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Best Paper Awarded to Joseph Kwarteng at ASONAM 2021

Kiran Parmar, Friday 19 Nov 2021

Congratulations to Joseph Kwarteng, our PhD Research Student who has won Best Paper at ASONAM, for his publication: "Misogynoir: Public Online Response Towards Self-Reported Misogynoir", alongside his co-authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Serena Coppolino Perfumi. This paper investigates Misogynoir – a portmanteau coined by Moya Bailey in 2008 to describe the specific forms of misogyny that Black women experience in visual and digital culture, coupled with racism and normative expressions of gender. [1] Bailey, M., and Trudy, "On misogynoir: Citation, erasure, and plagiarism," Feminist Media Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 762-768, 2018

As explained by Bailey, ‘it is particular and has to do with the ways that anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world".

This paper aims to: i) understand and characterise how misogynoir is manifested online and ii) investigate potential tools and methods to identify this type of hate automatically; it highlights four recent cases involving four prominent Black women in Tech. They were former employees of two large technology companies, Google and Pinterest and were reporting experiences of misogynoir at these firms on their Twitter platform. We followed the reactions to these cases (both supportive and non-supportive responses). We categorised them within a model of misogynoir that highlights experiences of Tone Policing, White Centring, Racial Gaslighting and Defensiveness.

The international conference on the 8th-11th November brought researchers and practitioners from various fields together virtually to promote collaborations to share ideas and practices. The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2021) addressed important aspects focussing on emerging trends and industry needs.

Tracie Farrell, Joseph’s PhD supervisor, said, "Intersectional hate is a very challenging topic, both on- and offline. We appreciated Joseph’s mixed-methods approach in dealing with this topic in his paper."