As the podcast industry continues to mature and develop, a reflection on Black podcasts and how they are situated within the industry is useful, through the lens of Stuart Hall’s infamous query about the Blackness in Black popular culture. Returning to Hall’s question, what is the utility of exploring the Blackness in Black podcasting, and in this particular cultural moment? Using Moya Bailey’s (2021) concept of digital alchemy, this paper seeks to explore the ways that Black podcasts intervene in oppressive media systems to imagine new possibilities for and reframing of representations of those whose identities lie at “the margins of the margins” (Bailey, 2021). Thinking through the utility of the “Black” in Black podcasts speaks to the ways that marginalized folks create podcasts that center “the margins of the margin” while also using the platform to create different sounds and formats steeped in Black cultures and aesthetics. This paper does not insist that all Black podcasts do this but instead considers the larger implications for the audiences, creators and industry at large of the podcasts that do. Together, these Black podcasts practice generative digital alchemy by “creating new media that appeals to the community from which they come” (Bailey, 2021, p.24). These Black podcasts reframe narratives of victimhood, community and physical health while centering Black women. In turn, they fashion audio spaces where the Blackness of the intended subjects is used to address their specific tensions, needs and futures, showing the possibilities inherent in making bread from crumbs.

In this paper, I build on existing critical analyses of the social media uses of the term "whitexican" and extend these insights to propose that it acts as a heuristic to examine more widespread struggles over class, race, and indigeneity present in new media platforms in Mexico. My approach uses discourse analysis of press and promotional materials and close textual analysis of memes, social media posts, and YouTube videos. As a socio-digital invention, whitexican proves to be a plastic concept that reveals much about the class politics of its users and detractors. The simplicity and virality of this digital neologism prompts different publics to take it up as a way to articulate a series of interconnected critiques about twenty-first century Mexican media: matters of representation, the influx and influence of international platforms, social media’s affordances for resistant viewing practices. The popular lives of whitexican both signal new cosmopolitan formations for Mexican identity in the digital age and, at the same time, reveal potential avenues for disrupting the hegemonic formations of this national identity.

Amy, a white American who moved to Korea as an English teacher, made her TikTok account about Korean culture. Erin, a Korean American content creator made the series “Emily in Korea” on TikTok to criticize Amy for using Korean culture. Both content creators actively utilize their identities, white American and Korean American respectively, to showcase various ‘differences.’ Amy establishes a unique account as a white American in Korea by emphasizing the differences between her and Korean society; Erin emphasizes her Korean identity to call out Amy’s content by presenting the difference between her experience as an immigrant and Amy’s experience as a white American. Using the TikTok video series "Emily in Korea" as a case study, this study proposes a conceptualization of identity-based content within the field of digital content creation. I argue the complexity of identity-based content, which has various implications even though they are ultimately digital content that aims to attract more views and audience engagements. This case study thus casts the complex question of the murkiness between commodification, the power dynamic between nations, and identity in the digital content creation field.

This paper analyzes genetic ancestry test (GAT) result reveal videos, user comments, and the role of YouTube in hosting these videos, to capture the popular discourse around the relationship between genetics and racial identity. I explore this space to articulate the construction, deconstruction, and performance of racial authenticity. By employing Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do YouTubers use their videos on GAT test results to further discourses of race that codify notions of authenticity?

2. What role does the affordances of comments and validation play in the ongoing project of YouTube creators’ own racial identity?

I focus on videos made by creators who specifically identify as racially ‘ambiguous.’ By using Stuart Hall’s conception of race as a floating signifier, I discuss how content creators and audiences discourse around racial identities coalesce into a new project of “racial formation” (Omi & Winant, 2015). I unpack how racial authenticity is being reconstructed and deconstructed in digital spaces and interrogate the ways in which the conceptualization and mobilization of authenticity are intertwined with white supremacy. Finally, I offer that YouTube’s digital subaltern counterpublic is a site of contestation (Squires, 2002). This contestation reclaims agency for people of color in crafting liberatory understandings of racial identity.

Beauty vlogs – a lucrative and highly popular YouTube genre (Banet-Weiser, 2017) – offer a unique area of study for exploring the ways that Asian Australian identity is performed and negotiated, given their attention to the Asian faces of vloggers (which is often a focus of beauty content) and the inclusion of speech, with accent being one of the key distinguishing features of Australian national identity to a global audience. However, the study of Asian diaspora in the beauty vlogosphere has generally been limited to the Asian American experience (Kim, 2021; Tomkins, 2020; Tran, 2020). This project responds to the need to build on contemporary representation work in Asian Australian studies, and the current lack of scholarship on Asian Australian representation on social media, with a study of three young Asian Australian beauty vloggers: Vietnamese Australian Tina Yong, Filipino Australian Rachel Tee Tyler, and South Asian Australian Rowi Singh. Drawing on ideological and thematic analyses of these content creators’ vlogs, associated YouTube comments, branded social media accounts, and mainstream media coverage, I explore how national, transnational, cultural and diasporic identities are negotiated through the practices of YouTube beauty vloggers, the commercialized landscape in which their work is made legible, and within their respective audiences and online cultures. In turn, this question and its resulting analysis is oriented towards an understanding of the potential and limitations of negotiating a hybrid Asian Australian cultural identity through social media.