Dr. Kevin C. Winstead is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and AI Studies within the African American Studies and Sociology Departments at the University of Florida. His research focuses on critical information studies, social movements, and digital media, specifically on transglobal disinformation. His work can be found in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology Compass, and Critical Intersections in Contemporary Curriculum & Pedagogy, Information Age Publishing.
Dr. Winstead's in-progress book-length manuscript, Sankofa Cyberculture: Black Digital Activism and Disinformation, builds on his decade-long research into the Movement for Black Lives and foreign actors' attempts to influence the American political process. Sankofa Cyberculture considers
- the role of culture in a social movement's continuity, political process, and abeyance.
- as well as digital misinformation's impact on the movement for Black Lives agenda.
His work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology Compass, and a chapter in Critical Intersections In Contemporary Curriculum & Pedagogy.
Kevin has been part of the founding team of many of the country's earliest Black Digital Studies centers, including the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum fostered research, education, and training at the intersections of digital humanities and African-American studies and prepared a diverse community of scholars and students whose work has broadened the reach of the digital humanities in African-American history and cultural studies, and enriched humanities research with new methods, archives, and tools.
Kevin served as the Council for Library and Information Science (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow of African American Data Curation with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, home of the Colored Conventions Project.
Kevin has also served as the inaugural Project on Rhetorics of Equity, Access, Computation, and Humanities (PREACH) Research Lab Fellow within the School of Literature,Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network.
More recently, in his recently released book Doing Black Digital Humanities: Radical Intentionality and the Praxis of Care, Dr. Winstead, along with his co-authors, Drs. Catherine Knight Steele and Jessica Lu chronicle the work building the AADHum, the nation's first African-American Digital Humanities Initiative.