Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Critiques and Praxis

Pedagogies of liberation are rooted in, and developed and led by, community. There are so many wonderful community-led and community-grounded organizations, networks, initiatives, collectives, and movements committed to teaching for liberation.

Earlier this year, the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed collective facilitated a virtual workshop on anti-colonial digital humanities pedagogy for an academic institution in Chicago and, through doing so, we learned about the liberatory work of one such community-led and community-grounded organization and movement: Chicago Freedom School.

Since 2004, Chicago Freedom School has been “develop[ing] & support[ing] the next generation of BIPOC youth to become informed, strategic, motivated, and holistic leaders for social justice.” Chicago Freedom School “support[s] Black and Brown youth to lead action that addresses pressing issues in their communities” and “equips individuals & organizations to build networks and strategies to dismantle oppression in all forms.”

Please support, amplify, and learn more about the latest work of Chicago Freedom School by visiting and following their online networks:

Website – www.chicagofreedomschool.org

Instagram – @Chifreeschool

Facebook – Chicago Freedom School

They will be releasing a Year in Review in the coming weeks about their work this year as well.

The violence of the US regime is unending. We, the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective, are filled with immense anger for the latest series of mass shootings in the US, including the white supremacist and anti-Black massacre in Buffalo, New York and the massacre of children at a predominantly brown school in Uvalde, Texas. The NRA (that is, the National Rifle Association), the US 2nd Amendment, “gun culture” in the US, and gun violence in the US are inextricably linked to and about upholding white supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialism. We mourn for the many children who should be waking up tomorrow with joy for the summer, who should be dreaming of the future, and who should be growing old. We mourn for the many families and communities harmed and grieving from these atrocities. And we continue our commitment to the fight to end the violence that is the US.

As one of the many ways that we must individually and collectively refuse, dismantle, and end white supremacy and anti-Blackness, please support and amplify these Black-led and Black-centred organizations in Buffalo:

Colored Girls Bike Too: This cycling organization advocates for racial and mobility justice and liberation in marginalized communities through biking, and is currently helping to ensure that Black communities in Buffalo have access to fresh food.

Rooted in Love Inc.: This organization provides fresh produce and hygiene items to members in need in the Buffalo community.

Black Love Resists in the Rust: This organization is working to abolish policing, supports those in Buffalo who have been harmed by the police, and works to build truly safe communities that resist and refuse the prison industrial complex, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Feed Buffalo: This Black-led food pantry works to end food deserts and provides members of the Buffalo community access to free, local, and halal food.

To learn more about organizations to support, visit Step Out Buffalo.

Please also amplify and offer support to verified relief efforts in Uvalde.

This post follows our paper entitled “Defining the Transnational through Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” which we presented at the MSU Global Digital Humanities Symposium on March 25, this year. Being accountable to globally-minded and transnational issues and movements is one small way we as a collective seek to refuse digital nationalism. To that end, we began with digital land acknowledgements and concluded with the following set of community-centered and justice-oriented land and digital acknowledgements. 

Acknowledgements:

Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed started as a collective practice in Lkwungen territory (colonially called Victoria, BC). Since then, and ongoingly, we have been (re)connecting with each other in person and online from various lands, including Indigenous lands, and we recognize that many of the digital infrastructures we use are built on Indigenous lands and remain inaccessible to many Indigenous communities. Our responsibilities to Indigenous lands and life must extend into the digital realm. 

We recognize and wish to honour the Indigenous children whose bodies are being recovered from residential schools throughout colonially called Canada. The residential, industrial, and boarding school system is one of the horrific ways that the Canadian and American nation-states have enacted genocide on Indigenous peoples. Acknowledgements are not enough. 

We also express solidarity for lives both dispossessed and ended by extended, intensified, and ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. Last year, we co-signed the Architects and Planners Against Apartheid petition, where we asked University Presidents, Provosts, Deans, Chairs, Directors, and Pedagogical Collectives to identify our disciplinary and institutional complicity in settler colonialism, incarceration and white supremacy and its implications for anti-colonial politics, teaching, and learning around the world. 

