Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities

Description

In the last few years, we have seen a resurgence of minority activisms, ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Me Too movement, from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico, even as white supremacist and xenophobic ideologies and policies have flourished. When silence can be tantamount to complicity, what is our responsibility as academics and what can digital humanities offer in this era of renewed political activism?

This course takes a historically grounded approached to apply anti-racist feminist praxis to digital humanities. Focusing particularly on labor, infrastructure, methods, and pedagogy, we will interrogate the silences and gaps in digital humanities as well as work to adopt and embed anti-racist praxis in our digital humanities work. These are some of our guiding questions our course will take: What can digital humanities practitioners learn from past and current liberation movements? How do we build and support anti-racist feminist movements and networks in our digital humanities work? How can digital humanities pursue community accountability and advocacy?

This is an introductory course and we will begin with foundational scholarship on anti-racist praxis as well as the disciplinary critique of digital humanities by #transformDH and #DHpoco. No prior coding experience is needed and readings will be provided. As scholars and librarians with backgrounds in Asian American studies and community organizing, we center scholarship and knowledge production from Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Global South scholars and activists. Each day will combine conversation and dialogue with hands-on activities. The goal of this course is to enable participants to reflect on and implement anti-racist praxis in their own scholarship, methodology, pedagogy, and labor practices. This course will be taught using Emergent Strategy & Anti-Oppressive Facilitation methods, practices drawn from community organizing that build care into their processes.

Participants will collaboratively build a guide and bibliography for anti-racist feminist digital humanities, with the intent of future peer review and publication.