Seeing and Unseeing Racism: Explorations of Salience and the Black Lives Matter Movement - Lecture
Channel: PurdueLibraries
Date: 2023-06-16

Here is a recording from the 2023 ID:EALS symposium of an invited presentation by Anish Vanaik of Purdue University, Dwaine Jengelley of Purdue University, and Rolfe Peterson of Susquehanna University.

Democracy, and the landscape of information within them, are molded by social movements. We study representations of the police and popular protests in over 2000 editorial cartoons during successive waves of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Analysis reveals that the salience of racism varied throughout the period. On the one hand, the police didn’t remain in consistent focus and were rarely depicted by right-wing cartoonists. On the other, centrist and left-leaning cartoonists avoided depicting the protests, while right-wing cartoonists regularly did. BLM, forms an excellent lens through which to see how movements shape our access to information.