Equally, it is not lost on us that today marks two years, seven months, and 21 days since the Presidential order in India abrogated Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution on August 5, 2019, expanding both militarized policing and digital surveillance of ground-up resistance in Kashmir; reducing and even blocking internet communication in the region; and licensing the occupation of indigenous Kashmiri resources, lands, and infrastructures. We want to amplify the work of independent feminist and digital collectives based in Kashmir who are subverting the enforced limitations of digital media in the area through local and transnational politics. Please see the work of “Zanaan Wanaan,” which are Kashmiri words for “women speak” — a collective that works at the cross-sections of art, academia, media, and activism.

This brings us to the current moment of living through a pandemic whose global and local responses have exposed what education scholars Shashank Kumar and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, in conversation with scholars of settler colonialism, have called “imperialism in action” (2020), that is, a process marked by power and its justification for sustaining inequities not just between nation states, but also within their respective territories along race, caste, gender, and class lines. But there’s also a counter to this reality: while the colonial-imperial Euro-American hegemonies were refusing vaccine IP waivers, we witnessed solidarities between transnational and global Indigenous peoples and populations (with, for example, the Navajo Nation offering support to India by sending health care supplies). 

Finally, and ever since the Indian National Council of Educational Research and Training or NCERT’s dropping of the teaching manual for transgender children and those with non-binary identities from its website on November 7 last year, we have added our support to national-level online organizing to emphasize the integration and utility of the manual in educational institutions, advocating for the health, presence, and dignity of transgender and gender non-conforming students on educational campuses in India. And we would be remiss if we did not also highlight the urgency and deep need of supporting and fighting for the trans community in and beyond our teaching-learning spaces, as the state of Texas is attacking trans children, including directing teachers to report any trans students they see.

Included below is the paper abstract, where we offer further context of our critical pedagogical work. The talk was live streamed following the guidelines and protocols of the symposium organizing committee. To continue this conversation and engagement, please reach out to us via this site and feel free to use the following #OurDHIs #AnticolonialDH #MSUGlobalDH hashtags for extending the discussion into Twitter.

Paper Abstract:

While the common perception of the digital is as a global, democratic environment, there are countless ways that digital environments are inaccessible and oppressive. One way we witness the fallacy of the global digital is through the nationalism [1] of many DH pedagogies. With Silicon Valley, the pervasiveness of US capital, and US imperialism, the nationalism of digital spaces is often US-centered [2]. Nevertheless, we have also witnessed DH nationalism beyond the US, including within Global South, purportedly postcolonial, contexts. We see the move to nationalistic DH as part of a colonial digital divide. The project of Digital India, for example, extends right-wing Hindu nationalist and settler colonial mobilizing to digital learning, increasingly in the name of “decolonizing” how, what, and where we learn with/in the digital. This digital nationalism enacts digital erasures of Indigenous, Black, Dalit-Bahujan, queer, feminist, and disability justice scholars who push against the nation-state.

Our collective, Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed, seeks to refuse digital nationalism. By starting as a coalition, and working within university and community coalitions, our approach to pedagogy follows Paulo Freire’s call for conscientization through learning and teaching: to become aware of the sources of one’s oppression—including nationalistic impulses—and critically reflect on that oppression to imagine a co-liberatory future. In this presentation, we define the transnational as the dialectic of the digital nationalist, contending with a series of questions related to digital nationalism as it relates to DH pedagogy: What does it mean to teach a transnational, translocal DH, and why is this crucial to anti-colonial DH? How have we fallen short in our practice and how are we working to be accountable to this need? At the heart of this presentation and these questions is a larger project of defining what must be an integral keyword in DH pedagogy: transnational.

Footnotes:

[1] That is, nation-state nationalism is different from Indigenous nationhood, and this is an integral distinction. Nation-state nationalism perpetuates colonial movements and ideologies of patriotism, whereas Indigenous nationhood is grounded in the anti-colonial sovereignty and knowledge systems of Indigenous nations, which have continued to survive and thrive despite the violence of settler colonial nation-states.

[2] By US-centered, we specifically mean the settler colonial US regime, not the sovereign Indigenous lands which are currently occupied by the US nation-state nor the Indigenous peoples who have always been sovereign and distinct from the US nation-state.

