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.