Rachel Kuo | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (original) (raw)

Papers by Rachel Kuo

Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, ... more This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality. In the United States, identity, particularly race, plays a key role in the messages and strategies of disinformation producers and who disinformation and misinformation resonates with. Expanding what “counts” as disinformation demonstrates that disinformation is a primary media strategy that has been used in the U.S. to reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and hierarchies of power at the expense of populations that lack social, cultural, political, or economic power.

Big Data and Society, 2021

This commentary reflects on recent instances of anti-Asian violence and state responses to redres... more This commentary reflects on recent instances of anti-Asian violence and state responses to redress violence through data-driven strategies. Data collection often presents itself as an appealing strategy, due to impacted communities' desires for evidence and metrics to substantiate political claims. Yet, data collection can bolster the carceral state. This commentary takes an antagonistic approach to policing, including the ongoing creation of data infrastructures byand for-law enforcement through hate crimes legislation. We critically discuss the challenges and possibilities in building towards anti-carceral responses amidst ongoing racial violence and crisis.

Social Media + Society, 2020

This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing... more This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Media and Society, 2018

Using critical discourse analysis and network analysis, I address how racial justice activist has... more Using critical discourse analysis and network analysis, I address how racial justice activist hashtags #NotYourAsianSideKick and #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen circulate discourse across networked online publics within and outside Twitter. These hashtags showcase relationships between feminist online publics, demonstrate ways that hashtags circulate racial justice discourse, and exemplify the fluidity and intersectionality of racialized and feminist online publics. I draw on critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2012) as my technique in order to examine the hashtag's discursivity. In order to analyze message spread and network relationships, I then provide a network analysis that illustrates message circulation in online feminist spheres.

Studies in Transition States and Societies, 2018

This article examines how uses of 'Asian-ness' as racial presence becomes used discursively and v... more This article examines how uses of 'Asian-ness' as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #Asians4BlackLives/#Justice4AkaiGurley and #SavePeterLiang/#Justice4Liang. Specifically, I look at how Asian American racial positioning becomes deployed in order to produce feelings of solidarity. Approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, I track media objects across multiple sites in order to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. I closely examine how #SavePeterLiang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of Liang's racial body and how the #Asians4BlackLives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics.

ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2020

The moral authority of ethics codes stems from an assumption that they serve a unified society, y... more The moral authority of ethics codes stems from an assumption that they serve a unified society, yet this ignores the political aspects of any shared resource. The sociologist Howard S. Becker challenged researchers to clarify their power and responsibility in the classic essay: Whose Side Are We On. Building on Becker's hierarchy of credibility, we report on a critical discourse analysis of data ethics codes and emerging conceptualizations of beneficence, or the "social good", of data technology. The analysis revealed that ethics codes from corporations and professional associations conflated consumers with society and were largely silent on agency. Interviews with community organizers about social change in the digital era supplement the analysis, surfacing the limits of technical solutions to concerns of marginalized communities. Given evidence that highlights the gulf between the documents and lived experiences, we argue that ethics codes that elevate consumers may simultaneously subordinate the needs of vulnerable populations. Understanding contested digital resources is central to the emerging field of public interest technology. We introduce the concept of digital differential vulnerability to explain disproportionate exposures to harm within data technology and suggest recommendations for future ethics codes.

Journal of Communication, 2018

Racial inequalities and the colonial legacies of White supremacy permeate scholarly and public di... more Racial inequalities and the colonial legacies of White supremacy permeate scholarly and public discussions today. As part of an ongoing movement to decenter White masculinity as the normative core of scholarly inquiry, this paper is meant as a preliminary intervention. By coding and analyzing the racial composition of primary authors of both articles and citations in journals between 1990–2016, we find that non-White scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions in communication studies. We offer some analysis as to why these findings matter in our current political moment, and propose steps the field might take towards further documenting and rectifying race and representation in the production of disciplinary knowledge.

Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism

GIF use in digital platforms offers community space for humour, play and joy. Focusing on reactio... more GIF use in digital platforms offers community space for humour, play and joy. Focusing on reaction GIFs, this chapter examines how feminist anger can be digitally expressed, represented and circulated by looking at the process of meme-fication within online affective economies of anger. While reaction GIFs can function as performative gestures and rhetorical devices that animate feminist anger, GIFs must also be contextualized within the racial and gendered body politics around “whose” bodies animate anger and whose bodies circulate within the digital visual economy. Taking up Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “feminist killjoy”, I analyse the form and aesthetics of killjoy and “white male tear” GIFs.

Racialized Media: The Design, Delivery, and Decoding of Race and Ethnicity, 2020

Considering the gains and losses of translating racial and political critique into minor forms, t... more Considering the gains and losses of translating racial and political critique into minor forms, this chapter examines the form and aesthetics of online comics to locate ways racial justice can be visually designed and communicated in digital environments. The circulation of activist media within visual economies creates different possibilities and limitations for radical politics across modes of legibility. In attempts to shift politics through shifting culture, what happens when racial justice becomes converted into a commodity object that circulates as visual capital? By focusing on minor forms of racial critique, this chapter examines the processes in which racialized affect and social justice become rendered into objects for consumption and circulation within affective visual economies.

The Routledge Companion for Asian American Media (eds, Lori Kido Lopez and Vincent Pham), 2017

This chapter compares samples of print and digital media materials that articulate discourses of ... more This chapter compares samples of print and digital media materials that articulate discourses of solidarity from the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women who are working to build a more intersectional feminist, anti-racist movement. These discourses can be seen as examples of intersectionality and solidarity in practice, and reveal the ways that hashtags on Twitter function as a tool for unity and specificity. The print materials come from Asian Women United (AWU)'s archives and the archives of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund and Asian Cinevision. Hashtags such as #NotYourAsianSidekick pushed conversations around Asian American feminism to the forefront of both Asian American and feminist online communities, and demanded a space where the two digital publics could converge. While hashtags function as gestures of solidarity between both individuals and communities, they are also just a small piece of a movement.