Nicole Schneider is a postdoctoral Research and Teaching Assistant in American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. For her thesis on photography, social movements, and antiprecarity protest – entitled “Visual Protest, Viral Images and Virtual Participation: Protest and Photography in the Contemporary Movement for Black Lives” – she has received the Maximilian-Bickhoff-Foundation’s dissertation scholarship (2018-2021) and was awarded the 2017-BAA-Fellowship for a research stay at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University.

Her doctoral thesis analyzes press photographs of current protests organized by the #Black Lives Matter Movement in the US in terms of their work for Black liberation. Mobilizing their visual-activist and political capacities, images like those awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2015 and 2021, Schneider argues, become agents of the movement whose actions go beyond mere representation of protests and documentation of the Black liberation struggle. In their political-aesthetic and performative dimensions, these photographs negotiate the current matter of Black lives in the United States and articulate ontological dimensions of Blackness as political struggle and affirmative position. They become mobile and material discursive places that lift the protested debates into wider fields of consideration and visibility, complicating notions of society, politics, and interaction. In their memorial and narrative recursion, the press photographs address the American past and present and unsettle the belief in a clear end to racialized practices and attitudes, inherent in romanticized ideals of the Civil Rights Movement and tropes of colorblindness. Reading the photographs in this way, Schneider further understands their use of hashtags and social media symbolism as a means to create an imaginary of digital protest, enhancing the movement’s scope and potential. It is, thus, in the application of civil imagination (Ariella Azoulay) and attentive listening (Tina Campt) that press photographs begin to reveal the deeper structures of racialized systems, negotiating and unsettling long held beliefs and in|visible articulations of Blackness in America.