Chapter 16
A Call to Research Action: Transnational Solidarity for Digital Humanists
Olivia Quintanilla and Jeanelle Horcasitas
Remember back when people used to go to the U.S. in pursuit of “The American Dream?” Well, that’s all it was and ever will be: a pipe dream. No matter how they try to spin it, they never really wanted outsiders in their country. And once the right person got in power, he built that wall. Yeah, the one nobody took seriously. Just like those people who said climate change wasn’t real, and look here, we are: on the brink of extinction. Barely making it with the resources we have left. Living out our lives in the VR.
—Maria, the transfronteriza from Front|eras
Imagine the world thirty years from now. A world where Mexican immigrants such as Maria are forced into a type of technological oppression that compels them to provide physical and intellectual labor. A world so uninhabitable that you must wear a mask to avoid the toxic air. A world where, if you have enough wealth or privilege, you never have to leave the house. Instead, you have the luxury of escaping the dystopian realities surrounding you through virtual reality technology that transports you to other worlds, places, and even timelines. But for those who cannot access virtual reality: What is left in the world for them to live for? More importantly, who is left in the world, and how will they survive?
This is the premise of our choose-your-own-adventure game, Front|eras.1 In retrospect, we could have never predicted how stories like Maria’s could resonate so strongly with our current moment amid a pandemic, social unrest, and political uncertainty. As in the game, we too worry that the air is too dangerous to breathe, and a nation that requires “essential workers,” who are predominantly people of color and poor, risk their lives outside (and inside) while wealthier and more privileged members of society wait out the pandemic at home. We face hate crimes and gun violence, with memories of the vitriol brought about by the Trump administration never far from our minds. Even in the administration of President Joseph Biden, large-scale movements across borders remain controlled and exploited for profit by governments and corporations. We need more urgent conversations and collaborations grounded in transnational solidarities, relations of mutual support, and recognition that connects communities beyond borders to alter our future course.
Solidarity can take many forms among individuals, groups, and organizations and is typically constituted through shared values that elicit unity and support. Practices focusing on justice and mutual care, and manifesting through advocacy and action commitments, lie at the core of solidarity. In May 2021, the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement of solidarity with Palestinians, affirming the movement’s commitment to end all forms of settler colonialism and pledging to “continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation.”2 Since oppression and systems of exploitation, dispossession, and violence are (re)produced through transnational processes, resistance and solidarity must, together, take transnational form.
Our call to action is to cultivate transnational solidarities as a collective care-driven response to the everyday experiences of those living under colonialism and struggling with intersecting forms of violence and oppression. Especially in the era of Covid-19, where national borders are more visible and restrictive than ever, nation-states should not be defining elements that shape the legitimacy or resilience of transnational solidarity relationship building. But what might this look like for a digital humanities (DH) project, and how might we use it in our pedagogical practices?
We have been working to establish a fertile foundation where ideas can be seeded and grown to evolve into a DH toolkit grounded in transnational solidarity. The toolkit contains questions to help practitioners get started with their projects and provides an access point for students (especially historically underrepresented ones) to draw from their everyday lived experiences and visualize how they can create meaningful connections and collaborations among their networks. As a result, students build a solid footing in their own communities, histories, and stories so that they can begin to share them with others and develop relationships that seek to capture the spirit of transnational solidarity. The following sections will preview these questions and provide examples of how we envision transnational solidarity in practice.
The purpose of creating our DH project Front|eras was not to simply represent “transnationalism” but rather to illuminate the conditions that inspire transnational solidarity, when people form relationships and networks of care that exceed the logic of national boundaries. The game’s storyline emphasizes decision making that is not solely focused on transnational solidarity as a form of resistance and survival but as a method of community building and “home-making” across borders.3 By emphasizing future transnational possibilities of resistance and solidarity in Front|eras, we call attention to how fraught the concept of transnationalism can be when forming meaningful connections among communities. Often, transnationalism is seen as purely transactional, tied to social, political, and economic advantages possible when relationships are developed across borders, typically only to serve the powerful and privileged. However, in creating Front|eras and characters such as Maria, we sought to reimagine how transnationalism can be based on reciprocity and care. We created characters who have been marginalized by technology and social and economic “benefits” in the future and their response through transnational connections in virtual reality. Our game focuses on storytelling from the perspective of immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous communities and, as a result, can position players to foster future transnational solidarities that are premised on a community of support and care in a real-world and digital space.
