African Diaspora, Ph.D. and Radical Black History Online

The internet has fundamentally changed black print culture. In the last thirty years, a digital public of African descent has emerged, one that intersects and extends the imagined community created by the nineteenth and twentieth-century African-American newspaper. Black print culture emerged in part out a need to challenge violence against people of color, organize around issues of social justice, and build histories around topics relevant to communities of African descent. Scholars of African American and African diaspora history have continued to make these issues a priority, taking special advantage of tools created in the advent of digital and social media to achieve their aims. This discussion will explore the blog African Diaspora, Ph.D. (#ADPhD) <africandiasporaphd.com> as a product of this new generation of scholarly production and as part of a longer history of radical media and African American print culture. It interrogates ways new media and digital projects like #ADPhD are part of the evolution of technology but also reflect changes in ways black history is positioned within the historical profession. Founded in 2008 as a blog highlighting scholarship and scholars of African descent, #ADPhD is a born-digital venture meant to challenge the ways African diaspora scholarship is organized and consumed by modeling a history that is diasporic and multi-nodal in nature and disseminated through the digital pathways being created and recreated everyday online. Operating in a growing ecosystem that now includes space on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, African Diaspora, Ph.D. challenges the boundaries between conventional media, traditional academic production, and popular historical engagement.