The Media Crease: Theorizing Culture, Repetition, and Social Difference

The Media Crease: Theorizing Culture, Repetition, and Social Difference brings together scholars from The Color of New Media working group at UC Berkeley to examine how patterns of repetition shape media, culture, technology, and social difference. Building on Abigail De Kosnik's concept of the "media crease"—the traces of return, re-use, and re-engagement with media—contributors explore how new media and technology can entrench colonialism, racism, capitalism, and misogynoir, while also generating disruptive possibilities for resistance, creativity, and collective world-making. Essays analyze cultural and technological phenomena across diverse geographies, from Indigenous ceremony to AI, digital activism to hip-hop, archives to embodied performance. In doing so, the collection demonstrates how culture is made and remade through mediated repetition, and how communities marked by race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora leverage new media and technology to both endure oppressive structures and imagine alternative futures.