What’s Up with Dudes?: The Reclaim Project and Masculinity

Tara Mcpherson, Digital Media Theorist & Historian

Join the event on YouTube Live on March 25th at 5:30pm with this link:

https://youtube.com/live/LK0pm7p3Iuo?feature=share

Co-hosted by Assistant Professor-in-Residence Catherine Masud, and Digital Media & Design students Mads Carey and Adam Gonzalez; Event Producer: Musawir Abrar

About the Topic:

The recent expansion of authoritarian and ethnonationalist formations has dovetailed with the growth of social media platforms, allowing conspiracy theories, racism, misogyny, and disinformation to spread via viral mechanisms. Young men increasingly turn to online spaces that are dominated by extremist voices. We saw the consequences of these developments in the recent U.S. election results. This talk will examine the Reclaim Project at USC. Through social media production, AI bot development, and collaborations with online influencers, we offer young adults compelling alternatives to the online “manosphere.”

About the Speaker: 

TARA MCPHERSON is the HMH Endowed Chair and Professor of Cinema + Media Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is a core faculty member of the MAP program, USC’s innovative practice-based Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her scholarship engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is author of the award-winning books Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Harvard UP: 2018) and Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH. She is currently researching hate online and making anti-fascist media as part of the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies grant. The collaboratively authored Data Fluencies book is forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Minnesota.

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This event is brought to you by UConn’s Department of Digital Media & Design

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