Black, Indigenous, people of colour, LGBTQ2IA+, disability justice activists, and class- and caste-oppressed communities have long raised awareness to and challenged the colonialism, neoliberalism, and imperialism embedded in mainstream digital pedagogy infrastructures, even in the name of care. In this podcast episode, we reflect on the ethics and politics of care work in digital pedagogy and online environments, particularly as this global pandemic continues and so does the cooptation of care and compassion in infrastructures of teaching and learning, including, but not limited to, academia. We believe that it is integral to recognize, honour, celebrate, and amplify the brilliant work, writings, and teachings of the care-filled, generous people who have so deeply grounded and guided our own teaching practices and processes. As such, we offer this Works Consulted of the important thinkers who, and pieces that, have helped to shape the ideas we share in this podcast dialogue. We extend deepest gratitude and thanks for their work:

Ángel David Nieves, bell hooks, Bonnie McElhinny, Brooke Foucault Welles, Deanna Reder, Dorothy Kim, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, Josephine Eric, Katherine McKittrick, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lisa M. Davidson, Maitrayee Basu, Moya Bailey, Nicole Nguyen, Peter James Hudson, Radhika Gajjala, Roland Sintos Coloma, Sarah J. Jackson, and Valentina Harper.

This episode (dated: November 10, 2021) is part of the Teacher of the Ear podcast series led by Chris Friend, Assistant Professor of English in New Media at Kean University and Associate Director of Hybrid Pedagogy. Thank you to Dr. Friend for having us on the show.

Podcast Link: https://hybridpedagogy.org/care/

Episode Transcript: https://bit.ly/hybridpedagogyepisode_care 

Works Consulted:

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Article 8 (1989): 139-167.

—. “Why intersectionality can’t wait.” The Washington Post. 24 Sept. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant- wait/. Accessed Dec. 2020. 

Eric, Josephine. “The Rites of Passage of Filipinas in Canada: Two Migration Cohorts.” Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility. Edited by Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, and Lisa M. Davidson. University of Toronto Press, 2012. pp. 123-141.

Gajjala, Radhika and Maitrayee Basu. “Introduction.” In Feminist Media Studies, 21:1 (2021): 147-150. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2021.1864868.  

Harper, Valentina. “‘One restaurant offered free food to seniors and low-income people’: Inside Caremongering, the Toronto Facebook group for good deeds,” Toronto Life, March 24, 2020. https://torontolife.com/city/one-restaurant-offered-free-food-to-seniors-and-low-income-people-inside-caremongering-the-toronto-facebook-group-for-good-deeds/

hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1989.

—. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Hudson, Peter James, and Katherine McKittrick. “The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick.” The CLR James Journal 20, no. 1/2, (2014): 233-40.

Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020.

McElhinny, Bonnie, Lisa M. Davidson, John Paul C. Catungal, Ethel Tungohan, and Roland Sintos Coloma. “Spectres of (In)visibility: Filipina/o Labour, Culture, and Youth in Canada.” Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility. Edited by Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, and Lisa M. Davidson. University of Toronto Press, 2012. pp. 5-45. 

Nguyen, Nicole. Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 

“#OurDHIs: Critical DH Organizing and Solidarity Act,” Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods. Course led by Dorothy Kim and Ángel David Nieves. Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2018.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.

Reder, Deanna. “Reclamation and Revitalization.” Symposium for Indigenous New Media, 11 June 2018, Hickman Auditorium, University of Victoria. Panel. 

Tungohan, Ethel. “Debunking Notions of Migrant ‘Victimhood.’” Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility. Edited by Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, and Lisa M. Davidson. University of Toronto Press, 2012. pp. 161-180.

— Ashley Caranto Morford, Arun Jacob, Kush Patel

Every child matters.

The Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed collective recognizes with grief and wishes to honour the 215 children whose bodies were found at the residential school in colonially called Kamloops, BC, and all residential school survivors as well as those who never made it home from residential school. The residential/boarding school system is one of the many horrific ways that the Canadian and American nation-states have enacted genocide on Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous children should grow up experiencing joy, beauty, love, support, nourishment, laughter, in their community, on their land, with clean water, with their family, speaking their languages, encompassed by the brilliant wisdom of their cultures, knowledges, and teachings. Acknowledgements are not enough. Feelings of grief are not enough. Settlers, we have responsibilities.

The only way forward is decolonization (that is, the restitution of Indigenous lands and lives to Indigenous peoples – see Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”) and abolition (that is, the end of settler colonial structures, systems, and institutions).