Our doctoral training in ethnic studies and literature influenced our approach to game design and DH more generally through a transnational lens. As educators and community college professors, we approach digital humanities from a framework that centers everyday ways of knowing and begins with the understanding that categories of identity are always intersecting, in flux, and transforming together across time and space. We encourage our historically underrepresented students to position themselves in a starting place of transnational solidarity from which they can reimagine their realities through the Front|eras game. We have encountered the cross-border commuter student who relies on technology primarily as a source of survival by way of transportation to and from school, work, and home. In this case, technology, DH included, is not perceived as a welcoming place or tool for creative contributions on the surface; rather, it is a means to an end. With our call to action, we insist on changing the narrative that students can only engage with technology when necessary for survival to one where they engage with technology for resistance, innovation, and community building. A network immersed in transnational solidarity will recognize the intersectional identities our students bring and encourage them to participate in changing larger structural issues. For example, suppose students can shift their perspective to understand their networks as a larger community ripe for transnational solidarity. In that case, we hope that they can reimagine the futures they want together—especially their relationship with technology as a tool for their empowerment.
We specifically work with community college students, and this demographic is already in a transitory state. Often, they are faced with a short window of time and a long list of required courses they must complete before transferring to a university or returning to the workforce. This means there are hardly any opportunities for students to engage in creative and critical work related to DH that could help them develop these essential life skills we know are vital for building inclusive and equitable futures. This is why, as community college professors, we intentionally modify our syllabi to provide time and space for this critical and creative teaching and practice to happen. Although we have not been assigned to teach formal digital humanities classes, we insist on modifying our syllabi when teaching literature and history to include digital humanities projects and approaches. Our engagement with Latinx community college students and our own experiences as women of color community college alumnae in the San Diego/Tijuana border region inspired the Front|eras characters we created. It was important for us to create characters that represented people we see every day and to critique the intersecting issues of border crossing, technology, labor exploitation, immigration, and displacement that we learned from our students’ personal stories. Our students’ stories inspired the game’s creation, and by making them visible and accessible with Twine,4 we hope to inspire other students to share their lived experiences.
Our approach to DH and pedagogy, as shown by how we used Front|eras in the classroom and with our DH toolkit, builds from the strategy of a collective of scholars associated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice. They align their efforts with Indigenous land and water protectors to develop practices for decolonization grounded in anti-racism and feminism. They follow a framework of “decolonial feminist science” and explain:
Building on decades of community-based organizing, grassroots activism, and slow intimate relationship-building practices, we leverage Western science and laboratories in support of Indigenous knowledge as science in its own historical and cosmological right. We call this emergent practice decolonial feminist science: a science for land, life, and radical liberation. When we say “decolonial,” we mean that our work is in service of Indigenous communities working to keep or regain agency over their land and livelihood. When we say “feminist,” we take as a starting point the argument that feminist science must aim to eliminate research that leads to the exploitation and destruction of nature, the destruction of the human race and other species, and that justifies the oppression of people on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality, or nationality.
We argue that the same choices to center Indigenous community priorities and relationships based on respect for nature and reciprocity are necessary to show transnational solidarity in DH and lay the groundwork for decolonial and sustainable futures. Digital humanists can create DH projects that work in service of underrepresented and underresourced communities internationally and within national borders as a method of (transnational) solidarity and decolonial DH. While we do not have a clear blueprint for what decolonial futures should look like, a decolonial analysis of DH can gesture away from the violent and unsustainable modes of existence underwritten by settler colonialism and move toward reinvestments in different options for the future. Preventing the destruction of nature and actively working to care for our global environments is a necessary component of all research endeavors because our work will not serve much good if we collectively do not have a livable and healthy planet to call home. The responsibility DH scholars have to serve the environment cannot be overstated. DH scholars can build from decolonial feminist science to hold their projects accountable and prevent exploitative research practices and the destruction of nature while also ensuring that the processes and outcomes of their work build toward Indigenous resurgence and challenge relationships with land, people, and states. Emphasizing a decolonial feminist science consciousness brings us to critical starting points to begin DH projects.
Digital humanists must address the legacies of science that have enacted diverse forms of oppression against cross-border or Indigenous communities and their data, knowledge, stories, health, and priorities.5 Decolonial DH projects and methods “that foreground intersectional engagement with race, gender, class, nation and other axes of identity that shape knowledge production”6 can play a critical role in not only preventing further and future violence against these communities but also in breaking away from such frameworks entirely. Ahistorical and diversity-driven trends to “decolonize” DH risk becoming empty metaphors without the specificity required to transform colonial dynamics. In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, Roopika Risam notes that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have argued that “invoking decolonization solely as a metaphor undermines the real possibility of decolonization for those whose lives are, in fact, determined by colonialism” (3). Decolonial DH moves away from reproducing colonial discourse and practice through digital tools and projects that create opportunities for reimagining communities, relationships, infrastructure, and power dynamics not dependent on Indigenous displacement, erasure, exploitation, occupation, and militarized violence. In response to Tuck and Yang’s warnings of misplaced decolonial aspirations that inevitably “rescue settler futurity,” our call for research action asks how scholars can create DH projects and teaching exercises rooted in decolonial critical awareness to prevent resettlement and reoccupation practices that further settler colonialism. To be sure, our DH toolkit and call to action do not alone decolonize DH; rather, they begin the process for the necessary thinking, teaching, conversations, relationship building, and storytelling to happen for real decolonization to transpire.
