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)