Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
I am Amanda Maria de Sobral Gomes, a journalist, master’s degree holder, and doctoral student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG).
Where are you from?
Contagem, Minas Gerais – Brazil
What is your current area of study?
Communicative processes and social practices, in Social Communication
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2025.
My paper, called “Reflections on the ‘Afrogoth’ Hashtag on TikTok: strategies for hacking the dispositive of raciality in digital media technologies”, aims to analyze the term ‘afrogoth’ (afrogótico) – created by Black Goth people – through the social network TikTok, from Afrocentric perspectives on digital technologies. The central question of the research is: how do Black Goth people use technology to create spaces of existence and resistance on social networks?
As key findings, what can be observed so far is that, as a way of gaining visibility on social networks, black people have adopted the term ‘afrogoth’ to value black and Goth content creators, being black people with elements of clothing socially constructed as feminine, such as dresses, skirts, make-up, and corsets. The hashtag is constantly used on social networks such as TikTok and Instagram (which has around 54,100 posts with the tag). This is a powerful strategy of Black resistance.
The creation and use of the term ‘afrogoth’ is a form of Technological Pretuguese (Pretuguês Tecnológico). In this technology, itself is used to go against white supremacy, creating a language that refers to blackness. In addition, it emerges as a self-definition, in which Black people can name themselves within the Goth Subculture, valuing their blackness and seeking more equality in Goth spaces, proposing cyberquilombism by forming a network of visibility and support among Black Goth people. For these reasons, the paper contributes to the discipline and research area because it articulates communicational, technological, and intersectional perspectives, observing how Black Goth women use technology to achieve visibility for themselves and against racial, gender, and class violence, for example.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2025 in Niterói is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
This is my first time presenting at AoIR, so I am very grateful for being selected with the Scholarship Travel that will support my participation in the event. For me, it is a unique opportunity to be in contact with people all over the world to talk about the subject that has majority present throughout my academic career. I am very excited for the conversations, learning, and networking. Therefore, I see the scholarship a way to possibility that people with my background (Black women, from a suburb – or favela –, and the first person in the family to enter e graduated in the high education).