We employ storytelling using DH tools as a tactic for (re)imagining and (re)investing our time, energy, teaching, and DH practice in transnational solidarities. Because colonialism and decolonial DH is a process rather than one event, we look for opportunities in our pedagogy to plant decolonial seed-starters in as many creative forms as possible. The narrative tools of Twine and story maps can bridge decolonial DH theory with practice. We also use this approach with our DH toolkit as a starting point for readers to consider the communities they are speaking with, who they may be designing their projects for, and understanding the issues and values of the communities they plan to work with. By offering “everyday” starting points, DH storytelling that leads with perspectives and knowledge from those not in power can spark reflective conversations that transform into investigations, discoveries, and actions that build communities grounded in care, respect, reciprocity, and solidarity.
Our work builds on several existing models of DH projects approached from decolonial frameworks, such as Torn Apart/Separados and the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC) story map project.7 Torn Apart is part of a mobilized and responsive humanities intervention in global humanitarian and migration crises. In it, scholars, librarians, students, community members, artists, and activists came together to map locations of federal detention facilities across the country to track where immigrant children separated from their parents were possibly being held. This volunteer collaboration enacted transnational solidarity through data mapping and grassroots DH community action to help alleviate the crisis and foster collective knowledge production and sharing that transcends borders. The CRSC story maps, created by scholars from across California, invested in facilitating new forms of knowledge and narratives about refugee life with those displaced instead of studying refugees as objects of inquiry without agency. The interactive multimedia maps were crowdsourced from refugee communities. The CRSC story maps revise history to reflect creative and holistic forms of transnational solidarity not represented in the dominant narratives of refugee life.
As seen in these examples, DH can be a strategic tool to support transnational struggles when it is mobilized to reframe oppressive versions of storytelling and respond to community needs and desires to share alternative histories and futures. We provide an example of this mobilization and resistance in the next section with the character Maria and the group ContraVR, who organize together to dismantle the technological systems meant to exploit and oppress them. By honoring their connection to the community and partaking in transnational solidarity, they successfully recode their virtual reality (and actual reality) to provide a more equitable future for marginalized communities.
Front|eras: Capturing Transnational Solidarity and Collaboration across Borders
Our Front|eras project critiques the technologies we use while asking how we can provide more access to those without it and create more inclusive spaces in the academy and beyond for others to make contributions. This is where our DH toolkit and prompting questions are integral to our call to research action, primarily because they provide the framework for fostering transnational solidarity and collaboration. We explain that designing a DH project must be an intentional and thoughtful process that always centers on the communities involved. In Intersectionality in Digital Humanities, Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam refer to Moya Bailey’s arguments that DH work is not about simply diversifying voices but rather making DH “open to the inevitable transformation of scholarly practices that an intersectional approach to digital humanities provides.” Yes, including more voices, histories, and stories is always important for inclusivity and diversity, but are we ethical about how they are represented? One of the questions from our DH toolkit directly asks: What and who gets represented in your project, and why? And as a follow-up: What gets elided and glossed over? More importantly, we ask: What community-specific ethical concerns are there for your project? We recognize that qualitative research, especially with oral histories, can sometimes misinterpret or misrepresent what is said, how it is said, and what the intended message may have been. When it comes to representation in a digital space, this becomes even more complex because of the various ways in which data can be altered and compromised through hacking, image and video alteration, and surveillance. As a result, we want researchers and students to develop DH projects that center questions of ethics, knowledge sharing, transparency, and proper acknowledgments. These efforts are already being tackled with grassroots groups that bring together students, scholars, and practitioners across the United States and beyond, in response to the vulnerability of corporate trends of hyper-surveillance and education outsourcing. One example is Ethical EdTech.8 Starting a DH project without this framework—that is, without reflecting on these questions based on trust, care, and mutual support—risks forming one-sided and exploitative relationships in favor of the researcher’s project. One of the most important questions we ask students as part of our DH toolkit is: What are the anticipated outcomes (of their DH research), and who do those outcomes benefit in the short and long term? This question is key for a framework of transnational solidarity because researchers and students should create and sustain community relationships beyond transactional project purposes. In doing so, their DH projects are not simply detached and empty deliverables. Rather, they can be collaborative works-in-progress that encourage community involvement and directly contribute to ongoing community priorities.
