Research Areas

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

Biography

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I’m a sixth-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). I am also an adjunct faculty member at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. 

My dissertation analyzes depictions of girls in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Parisian banlieue as they engage in self-imaging; it so happens that Blackness is a category that unites these girls, so my research also interrogates the contours of this identity. Through self-imaging—and the ways images are distorted via filters, AR, or physical manipulation—I explore a re-orientation of the ''self'' for Black girls and how these re-orientations are (inter)mediated. I am especially interested in the Black girl as a conceptual figure that can tell us about race in/after the selfie internet, the weird life of cyborg studies, and what exactly AI is doing as both human-generator and human-generated. My later project analyses the relationships between fiction and reality, as well as the ways global Black communities have lived in conditions largely conceptualized in the west as scientific 'fictions.' 

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 was 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. I have a penchant for coffee shops and distance running, I spend 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

• (2024, 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: On Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe." 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...”