This article examines naming as a discursive performance deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. I analyze tweets referencing the names of three Black Brazilian women intellectuals: Marielle Franco, Lélia González and Djamila Ribeiro, seeking to unearth the way in which their names help to build counterpublic spaces of resistance involving notions of citizenship, belonging and democracy. Using platform studies and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as a theoretical frame, I perform different operations of computational textual analysis to map most frequent users referenced and hashtags used, as well as most relevant topics. I conclude that naming grants a powerful role in building counterpublics’ identities, helping to constitute alternative intellectual traditions in Brazil. Linking a social media post with a name to a collective mobilization serves to establish and maintain cultural identity, combining ephemerality with a continuing legacy.

Keywords: counterpublics; antiracism; feminism; Twitter; Digital Studies

This article follows a computational cultural criticism to analyse the reading practices on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses tweets that reference Jorge Luis Borges and Clarice Lispector, which were extracted and analysed using textual mining tools. The article demonstrates that both authors were mobilized in two different senses: in a therapeutic sense, as a way to deal with loneliness and suffering, and also to process collective and social transformations, expressing support or criticism of governmental politics dealing with COVID-19. In those ways, the article shows that reading practices on Twitter reveal the multiples ways in which people experienced the pandemic, and shaped collective and subjective experience.

Keywords: Digital  Humanities;  Reading  Practices;  Global  South;  Clarice  Lispector;  Jorge  Luis  Borges; 

Social Media.

Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.

Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.