This round table explores how the transformative internet research method, Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), has been taken up by a multi-disciplinary, international group of qualitative researchers. (CTDA) is a problem-oriented discourse analytic approach to digital (née internet) objects and phenomena. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is designed to be receptive to any critical cultural theory, with the only requirement being that said cultural theory be applied to both the technology under examination and the discourse community using that technology/encountering phenomena.

Since its 2012 introduction in a pioneering research article on Black Twitter (2012), CTDA has been cited thousands of times; moreover, the article of the same name which more fully explains the method has been cited over two hundred times. Brock’s (2020) monograph, /Distributed Blackness/, has provided additional depth to the method and also have been cited hundreds of times, suggesting that CTDA is both timely and quickly becoming essential to qualitative studies of internet phenomena. The scholars selected for this panel have used CTDA across languages, platforms, communities, and phenomena to create a growing body of work that has had a significant impact on how race and/or difference is integral to internet studies, new media studies, sociology, social work, information science, and communication studies.

* The session will begin with a brief presentation by the facilitators defining CTDA, followed by discussion on how CTDA has (or hasn’t) worked for inquiry between participants and the audience. Overall, this panel engages with race, queerness, disability, gender, language, nationality, and other categories of difference that inform internet research across disciplines and in the everyday world.