CURRENTS: Earl Brooks
Humanities Work Now
Location
Performing Arts & Humanities Building : 216 and Online
CURRENTS: Earl Brooks – Online Event
Date & Time
November 15, 2023, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Description
CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now is a lunchtime series that showcases exciting new faculty/student work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting. In general, two speakers will share the free hour with 2 short, informal presentations (10 min. ea.) and time for discussion.
Earl Brooks, Assistant Professor, English; Dresher Center Residential Faculty Fellow (Fall 2023)
This talk will explore technological discourse and the evolution of a rhetorical mode of social critique most often identified as the African-American Jeremiad. The term jeremiad has come to signify both lamentation or doleful complaint as well as a style of public censure meant to alter a group’s behavior by leveraging both a promise of salvation and some form of imminent catastrophe as the consequence for not heeding the prophetic warning. What Brooks calls the Afro-Techno Jeremiad, is a strain of the jeremiad that questions the technological progress narrative fostered by entities such as Google and Meta and applies concepts of structural racism and sexism to the sphere of techno-social discourse.