Remaking the #Syllabus: Crowdsourcing Resistance Praxis as Critical Public Pedagogy

Abstract

Between 2014 and 2017, the creation of hashtag syllabi—bricolage iterations of reading lists created by or circulated among educators on Twitter—emerged as a direct response for teaching about three highly publicized incidents of racial violence in the United States. Educators used hashtags as a means of sharing resources with their networks to provide non-normative literatures from marginalized scholars for teaching to transgress in the wake of Mike Brown’s slaying in Ferguson, Missouri; the massacre of nine congregants at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the fatal car attack on anti-fascist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. Acting on Chakravartty et al.’s provocation to center scholars of color in course syllabi as a pedagogical strategy to disrupt the reification of white supremacy in communication and media studies, I consider the creation of three hashtag syllabi related to these events as a form of critical resistance praxis in the emerging framework of digital intersectionality theory. I present a brief textual analysis of the aforementioned syllabi, triangulated with data from online conversations linked to them via their hashtags and derivative works produced by their creators and users to map two social media assisted strategies for doing critical public pedagogy.