Digital Frontiers' Social Media and Digital Communities Roundtable
and Questions of Belonging
Created by Marseille Moon
20th-21st Century Graduate Art History Seminar
AEAH 5813.001, Fall 2012
Dr. Jennifer Way, Professor
On Friday, September 21, 2012, Dr. Jennifer Way's graduate art history seminar on 20th-21st c art
attended "Social Media and Digital Communities: A Roundtable Discussion," a session featured
at the Digital Frontiers 2012 conference sponsored by the UNT Libraries. The roundtable
speakers and titles of their presentations included Jennie Fleming, "Examining Flickr's The
Commons: What does creative interaction with digital image archives mean for users and
institutions?," Robert Emery, "Telling Stories of The Dallas Way: Finding LGBT History and
Creating Community Using Social Media," Heidi J. Wachter, "RevolutionaryAct.com and
ExperienceLife.com," and Mariette Papid, "Digital Rights, Media and Practice: The Right to
Bear Arms in The Information Age." Spencer Keralis, UNT Libraries' Director for Digital
Scholarship, moderated the roundtable.
Students in Way's seminar are studying how recent scholarship on belonging illuminates
contemporary and historical art and art history. They are considering how art and culture foster
belonging to a place as well as a nation, and the ways that places index belonging, inclusion and
exclusion. A primary concern is the way the creation and use of works of art participate in
facilitating someone or something belonging or not. There are also questions of what counts as a
belonging and how this relates to someone belonging to someone, thing or a place. Ways of
facilitating belonging include civilize, salvage, domesticate, diplomacy, accommodate,
remember. Examples of forms of belonging include autochthony, citizenship, memory and
heritage. Ways of not belonging encompass but are not limited to outsiderness, alienation,
dislocation, refugee, and homelessness.
Way charged her students with writing a short paper to explore connections between the
roundtable and their seminar studies. What follows is a short paper by graduate student,
Marseille Moon.