Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Practicing Anti-colonial DH Pedagogy and Research

This forum invites scholars, creative practitioners, activists, and community members to collectively discuss and develop strategies for refusing the damaging colonialities too often perpetuated within digital humanities teaching, learning, and research practices. Some of the topics that we hope to touch on in this discussion include: 1) how colonial ideologies and extractive research methods are naturalized within hegemonic DH principles and practices; 2) what anti-colonial DH pedagogies and insurgent research practices we might incorporate into individual contexts of digital humanities knowledge-making, especially given the uneven distribution of and access to digital infrastructures along the campus-community as well as the Global North-Global South spectrum, and; 3) how to sustain spaces for healing and community building within the realities of these uneven and dispersed infrastructures. This forum will foreground an ethic of care and community building in imagining and identifying tactics that digital humanists can share and act upon to transform colonial ideologies and systems embedded within the conventions and protocols of digital humanities. Individually and collectively, we will create brief position statements where we will identify what is at stake in our communities, what the corresponding action plans might be, and at which scale(s) we might begin this work to realize the scope and limits of an anti-colonial DH praxis. As co-participants of this forum, we will imagine and reflect on the processes and challenges of bringing into being the anti-colonial possibilities of digital research and teaching for a bolder and more affirming environment for digital humanists inside and outside the academy