Have you read and committed to the TRC Calls to Action? Are you helping to hold the Government of Canada responsible for the urgent need to honour these calls, and for its current failure and refusal to uphold this ongoing responsibility? Settlers, we must read, listen to, witness, and commit to the TRC Calls to Action: http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. And we must always remember that reading is only the beginning. Reading alone is not enough, no where near enough. How will we — each and every one of us — commit to and work towards the Calls to Action every single day and for the long-term?

We share just some of the amazing and urgent community-led Indigenous initiatives that we can support in concrete ways, and which are dedicated to land-back processes, Indigenous languages, and the thriving of Indigenous children. 

1. Make a financial contribution to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society (IRSSS) at: https://irsss.ca/donate. The IRSSS is an “organization with a twenty-year history of providing services to Indian Residential School Survivors.”
2. Make a financial contribution to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition at: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/about-us/donate/. The Healing Coalition’s “[m]ission…is t]o lead in the pursuit of understanding and addressing the ongoing trauma created by the U.S. Indian Boarding School policy.”
3. One of the co-facilitators of the collective, Ashley Caranto Morford, grew up as an uninvited occupant in Duwamish territory, so we want to shout out Real Rent Duwamish, “a grassroots movement calling on Seattleites to pay ‘rent’ to the Duwamish Tribe to acknowledge their stewardship of the land on which we live and work.” Settlers in Duwamish land can pay rent by going to: https://realrentduwamish.org. You can sign up to pay rent weekly, monthly, etc. “All funds go directly to Duwamish Tribal Services (DTS) to support the revival of Duwamish culture and the vitality of the Duwamish Tribe.
4. Support the Dechinta Centre for Research & Learning. “Dechinta is the only fully land-based university accredited program in the world, and the only program explicitly mandated to serve Indigenous people.” Learn more & make a financial contribution at: https://www.dechinta.ca/donate
5. Support RAVEN Trust & its campaigns, for ex. by becoming a monthly contributor. “RAVEN raises legal defence funds for Indigenous Peoples in Canada to defend their rights and the integrity of lands and cultures.” Visit: https://raventrust.com/
6. There are so many wonderful community-led language projects and programs to support. One of these is Kwi Awt Stelmexw, “a non-profit organization that raises funds to support language and arts development in the Squamish Nation”: https://www.kwiawtstelmexw.com/donate/
7. Another wonderful language program is the Kanienkehaka Land Back Language Camp, “a land based language camp in the middle of the Lac St. Francis Wildlife Sanctuary, on land that was leased to settlers over a 100 years ago.” Support at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/building-kanienkehaka-land-back-language-camp
8. “The existing Line 3 is an Enbridge pipeline that ships crude oil from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin. It spans northern Minnesota, crossing the Leech Lake and Fond du Lac reservations and the l855, 1854, and l842 treaty areas.  And it is a ticking time bomb.  It was built with defective steel in l96l, has had numerous ruptures and spills, and is running at half pressure because of severe corrosion.  Instead of cleaning up this liability, Enbridge wants to simply abandon it in the ground forever, and cut a brand new energy corridor through our best lakes, wetlands, and wild rice beds, and the heart of Ojibwe treaty territory. ” Learn more at: https://www.stopline3.org/issues. Join the fight to #StopLine3 at: https://www.stopline3.org/take-action
9. Another fabulous, important organization you should support: First Nations Child & Family Caring Society, which works for “equity for First Nations children and young people, and reconciliation-based activities for all children in Canada.” Support at: https://fncaringsociety.com/donate
10. And learn about & support Save the Evidence, “a campaign to raise awareness and support for the restoration of the former Mohawk Institute Residential School, and to develop the building into an Interpreted Historic Site and Educational Resource.” Visit: https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/donate/

Indigenous children are beautiful. Indigenous children are sacred. Indigenous children are important. Indigenous children should grow up to live full, long, joy-filled lives.  Every child matters.

We are filled with grief and anger at the recent and ongoing police brutality against Black communities, and we remember the lives and names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Regis Korchiniski-Paquet, and Tony McDade. We know that the police forces in colonially-called Canada and the US are part of the settler colonial system. We have begun to assemble a series of readings on how race, racism, and anti-Blackness are produced, supported, and amplified in and with the digital. Any digital research and pedagogy that claims to be anti-colonial must inevitably contend with and work to end anti-Blackness, and must support Black liberation and the abolishment of settler colonial structures like the police force. These issues are not separate from but, rather, are utterly enmeshed in current digital and surveillance infrastructures. We invite you to contribute to this list as we reaffirm our commitments to restorative learning and teaching practices.   

