About Digital Alchemy

This podcast features interviews with practitioners of digital alchemy and expands on the concept through an exploration of their work in the world. The podcast is hotels by Moya Bailey who introduced the concept of digital alchemy. Digital alchemy is a praxis designed to create better representations for those most marginalized, through the implementation of networks of care beyond the boundaries of the digital from which it springs. Alchemy is the “science” of turning regular metals into gold. Digital alchemy focuses on how women of color, Black women, and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks in particular, transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice media that recode the failed scripts that negatively impact their lives.

About the host

Moya Bailey

Moya Bailey is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).