receiving my Ph.D. in Communication with a specialization in Rhetoric and Political Culture.
Hardy, Alisa (2023). “Naming, Blaming, and “Framing”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Rhetoric of Black Feminist Pedagogy.” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 20 (2): 1-18.
This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TED Talk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.” Crenshaw enacts three distinctive features of Black feminist pedagogy in her activism for the #SayHerNameCampaign. She challenges traditional “frames” of anti-Black police brutality, uses blaming vocabulary from a Black woman’s standpoint to create new frames, and names an audience’s “revolutionary potential” in dismantling misogynoir in the justice system. An activist rhetoric of blame expands frames in dominant discourses so that the collective blame toward an institution can encompass intersectional oppression.
Hardy, Alisa. 2023. “Activists Literacies: Transnational Feminisms And Social Media Rhetorics By Jennifer Nish” In Women’s Studies In Communication.
Book Review of Activists Literacies.
The Intellectual Labor Of Digital Black Feminist Enclaves In Hashtag Construction, Reception, And Stratification Online
While existing research has examined counterpublics in hashtag activism, little attention is given to digital enclaves that emerge when mainstream media disregards the voices of these communities. This paper helps us understand the process of hashtag activism that derives from the intellectual labor of digital enclaves. I examine the digital Black feminist enclave that emerged through the Black online magazine, Ebony, mobilizing# MuteRKelly on Twitter. # MuteRKelly brings attention to musical artist's, R. Kelly, sexual exploitation of Black women and girls. I combined digital Black feminist theory with critical technocultural discourse analysis to demonstrate how this Black feminist enclave maximized Ebony's interface to defy ideologies of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and sexism that underpin the music industry's public allegiance to Black women’s exploitation on and offline. This digital Black feminist enclave solidified in the rhetorical and technical demand of# MuteRKelly, for (1) the music industry to dispatch all financial, commercial, and social engagements with Kelly and resist negative ideologies of Black women inscribed in his musical lineage,(2) for mainstream media to eradicate discourse that romanticizes domestic violence from celebrity Black men, and (3) for survivors’ to take space in the digital sphere to assemble a grapevine rhetorically committed to advocacy aimed at legal justice and increased protection for Black women and girls. It is important for scholars to trace the lineage of internet practices that traverse to hashtag activism and for us to look at the digital enclaves that produce these practices.
Steele, Catherine Knight, and Alisa Hardy (2023). “I Wish I Could Give You This Feeling: Black Digital Commons and The Rhetoric Of ‘The Corner’” Forthcoming in special issue on “The Commons” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
The unique experience of Black Americans in the United States produces a physical and cultural space with a long history of misuse, commodification, and theft of the Black imagination and Black culture. These spaces, which also historically complicate notions of privatization and ownership, are replicated online today. In this essay, we propose the corner as a lens through which to interrogate whether Black networks online potentially produce a rhetorical digital commons and, further, whether the theory and practice of “the commons” adequately make space for the particular historical reality of Black America. To do so, we focus on three social media platforms wherein Black digital praxis meets the possibility of the corner: TikTok, Twitter, and Black Planet. These digital corners provide lessons that center the Black experience on- and offline, and point toward possibilities and limitations in our digital future. Ultimately we argue that the corner contradicts hegemonic modes of white supremacy in public spaces while also spotlighting the brutal realities of gentrification, commodification, and theft that fortify the exploitation of Black communities.
Hardy, Alisa (2024). “Breaking bridges to the Pied Piper: how Black feminists digitally wreck the legacy of R. Kelly on Ebony. com.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 1-15.
While existing scholarship on R. Kelly primarily focuses on hashtag activism via #MuteRKelly, #FastTailedGirls, and #SurvivingRKelly, this essay considers the role of investigative journalism in documenting decades of R. Kelly’s sexual violence against Black women and girls. Using Gwendolyn Pough’s concept “bringing wreck” and Regina Duthely’s expanded version of “digital wreck,” this study analyzes nine articles published from 2013 to 2015 on ebony.com, the digital version of the Black-oriented magazine Ebony. In response to R. Kelly’s reentry into hip-hop, I argue that Black feminist bloggers as journalists aimed to digitally wreck patriarchy and capitalism through their rhetorical strategies on ebony.com. This project performs an interface analysis of ebony.com in conjunction with a rhetorical critique of these editorial attacks against the artist. It demonstrates how Black feminists engage in radical acts of blame to digitally wreck public sentiments towards abusive celebrities within the space of commodified news organizations. There are three types of digital wrecking practiced by Black feminists on ebony.com: expressing marginality, blaming misogynoir agents and practices, and reimagining Black culture by challenging sexual violence.