Bailey, Moya. “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Punctum Books, 2018. doi: 10.1353/book.66813. 

Benjamin, Ruha. Introduction: Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination edited by Ruha Benjamin. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. doi: 10.1215/9781478004493-001.

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA: Polity, 2019. Print.

Brock, André. “Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1012–30, doi: 10.1177/1461444816677532.

Brock Jr, André. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. NYU Press, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/k3j9kppk.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, Print.

Castagno, Angelina E. Educated in Whiteness: Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/educated-in-whiteness.

Jackson, Sarah J, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, 2020. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hashtagactivism.

Jefferson, Brian J. Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/digitize-and-punish.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 1 December 2018; 36 (4 (137)): 57–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658 

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018, doi: 10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5.

Noble, Safiya, and Sarah Roberts. Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths in Silicon Valley. 6, UCLA, 22 Aug. 2019, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z3629nh.

Please also see this post from the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, which offers 15 books by Black scholars that folx in tech industries should be sure to read: https://www.c2i2.ucla.edu/racial-justice-and-tech/ 

— Arun Jacob, Ashley Caranto Morford, Kush Patel

Hello Anti-colonial DHers,

I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and in good health during this uncertain and precarious period. 

Reflecting on Care | Ashley Caranto Morford

On this #dayofdh2020, I am thankful and humbled to be part of the ever-developing Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed community alongside Kush Patel (@kshpatel) and Arun Jacob (@arungapatchka). On this #dayofdh2020, I am thankful for the wisdom, kindness, generosity, support, and teachings of BIPOC DH scholars like Dorothy Kim (@dorothyk98), Safiya Noble (@safiyanoble), and Jeffrey Ansloos (@jeffreyansloos). On this #dayofdh2020, I suggest reading Algorithms of Oppression by#BPAN3), Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by Andre Brock. Jr. (@DocDre), Captivating Technology by Ruha Benjamin (@ruha9), #Hashtag Activism by Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey (@moyazb), and Brooke Foucault Welles (@foucaultwelles), Network Sovereignty by Marisa Elena Duarte (@marisaelena1979), A Digital Bundle by Jennifer Wemigwans, and The Labor of Care by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez (@doctoraval). 

During a global pandemic that has brought so much pain and precarity — particularly to BIPOC communities — Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed continues to ask hard questions about how DH can refuse capitalism and colonialism and can be kinder, more ethical, and more caring. Kush, Arun, and I have been talking about care work and what anti-colonial DH care work would, could, and should look like — guided by writings about care work by BIPOC folx like QPOC disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. We seek to challenge the university’s current capitalist-colonial use of digital infrastructures to pressure students and faculty to go on with “business as usual.” Through the widespread move of university courses online, we witness in rapidly emerging ways the need for accessible anti-colonial DH praxis. We must challenge how institutions are using digital technology to enable the continuation of the capitalist-colonial norm, both during this global pandemic and in the future-beyond. We seek to engage with digital technology in ways that help to build, organize, and nourish communities of support, kindness, and care for one another. We seek to foster DH communities that, through deep care work, have the ability to dismantle capitalist-colonial systems and capitalist-colonial responses to sociocultural, sociopolitical issues. 

Questions of Safety | Kush Patel

“In my teaching, I try very hard to create classroom conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!) we need to situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness. This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking.” — Katherine McKittrick, “The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick” in C.L.R. James Journal 20, no. 1-2 (2014): 238

“Currently, DH is not a safe or comfortable space for most scholars who are not white, cisgendered, able, Christian, and upper middle-class males. And considering the current rise of late-fascism and the involvement of the ‘alt-tech’ sector intersecting with white academic supremacy to help create the nexus of what is called the ‘alt-right,’ we have to move beyond a discussion of diversity and inclusiveness to move into discussing DH justice and equity.” — Dorothy Kim, “How to #DecolonizeDH: Actionable Steps for an Antifascist DH” in Disrupting the Digital Humanities, Punctum Books (2018): 482

