Latin American slavery was abolished over a century ago, with Brazil as the last country to exit slavery in 1888. Nevertheless, Afro-Latin Americans‘ historical exclusion remains evident in their current socioeconomic and sociocultural circumstances (Rojas Dávila 2018: 155), reflected in limited access to decision-making spaces and the mis- and underrepresentation of Afrodescendants in media (Htun 2014: 120). Fiona’s Quast doctoral research examines how racialized and marginalized Black and Afrodescendant people in Spanish-speaking Latin America resist these structures via digital media self-representations, particularly through podcasting.
This presentation offers insights into the creation of a decolonial and Afrocentric methodological framework for studying Afro-Latin podcasting from Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean. Using her dissertation as an example, Fiona Quast shares her journey toward finding suitable methods for studying Black digital cultural productions. Specifically, she demonstrates how she developed an appropriate analytical framework by applying a bottom-up, community-centered approach rooted in decolonial theory, specifically through Abdul Alkalimat’s (2016) D-7 method for digital artifacts and Brock’s (2018) Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA). This presentation provides insights into the research process of Afro-Latin podcasting, introducing manual and digital methods ranging from audio transcription to computer-based textual analysis.
Fiona Quast is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and with the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. In her doctoral research, she focuses on digital media self-representations of Black and Afrodiasporic communities in Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Afro-Latinx podcasting between 2020 and 2024. Next to this, she currently is associate researcher at “Afroeurope and Cyberspace” (ERC Starting Grant Project).
Contact: fiona.quast@gcsc.uni-giessen.de