Ithaca College

The Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity (CSCRE) will kick off their annual discussion series with a presentation on “Technologizing Funk/Funkin Technology." Adam Banks will discuss the rhetorical practices of the DJ in black music traditions on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at 7 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall. His talk is free and open to the public.

Banks is a professor of writing, rhetoric and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of “Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age” and “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground,” a book challenging teachers and scholars in writing and technology fields to explore the depths of black traditions more thoroughly and calling African Americans to make technology a central area for struggle.

“This lecture will present the DJ as an example of a digital griot, a high-tech storyteller who keeps storytelling traditions alive even as she reinvents them,” says Banks. “In addition to discussing issues at the intersection of studies in race, culture, rhetoric and technology, the lecture will discuss the need for a black rhetoric 2.0, a futuristic vision for black rhetorical study as a digital humanities project.”

Banks has served as a visiting scholar in comparative media studies at MIT and as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas, as well as associate chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

The theme of the 2014–15 CSCRE Discussion Series is TECH N’ COLOR: Old Racisms, New Technologies.” It will consider how technology mediates, disrupts or reinvents expressions of race, racism and resistance. Has technology changed our perceptions of race while keeping racism structurally intact? Has racism migrated to new terrains? To what extent has technology shifted social relations across race or intra-racially?