DH Pedagogies in the Global Souths

This presentation will be given by the editors of a special issue of
Reviews in DH
focused on Digital Humanities Pedagogy in the global context. Inspired by recent efforts to validate DH pedagogy through formal publication, such as the edited collection
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
, and journals such as
Hybrid Pedagogy
and
The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy,
we aim to bring awareness to the rich content created by students in higher education. In this presentation we will highlight the projects reviewed in the special issue, and we intend to include the voices of both the creators and the reviewers in order to make transparent the labor involved in building this publication. We hope to acknowledge the shape and infrastructure of pedagogy in the context of Global South(s) that often fall outside the normative forms reflected in these US-centric journals.

In this issue we focus on projects that demonstrate the power of community-engaged, research-based digital humanities across contexts. The intention is to showcase a range, both in terms of tools and scale, as well as a diversity in the production process from a variety of institutions across the globe. Some of the projects in this issue deploy open source and open access digital tools for project building such as Omeka and WordPress. These are accessible for most undergraduate students entering the field while also being accessible in the Global South where proprietary tools are cost prohibitive even when they are available within regions outside of the developed world. Participants adding content and updating infrastructure to sustain these digital spaces carefully over time raises questions about project sustainability. Given the realities of the Covid 19 pandemic, climate vulnerability, and the onslaught of disasters that threaten the Global South from the Caribbean to South Asia, we hope that these projects inspire creators and future DH teachers and practitioners to think more deliberately about preserving the digital record. 

Being acutely aware that DH and its pedagogy(ies) are shaped by the infrastructures, limitations, and affordances of our local contexts, we highlight projects that exemplify the chaotic yet productive potential of digitality, while also being alive to its various discontents. We believe that this special issue of
Reviews in DH
exemplifies how DH pedagogy must at its core focus on two key facets: empathy and engagement. With a keen eye toward the relational and not only geographical definitions of Global DH, this issue eschews authoritatively defining “DH Pedagogy.” Instead, the projects are illustrative of the complex genealogies and overlaps between cultural connotations of digital pedagogy, often made invisible in normative DH conversations.

The richness of the student projects in this issue has pushed the presenters to call for illuminating the often-invisible labor of digital humanities project development, even within resource-rich institutions. Many of the critiques raised in the reviews found in this journal issue, could be potentially addressed through a page on process in these projects, or a blog of reflection where project creators can lay bare the experimental and transformative nature of DH work in these specific circumstances. Perhaps this self-reflexive model of project development may become best practice through course sites where both instructors and students think through work together, or even with the inclusion of course syllabi as a menu option, elucidating the intellectual framework within which iterative student learnings emerge.  

In this presentation we will walk the audience through the process of working on this special issue across international time zones. We will discuss the main points of synchronicity and tension that arose, as well as the challenges and rewards of identifying projects and reviewers that would accurately represent the wide range of possibilities to inspire pedagogues working around the globe.