Cyberchat sponsored by Global Asias Institute at Penn State. 12 April, 12 pm EST

Colonialism denies its allocation to the past. Its persistence demands that we ask how it has changed alongside exponential data accumulation, fast evolving mediums, accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the vast reaches of human networks. This workshop brings together scholars who use computational methodologies, who position the digital as objects, who challenge the replication of inequalities in the digital space, who trace continuities across mediums, who observe human-AI relations, and who question the digital infrastructures of scholarship. It aims to unite the tools and knowledges of multiple disciplines to train the eye on colonialism even as it dissipates into the cloud.

Taking our cue from the Black radical intellectual Cedric Robinson and his underappreciated status as a theorist of cinema and media, this conference addresses the multiple ways in which the analytic of racial capitalism must be brought to bear on media theory, media history, and media practice. Over the course of three days, we bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose work helps elucidate the intimate entanglements between both historical and contemporary media and formations of racial capitalism.

First, Mediations of Racial Capitalism reflects on a range of intellectual traditions, activist genealogies, and aesthetic practices—ones that have often been marginalized within the field of media studies—concerned with the constitutively racial character of capitalism in its complex intersections with structures of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and empire. Second, conference participants consider how an analysis of racial capitalism opens up further avenues for making sense of the media landscape in the present conjuncture and for responding to exigencies and struggles of our times. 

Confronting the ‘Global’, Exploring the ‘Local’: Digital Apprehensions of Poetics and Indian Literature(s)
21-22 December 2020, New Delhi

Digital Literary Studies in Uncertain Times: Digital Humanities and Literary Studies shared early synergistic interests in digital storytelling, digital archiving, and computational methods for literary research. In many regards, DH offered the democratizing potential of open access publishing, sharing texts and archives with broader and new audiences, and destabilizing canonical formations. Although these promises have been hindered by structural issues like funding and the hegemonic entrenchment of the Euro-American canon, I revisit these affordances of digital humanities methods and platforms in our present moment. Situating myself in the diasporic and trans/national contexts of India and the United States, I make a case for postcolonial and anti-caste praxis to ground our work in digital literary studies. This includes taking up the broader question of how DH practitioners can respond to socio-political emergencies in their local and national communities. Against the backdrop of a pandemic unfolding amidst state and systemic violence, DH scholars and teachers can enact radical and transformative practices and pedagogies at the intersection of digital humanities and literary studies.

Digital Archives in South Asian Studies: Towards Decolonisation

A panel discussion with Varsha Ayyar (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), Dhanashree Thorat (Mississippi State University), Amber Abbas (St. Joseph’s University), and Roopika Risam (Salem State University).

Panel moderated by Sneha Krishnan (University of Oxford) and Megan Eaton Robb (University of Pennsylvania). Registration link here

Oct 23, 2020 10:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

This 2 day event features panelists from across the country and the OU community. Join us for two days of discussion on the state of digital humanities research and teaching. Moderated by Carrie Schroeder and Darren Purcell. Free and open to the public.

I will be speaking in session 1:

Session 1: Thursday October 22, 2-3:30PM CT
Moderated By Carrie Schroeder

Full video and powerpoint from the event will be uploaded later. Read more here.

My book chapter “Digital Infrastructures and Technoutopian Fantasies: The Colonial Roots of Technology Aid in the Global South” was published in Exploring Digital Humanities in India Pedagogies, Practices, and Institutional Possibilities, an edited collection by Maya Dodd and Nidhi Kalra.

My chapter explores Facebook’s unsuccessful attempt at offering the Free Basics initiative in India and examines the colonial paradigms about modernization, progress, and equality evoked by this initiative. I show how Facebook’s technoutopian promises about the affordances of (digital) technologies, particularly claims about equality, opportunities, and rights, predate the digital era and are reminiscent of British colonial discourse about Western modernity.

(If you would like to read the chapter but don’t have access to the book, please send me a message.)

Anne Cong-Huyen and I are co-teaching a course on “Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities” at HILT2020 at the University of Nebraska from 18-22 May 2020. Student scholarships are available.

Course Description

In the last few years, we have seen a resurgence of minority activisms, ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Me Too movement, from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico, even as white supremacist and xenophobic ideologies and policies have flourished. When silence can be tantamount to complicity, what is our responsibility as academics and what can digital humanities offer in this era of renewed political activism?

This course takes a historically grounded approached to apply anti-racist feminist praxis to digital humanities. Focusing particularly on labor, infrastructure, methods, and pedagogy, we will interrogate the silences and gaps in digital humanities as well as work to adopt and embed anti-racist praxis in our digital humanities work. These are some of our guiding questions our course will take: What can digital humanities practitioners learn from past and current liberation movements? How do we build and support anti-racist feminist movements and networks in our digital humanities work? How can digital humanities pursue community accountability and advocacy?

This is an introductory course and we will begin with foundational scholarship on anti-racist praxis as well as the disciplinary critique of digital humanities by #transformDH and #DHpoco. No prior coding experience is needed and readings will be provided. As scholars and librarians with backgrounds in Asian American studies and community organizing, we center scholarship and knowledge production from Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Global South scholars and activists. Each day will combine conversation and dialogue with hands-on activities. The goal of this course is to enable participants to reflect on and implement anti-racist praxis in their own scholarship, methodology, pedagogy, and labor practices. This course will be taught using Emergent Strategy & Anti-Oppressive Facilitation methods, practices drawn from community organizing that build care into their processes.

Participants will collaboratively build a guide and bibliography for anti-racist feminist digital humanities, with the intent of future peer review and publication.