Corey J. Miles, PhD
Tulane University
Sociology of Vibe: Ordinary Blackness/Carceral Intimacies
Is there more to blackness than research would allow me to say? The discipline of sociology has privileged measuring, quantifying, and naming as essential modes of accounting for racism. It is often through racial disparity gaps or overtaxing the suffering black body that the discipline claims to account for the structural experience of blackness. Sociology of Vibe centers unindexed moments, feeling some type of way, and bodily responses as ways of understanding how unequal systems impact the day-to-day experiences of Black people. Solely using calculations of disparity to name the current state of blackness inadvertently affirms the reality of black subjugation and disguises Black living. Looking towards southern black trap rappers, this research uses racialized emotional performance as an analytical space to understand the structural experience of blackness and ways black people live beyond it. This talk sits with how moments that don’t often register as moments, complicated feelings, and bodily gestures are important pieces of black living and can serve as modes of understanding the structural experience of blackness.
