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.