Research Areas

Children and childhood studies; girlhood studies; the Black francophone world; banlieue studies; digital humanities; feminist theory.

Biography

Note: As a condition of my Gérard fellowship, I will be the department librarian during spring 2023 and will not have formal office hours. This said, I am happy to meet any former or future students. Do feel free to schedule via email!

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I’m a fifth-year PhD candidate with a designated emphasis in Film and Media and certificates in Global Urban Humanities; Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education; Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

My dissertation project analyzes the lives of Black girls—in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Parisian banlieue—as they engage in processes of self-imaging. While my project originally dealt with questions of self-formation via technology in fictional narratives, I now explore a re-orientation of the ''self'' for Black girls, and how these re-orientations are (inter)mediated. Further, I am especially interested in the Black girl as a conceptual figure that ultimately collapses binarized oppositions between woman/child and technophilia/phobia, and I explore the degree to which texts can act as technology for the nascent field of Black French studies outside of (but next to) American ideological influence. I have a growing interest in ontologies of le cyborg-child and tech subjects in tandem with Black being and ethics of belonging. I also tackle questions about racial networks from the early modern to the present; urbanism and youth culture more broadly; hip hop; the child image as commodity; and the global life of Francophone youth speak. As an instructor, I understand critical (race) pedagogy and experiential learning as vital components of the changing humanities landscape. 

I received my MA from Berkeley in 2020 and come to California by way of an Honors BA at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a research internship at l'Université de Paris (Sorbonne-IV), Centre Roland Mousnier. I was in the 2017-2018 cohort for the Teaching Assistant Program in France (aka TAPIF) in Aubervilliers, France. Currently, I am a Chancellor's Fellow, a Gérard Fellow, and the French delegate to the Graduate Assembly. I will be a research assistant for the Universal Design Working Group in 2023, during which I will also be undertaking funded research with the Center for Race and Gender. I hold former affiliations with the Berkeley Transformative Justice Group and the Mellon-Berkeley Law and Humanities Symposium.

More than anything, I'm a very proud first-generation student of Black/Pinay ancestry. The grasslands of Texas are home! I have a penchant for coffee shops and distance running, I spend a lot (like, a LOT) of time at The Dance Floor, and I patiently await the tell-all memoirs of children who were born into social media fame. 

Selected Publications

First Author/Reviews

• Sweat, Amber Patrice (2024, forthcoming). “‘Cyborg-Cute': Colors of 'Good' Mixed-Race Algorithms.” Chapter in Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media. MIT Press. Boston, Massachusetts.
• Sweat, Amber Patrice (2023, forthcoming). “Child misérables and networks of (dis)allegiance in Ladj Ly’s Banlieue Cinema.” L’Esprit Créateur vol. 63 no. 3. Baltimore, Maryland.
• Sweat, Amber Patrice. (2023). "The Colonial Wounds of Senegal’s Girlchild." Africa is a Country. Online. 
• Sweat, Amber (2022). Review of L’ambivalence de la sacralisation de l’enfance dans l’écriture de Gisèle Pineau, Malika Mokeddem, Ken Bugul, by Djoher Sadoun. The French Review.
• Sweat, Amber (2023, forthcoming). Review of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, by Moya Bailey. Continuum: The Journal of New Media Studies.
• Sweat, Amber and Abad-Ocubillo, Robin (2020). “Diaspora: Identity and the Pathos of Global Labor.” Review commissioned for San Francisco Urban Film Festival. Digital.  
• Sweat, Amber (2020). “Urban Manufacturing: Nostalgia or Necessity? On Montreal, Metalsmithing, and the Materialization of Patrimoine.” Review commissioned for San Francisco Urban Film Festival. Digital. 

Translations

• Juan Antonio Elvira Calito, and Amber Sweat. “BENEATH THE SURFACE.” Maya America 4.1 (2022): 66–75. Print. 
• Sophie Villers, and Amber Sweat. “I, Volcano: Of Earth and Fire.” Maya America 4.1 (2022): 47–61. Print.

Still baking:

• Sweat, Amber Patrice (In preparation). “Noir.e, c'est en fait mon métier: Maintaining a Critical Race Practice Post-2020.” 
• Sweat, Amber Patrice (In preparation). “Diouana’s Duress: Transmediated Coercions of La noire de...”