This introduction is written by Susan Schreibman and Anna Villarica. The page is designed by Anna Villarica. 

Introduction

The pedagogic intersections between social justice and digital humanities is a relatively recent phenomenon, even within the relatively young field of digital humanities. The examples we found are less plentiful than, for example, courses that focus on an introduction to the field or on a specific methodology. Nevertheless, since c. 2015, there has been an increasing number of courses that specifically target the intersection of these two spaces, theoretically and methodologically, typically taking a praxis-based approach to learning and teaching. Some of these courses rethink how students are assessed and engaged, for example, through syllabi that encourage student-led projects focusing on social impact, exposing inequalities or  societal injustices (a gathering of these can be found at the FemTechNet Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Workbook, pictured on the right). There are also several sites that amalgamate or create resources, including Teaching and the Digital Humanities (2015) and Digital Humanities for Social Justice (2023), as well as this course,  for instructors who would like to incorporate exercises, assessments, and/or readings at the intersections of social justice and digital pedagogy. 

This introductory page is divided into three sections. Section I provides examples of DH courses within a methodological and theoretical framework.  In section II we highlight several digitally-inflected project-based assessments. Section III provides a list of resources for instructors wishing to incorporate social justice themes into their Digital Humanities teaching.

I. Methods and Theories

Digital Humanities is one of many fields in which instructors have begun to take an intentional approach in integrating social justice themes into their methodological practice. In his 2020 article ‘Between Social Justice and Decolonisation: Exploring South African MOOC Designers: Conceptualisations and Approaches to Addressing Injustices’ Taskeen Adam provides a framework for three lenses for what he terms Dimensions of Human Injustice. These lenses, e.g., material, cultural-epistemic, and political/geopolitical, provide a framing that instructors adopt, depending on their own positionality, educational goals, and methodologies chosen. These lenses also play a part in the instructor’s own views on how society shapes the ‘ways in which they understand and approach student difference and disadvantage’ (Keddie 2012: 264). Central to course design is about choosing the best methodology(ies) to address specific injustice(s):
 

...some placing greater emphasis on cultural-epistemic injustices embedded in geopolitical inequalities, and others on material injustices that need addressing at societal and national levels. This approach assists in putting aside narrow interpretations of particular discourses, for example, social justice being equated to economic justice, or decolonial movements being interpreted as Africanisation, towards a more holistic mindset that can better tackle the multiple dimensions of injustice in our educational contexts and bring about learning designs that better support learners (Adam 2020:2).

DH instructional design is an extremely good fit for raising student awareness of societal injustice, inequalities, and privilege, as the praxis-and team-based approach of many DH courses provide opportunities for truly transformative education, informed by context, the ‘situatedness of knowledge, and the necessity for education to respond to the needs of that context’  (Nnenne as quoted in Adam 2020: 7). DH courses can demonstrate to students the inclusivity of making visible issues such as dismantling power relations, social hierarchies and cultural hegemonies via public-facing assignments (Luckett and Shay, 2017: 3).

Watch here a presentation on challenges of DH teaching (Carnes and Smith, 2022)

Digital Humanities pedagogy is not only relevant at the university level. Educational institutions, at both the university and secondary school levels, in St Louis, Missouri, have formed a consortium funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is a network for supporting and disseminating methods in digital humanities pedagogy. The goal of the network is to not only bridge the K-12-college divide, but advance digital humanities pedagogy and access for underserved populations, with a focus on student learning.

This focus is key, particularly at institutions in which students, ‘especially those from poorer or more marginalized backgrounds, miss out on learning the valuable, 21st-century skills that DH can train them in’. Their white paper (Carnes and Smith, 2022) and presentation outline the difficulties of integrating DH teaching and learning at institutions that do not necessarily have the staff trained in DH methods, nor the resources, to engage in praxis-based teaching. The consortium-based approach was taken to expand access, narrowing the inequality gap. 

Another area of DH pedagogy beyond university level, is peer-to-peer training outside of formal curricula. In recent years, workshop designers have been embedding, beyond DH theories and methods, a third pillar into their training: that of social justice. The 2023 open access edited collection Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned, pictured on the right, demonstrates how important professional DH training beyond the Global North in building local expertise and networks (for example, in chapters on the Indian, African, and Taiwainese experience), but also how to build into one’s curriculum design (no matter where one teaches) social justice concerns, as in Kush Patel, Ashley Caranto Morford, and Arun Jacob’s chapter on ‘Workshops in Anti-Colonial Digital Humanities Towards Building Relationships With Critical University and Community Movements’ (whose work also features as a case study in this unit). 

Here we highlight several courses, at the undergraduate, MA, and professional levels, that embed in their instructional design, a number of the aforementioned theoretical approaches. These, at the time of writing, have syllabi or another format of online presence. Courses are presented from the most recent to the oldest. The majority are from North America as these institutions most frequently tend to make syllabi available online. We acknowledge that this list is incomplete and would  very much welcome further examples. If you have a course you would like us to feature, please email socialjusticeDT@gmail.com with course details providing the information below. If there is no additional information available online, you can send us a PDF of the syllabi, and we can upload it into the #dariahTeach database. 

II. Project-based teaching 

As mentioned above, many courses utilise project-based assessments. Here we drill down into how some instructors have taken a praxis-based approach. As was the case with syllabi, this is only a very small sample of project-based assessments. If you would like your project-based assessment listed here, please email socialjusticeDT@gmail.com with information similar to what is below. We welcome contributions from conference or symposium panels and instructors. If  there is no additional information available online, you can send us a PDF of the or conference abstract syllabi, and we can upload it into the #dariahTeach database. 

A good place to start with project-based assessments at the intersections of social justice and the DH is the 2015 panel on Teaching and the Digital Humanities held at Emory University. Panel participants  stressed  the importance of projects that encourage students to critically engage with digital tools while producing work that is relevant to their communities, providing opportunities for students to be critical, not only of the digital tools and methods they employ, but the communities in which they live and work. An example of this is Anne Cong-Huyen’s course at UCLA in which  she guided her students in creating an open-access digital book in Scalar entitled Ethnic Los Angeles (pictured on the left and published in 2014). Students conducted research by immersing themselves in communities they would not have normally visited and reflected on the politics of publishing as they were producing the book. Ultimately, the book revealed the racial and ethnic tensions in Los Angeles, allowing students to write an alternative representation of their city. Cong-Huyen remarks:

It was proof that undergraduate students can do high-level, original scholarly research if we provide them with innovative, interdisciplinary digital methodologies and analytic frameworks.(Teaching and the Digital Humanities, 2015)

At the same symposium, William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, described how he encourages students to engage in projects that are publicly available on the WWW. These allow students to reflect on the affordances available, becoming ‘producers working in a critical fashion with an in the digital medium’. He cited a few examples from his teaching, including student contributions to established projects like The Valley of the Shadow (University of Virginia) and History Harvest (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). 

The Valley of the Shadows project is a digital archive of primary sources from people from Virginia and Pennysylvannia who experienced the American Civil War. In teams, undergraduate students contributed new content to add to the archive. In one instance, a sub-project on US coloured troops became so popular it received emails from the public, and the student team continued to manage the site and engage with the public years later. History Harvest, on the other hand, is a collaborative project where students themselves make history by creating digital resources documenting the history of their communities. In creating this digital archive, students engage community members in sharing their stories and artefacts, ultimately to ‘create the possibility and digital space for a more diverse, inclusive, and democratic narrative of American history’ (Teaching and the Digital Humanities, 2015). According to Thomas III, such projects become: