Dr. Douglas-Wade Brunton

Lecturer, Communication Studies

Room 313B, 3rd Floor West

St. Augustine

Trinidad and Tobago

Telephone: 868-662-2002

Email: douglas-wade.brunton@sta.uwi.edu

I am a digital ethnographer specifically interested in the relationship between media, culture and identity in a global context. This interest, a prior career as a communications professional working throughout the Caribbean, and my Trinidadian identity inform my work on the role the online performance of self plays in the interpretive constructs of identity – particularly for people of colour.

My research congregates under five themes: temporality, spatiality, identity, race, and culture - all of which I bring to bear in my current book project The Creole’s Web - Creolité as a Digital Logic. This project constitutes the creole as the primary technological product of the global political economy of the Age of Empire created by language, collective memory and place and deploys it to offer a new understanding of the personal and social constructions afforded by the New World of online spaces as people continue to negotiate the intricacies of time, place, and interpellations in such unmapped or unknown spaces.

Aspects of this work are currently out for peer review in article manuscript form as part of an ongoing series on What is Cultural Studies? in the International Journal of Cultural Studies ; and also as a chapter in the forthcoming SAGE Handbook of Global Social Theory. The construct of the Creole is also the basis for a chapter in “Neo Race Realities in the Obama Era” published by SUNY Press in 2019. To date, I have developed theoretical models to interpret the online surveillance of Black and Brown bodies with this work appearing in Social Media + Society; Souls – A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society; and the Journal of Human Behaviour.

I am happy to supervise postgraduate projects on subjects from digital studies and the intersection of media, culture and identity to the social impacts of mediated surveillance.

Click here for a copy of my research output, conference presentations and invited talks

Qualification

MA New Media and Society – University of Leicester
PhD Communication Studies – University of Michigan

Research Interests

Media Studies
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Digital Studies
Surveillance Culture
Postcolonial Theory
Critical Race
Creole Studies

Featured Work

Cultivating Black Joy as Resistance Online : A roundtable discussion.
L’homme de la créolisation: Obama, neo-racism and cultural creolization. Chapter in Perspectives of Neo-Race Realities in the Obama Era. ed: Heather Harris. Albany: SUNY Press ISBN-13: 978-1438474151
Brunton, D-W. (2017) The Corridor of Uncertainty: Media, cricket and West Indian identity. In the International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367877917738310
Patton, D.U., Brunton, D-W., Dixon, A., Miller, R., Leonard, P., Hackman, R. (2017) Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations. In Social Media +
Coleman, R. & Brunton, D-W. (2016) “You Might Not Know Her, But You Know Her Brother”: Surveillance Technology, Respectability Policing, and the Murder of Janese Talton Jackson. In Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.
Patton, D.U., Leonard, P., Cahill, L., Macbeth, J., Crosby, S. & Brunton, D-W. (2016) “Police took my homie I dedicate my life 2 his revenge”: Twitter tensions between gang-involved youth and police in Chicago Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Envir
Mateescu, A., Brunton, D-W., Rosenblat, A., Patton, D., Gold, Z., boyd, d. (2015). Social Media Surveillance and Law Enforcement. Data and Civil Rights: A New Era of Policing and Justice. http://www.datacivilrights.org/pubs/20151027/Social_Media_Surveilla

Courses Taught

COMS 2002 - Communication Analysis
COMS 2501 - Communication Technology
COMS 2201 - Intercultural Communication
COMS 3901 - Communication Theory
COMS 6000 - Graduate Research Seminar: Qualitative Methods
COMS 6001 - Topics in Communication: Time Is a Place: A New Refutation of Race, Place, & Space

Curriculum Vitae

Brunton CV January 2022.pdf