ABOUT
A space with a story
Digital Blackness grows out of decades of my participation in, learning from and thinking about Black digital life. Long before I studied it, it was part of my everyday life: the friendships, conversations, debates and humour that made those spaces feel like home.
This space brings those experiences into conversation with research, writing and practice.
Foundations
01
Personal roots
My interest in Blackness and Black life has always been connected to larger questions about personhood, power and liberation. How we understand ourselves is shaped not only by the identities we claim, but by how we are named and categorised by others. The names and categories are never neutral. They shape what we can access, from rights and resources to recognition and opportunity, and who gets to decide.
02
Finding community online
With the internet came new spaces where these questions were played out and reproduced. Black people, myself included, were finding one another, creating and negotiating our identities in ways that both reflected and challenged the world around us. Those online spaces were never separate from “real life”, even if early thinking about the internet often treated them that way. Digital experiences have always been part of the wider social, cultural and political worlds we inhabit
03
Ideas becoming practice
Black feminist thought has been central to how I make sense of all this. It offers not only ways to answer these questions, but ways to connect them to the struggles of others, and to build the solidarity that liberation requires. Digital Blackness reflects that understanding, bringing together work that has never been confined to the internet or to any single discipline.
ABOUT DR KŨI MACKAY
Creative, insightful, bold
I am a Black feminist digital sociologist, researcher, theorist and writer exploring the intersections of race, gender, technology, identity and power. My work brings together Black feminist thought, digital cultures and critical research to examine Black life across digital and offline contexts, and to develop new ways of thinking about the structures that shape our lives.
Alongside my research and writing, I develop concepts and frameworks that connect critical inquiry with practice. I am also Co-Founder and Director of Research and Development at BRK Ujima, where I lead research, consultancy and facilitation grounded in Black feminist approaches to structural change.
Values
What guides this work
These values shape how I think, create, collaborate and show up. They are how I put Black feminist thought and a commitment to liberation for all into everyday practice.
Centring Blackness
Starting from Black lives, knowledge, creativity and possibility rather than treating dominant perspectives as the default.
Care & accountability
Taking responsibility for how research, knowledge and practice affect people and communities.
Critical inquiry
Questioning how power operates, whose interests it serves and how its assumptions become accepted as truth.
Solidarity
Recognising shared struggles and working in relationship with others to challenge the structures that produce marginalisation.
Creativity & possibility
Imagining and making ways of being, knowing and working beyond what existing systems permit.