On this #DayOfDH2020, I find myself thinking about the kinds of systemic failures of higher education pedagogy that this pandemic and public health crisis are making both visible and urgent for lives already vulnerable and precarious. On this #DayOfDH2020, I find myself asking what do messages of safety or “be safe” mean in the context of #AnticolonialDH pedagogy as we move our classes and communities entirely online? Following the words of Katherine McKittrick (@demonicground), how can we forget that our students and faculty comrades already navigate unsafe lives? Revisiting Dorothy Kim’s (@dorothyk98) teachings on “Race, Social Justice and DH”, how can we overlook the hostility of already popular online spaces to targeted bodies and anti-racist, anti-casteist, and anti-patriarchal classroom and studio conversations? What constitutes the “essentials” of online and remote learning in this pandemic so that our pedagogies are not merely mediated by elected (or enforced) web platforms but instead are always critical of their capacities for and claims to provide a “safe space” for learning and teaching? On this #DayOfDH2020, I want to give a big shout-out to my friends and partners Ashley Caranto Morford (@ashleycmorford) and Arun Jacob (@arungapatchka) for co-building “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed” #AnticolonialDH praxis, where we can raise these questions and approach their answers in community and with courage.

The Sensory Deprivation of Online Conferences | Arun Jacob

The other day I was thinking about how a very good majority of the conferences that were supposed to take place in the summer have been cancelled. But it is not the myriad of issues that arise from the cancellations that I was dwelling on. It is the new genre of conferences that have cropped up in its place, the online conference that I am very concerned about. I am of the opinion that there’s a subtle move happening here when we look at online conferences through a Johari Window. i.e.

Good Presenter, Good Infrastructure	Good Presenter, Bad Infrastructure
Bad Presenter, Good Infrastructure	Bad Presenter, Bad Infrastructure

The online conference makes the case for a new tier of presenters to emerge in future conferences. Pretty soon, we’ll have holographic presenters at academic conferences presenting their research from a location far far away, at an appropriate social distance. Until then, there’s a tethering of the media infrastructure to the person that is happening here. Where the presenter’s reliability (Can you hear me now??) and trustworthiness (Oops! Sorry, I have a faulty connection!) are tethered to the fidelity of the media infrastructure. So rather than the virtual conference championing the socio-economically underprivileged graduate students, it will stratify and stultify conferences evermore. The virtual presenter/ graduate student/worker is yoked to their media infrastructure in a way that they lose their agency and they are only as good as their network connection and the fidelity of that relationship with the media service provider. In order for the graduate students’ virtual presentation to go right, the hardware has to work right, the software has to work right, the network connection has to work right, if and only if all these media architectures nod their heads in harmony, can the graduate student deliver their presentation. Moreover, what is troubling is the likelihood that the state of exception becomes the new norm. i.e. Post-Covid-19, the Covid-austerity measures will in all likelihood be implemented, at which time, the graduate student funding to attend conferences will be clawed back, with only the virtual presentation option dangled as a cost-effective option. One in which the graduate student will be expected to do all the work and receive none of the benefits.

Last month, I presented at the inaugural #DHARTITwitterConf 2020, which brought together diverse members of the DH learning community from India and the US to build discourse around the theme of “Innovating for DH in India.” DHARTI or Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations builds upon its origins in Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) to facilitate more intentional cross-disciplinary collaborations between digital practices in the arts, humanities, and design scholarship from the subcontinent and beyond academic institutions. The conference was held on January 19, 2020 and inspired by the 2019 Humanities Commons Twitter Conference. 

My presentation entitled, “Digital Humanities Pedagogy for Whom?,” served as an introduction to anticolonial DH pedagogy in the context of writing and teaching urban and architectural histories in India. What forms might our community-centered projects with the digital take to engage contexts with unequal and differential access to resources, recurring power outages, limited accessibility to the internet, and where the majority of non-academic participants are also non-English language users? Building with my collaborative and transnational  “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed” DH practice (with Ashley and Arun), I discussed two projects within the micro-infrastructures of an emerging not-for-profit academic institution, where I’m currently a faculty member.

Kudos to the conference organizers Dibyadyuti Roy, Nirmala Menon, Arjun Ghosh et. al for putting together this call and meeting, as well as for making all presentations available as Twitter moments. My presentation (twitter thread) started with a shout-out to Dhanashree Thorat for foregrounding identity and its connections to power, place, and privilege in relation to the event’s keynote.

Kush (@kshpatel)