Research Areas

Children and girlhood studies; the Black French Atlantic; digital humanities; medical humanities (namely therapeutics, pediatrics); feminist theory.

Biography

Fall 2024: On leave. Please send me an email to schedule an appointment!

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I’m in the seventh (and final) year of the PhD with a designated emphasis in Film and Media and certificates in Global Urban Humanities; Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education; Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I am also an adjunct faculty member at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. 

While psychology and pediatrics have been concerned with technology's influence on children (think about the fear of selfie narcissism or iPad kids, for instance), I take up this question philosophically from the 1800s to the present. I wonder: how might we consider technologized childhoods as a (post)phenomenological process? More specifically, my dissertation, Coming-of-(im)age, analyzes depictions of girls in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Parisian banlieue as they engage in self-imaging from the water glass, to the photomaton, to the selfie, to the ocean, to the text itself. Through exploring methods of seeing the self—and the many ways we might think about the ''screen'' or "mirror" in relationship to a girl's encounter with reality—I explore how coming-of-age functions nowadays, and how these processes are mediated in-and-via film and literature. I ultimately argue for a re-conceptualization of the mirror and/or screen for black girls in contemporary spaces. I further wonder how written works, films, and new media (or, how writing and making) become somatic-therapeutic praxes for black women in the screen era. When it comes to my field, I try to bring the conversation of girlhood into the world of theory, as it has lived its rich life in developmental psychology, sociology, and education studies. I do this while also considering the tricky life of blackness and identity in francophone dialogues. 

In terms of theory, Ndiaye (both Marie and Pap), Fanon, Latour, Bourdieu, Lacan, and Baudrillard help me think through these questions.

Diop (Mati), Doucouré, Ndiaye (only Marie this time), Pineau, and the girls of today's technocultures make up my primary corpus. 

I received my MA from Berkeley in 2020 and come to California by way of an Honors BA at UT 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 and Gérard Fellow, and I was happy to recieve honorable mention from the Ford Foundation in 2023. I was a research assistant for the Universal Design Working Group in 2023, and I also undertook 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. I was raised and heat-tested in Texas, and I split my time between California, France, and the Netherlands. I have a penchant for coffee shops, biking, and distance running, and I patiently await the tell-all memoirs of children who were born into social media fame. 

You can also find me at ambersweat.com (domain has been finicky as of October 2024, but we're fixing it!) Furthermore, my GoogleScholar is here. 

Selected Publications

First Author/Reviews

• (2025, in press). “‘Cyborg-Cute': Colors of 'Good' Mixed-Race Algorithms.” Chapter in Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media. MIT Press. Boston, Massachusetts.
• (2024, in press). "Space to Breathe." Qui Parle. Duke University Press. 
• (2023) “Mise(ère)-En-Scène : Transposition and the Child in Hugo’s and Ly’s Les Misérables.” L’Esprit créateur 63.3 (2023): 67–79. Web.
• (2023). "The Lost Promise of Childhood." Africa is a Country. Online. 
• (2023). "The Colonial Wounds of Senegal’s Girlchild." Africa is a Country. Online. 
• (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 and Abad-Ocubillo, Robin (2020). “Diaspora: Identity and the Pathos of Global Labor.” Review commissioned for San Francisco Urban Film Festival. Digital.  
• (2020). “Urban Manufacturing: Nostalgia or Necessity? On Montreal, Metalsmithing, and the Materialization of Patrimoine.” Review commissioned for San Francisco Urban Film Festival. Digital. 

As Co-Author

• (2025, forthcoming). Faidley, E., Weiher, R., Sweat, A., Davidson, J. “Framing Higher Education Social Movements: The Case of the University of California (UC) System.” 

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...”