Talk

Candace Williams

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Candace Williams is a black, queer nerd leading a double life. By day, she’s Head of Community Operations at a podcasting startup. By subway ride and lunch break, she’s a poet. After earning her MA in Elementary Education at Stanford University, and teaching science in the South Bronx, Candace started her digital marketing career at VaynerMedia. Her award-winning content for General Electric was featured in Adage, Forbes, Mashable, and Time.com, among other places. Later, she helped General Assembly launch its online learning platform and created educational content for partners like Twitter, Google, and FastCo. Now, at BTR, she’s building a platform that helps podcasters thrive.

Candace is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lambda Literary Review, Bennington Review, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2017), and elsewhere. You can find her walking her pit bull down Nostrand Ave and watching too many episodes of Murder, She Wrote. Tweet her @teacherc.

New York City, NY December 10, 2016
It's not lit: strategies for exposing and eliminating cultural appropriation in marketing
IMAGES OF APPROPRIATIVE MARKETING MATERIALS MAY BE SHOWN DURING THIS TALK. EXAMPLES MIGHT RELATE TO RACE, ETHNICITY, NATIONAL ORIGIN, GENDER IDENTITY, SEXUALITY, AND OTHER ASPECTS OF IDENTITY.

From tweets written by agency agency staffers, to tech talk slides and “witty” cafe chalkboard signs, the use of appropriated artifacts and slurs has been normalized in product and service marketing. In this talk, I identify examples of this issue and lead a brainstorming session. You’ll leave this talk with a list of practical strategies marginalized folks and accomplices can use to expose and eliminate these practices in their place of work.