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The Affect of the Hashtag: #HandsUpDontShoot and the Body in Peril

On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, a young man of barely 18 years, was killedby Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, which renewed discoursesurrounding the occurrences of racial violence in the United States enacted at thehands of police. Brown’s death led to the development of a hashtag movement called#HandsUpDontShoot on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, whichcritiqued the disparate treatment of racial minorities and the excessive use of (oftendeadly) force by police on black bodies. #HandsUpDontShoot offers an example howthe convergence of subjectivities occurs affectively: the hashtag, while making adiscursive appeal to consider Michael Brown’s rumoured stance of surrender whenhe was shot by Wilson, also featured photos of movement participants recreating his pose with their own bodies. Further, the embodied affect of the movement overlappedand entangled with that of offline spaces, where protesters on the ground in Fergusonand other communities began to raise their hands above their head in a desire tonot only create an external spectacle of Brown’s victimhood, but to live within thesubjectivity of his abject body. Through a media ecology analysis, I argue that thesubjectivity of Brown’s body was kept alive through the movement, as the hashtagand associated imagery can be seen as material extensions of Michael Brown’s bodyand a desire to make sense of Brown’s death through an affective exchange with thebody in peril. In this sense, the participants of #HandsUpDontShoot transformed themovement from a space for standing with the victim to a state of standing within the body in peril.

The Next Terminator: The Growing Addiction to Technology (Interview with Dr. Kate Drazner Hoyt)

Zahra’s Paradise: The Virtual Technics of (Dis)Orientation

#HandsUpDontShoot: Collective Images & Ethical Witnessing

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