Many of these DH toolkit questions guided our creation of Front|eras, a choose-your-own-adventure game that would be accessible, understandable, and invite players to contribute their own narratives. For this project, we chose to use Twine, an open-source interactive platform for creating nonlinear digital narratives. Twine is premised on collaboration and features multimodal design with story maps (in the shape of networks that follow the various storylines) that show the interconnected stories or “choices” people can be led to as they navigate the game. The platform gives users the agency to design a narrative structure, such as a fixed or nonlinear path. Creating a Twine story does not require high-level coding skills beyond HTML to change fonts, colors, and backgrounds; as a result, it provides an opportunity for various disciplines to be involved in the project and reduces the hierarchies between those more tech-savvy and those who are not. We wanted to create a DH project that highlighted transnational solidarities in the future while fostering collaboration beyond any technological or discipline-specific barriers that often prevent those from the humanities, social sciences, visual arts, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) from working together.
This collaborative and interdisciplinary project was made possible through the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, which worked with three groups to develop speculative design projects that imagined San Diego in 2049. Our group consisted of a computer scientist, a visual artist, literary writers, and social scientists; Twine served as the collaborative platform to share our expertise and stories. Front|eras was not just a DH project; it was also an example of public scholarship that we shared with our colleagues, students, and domestic and international communities.
Our game provided six different narratives from protagonists and antagonists: a federal agent, a refugee, a transfronteriza, a university student, and two queer U.S. citizens trying to navigate love and intimacy in a future where virtual reality is preferable to real connections. As a player, you could choose to follow the path of one character, or you could traverse back and forth across the U.S.–Mexico border without a border checkpoint, move forward, then move backward, or switch characters in seconds. This reproduced the border as a space always in flux, constantly shifting rather than fixed; it was integral to our goal of representing transnational solidarity where marginalized communities have the power to shift narratives as well as the physical and abstract borders that exploit and dehumanize them as laborers. There were a few core characters and aspects of the game that embody our call to action for transnational solidarity:
- • Maria: A transfronteriza who crosses the border each day from Mexico to the United States for work. She is a virtual reality (VR) laborer who provides hospice-like care to her employer, who is hooked into his VR technology all day to escape the real world. She is also a member of the resistant group ContraVR and plays a large role in hacking the VR system in hopes of overthrowing it.
- • Benny: A Haitian refugee working as a ride-share driver for a company called SWYFT in Mexico. He was displaced from his home in Haiti as a result of climate change, which made his home island uninhabitable. As a driver, he takes clients to a VR vacation of their choosing, but he often goes to visit the VR version of his home in Haiti since the memory is all he has left of it.
- • ContraVR: This radical group is arguably one of the most important aspects of the game. The name translates to “against” VR in Spanish and is representative of the transnational solidarity that exists between the communities of immigrants, refugees, and U.S. citizens to organize together against the oppressive technological systems in place. Various characters in the game refer to ContraVR or see the graffiti tag with cryptic details about the next meeting time and place. ContraVR is a group that reimagines new futures and worlds and illuminates what collaboration and social change could look like among our diverse and transnational communities.
Our characters and ideas were not simply a result of thought experiments but were influenced by our graduate research and, more importantly, by the students we work with at our community college and refugee-led community centers. For example, in creating Front|eras, we developed a DH project that told stories we knew were invisible in a predominantly white and heteronormative narrative. As a result, this inspired the way we approached our pedagogy and expanded what we know can be possible for future DH research and pedagogy.
As educators, we argue that using DH to tell stories—to think beyond just how digital tools might be used in our classroom by students and beyond the parameters of the classroom and toward the possibilities of the future—will generate new DH projects that challenge the technologies we use and the power and privilege of those who do (or do not) have access to them. Projects designed with a goal of transnational solidarity in mind will center the stories of immigrants, refugees, and Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Scholars such as Roopika Risam, Barbara Bordalejo, and Kathryn Wymer have argued for more intersectionality in DH, where there is an “openness to the transformation of practices that the inclusion of practitioners from a broader range of scholarly backgrounds particularly in African diaspora, feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial thought, might bring” (2). Our Front|eras project represents an intersectional DH that speaks to the transnational communities we are personally a part of and those we learned about in the classroom, primarily through working with students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Although the characters in Front|eras are fictional, the ideas they represent are rooted in real-world social justice, organizing, and world-building practices.
Fostering Ethical, Collaborative, and Transnational Solidarity DH in Pedagogy
Front|eras seeks to highlight the transnational solidarity possible among intersectional and diverse communities and leads us to an important question: How can we teach our students to adopt a transnational solidarity framework for their DH projects and encourage collaboration with their communities to build better worlds and futures? How can we do so in a way that incorporates the knowledge and experience that they already bring to the classroom? How can we acknowledge the realities of our students’ lives and the strength and commitment they demonstrate by being present in the classroom each day? How can we spark interdisciplinary reflections on transnational solidarity and decolonial DH?
We teach at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) in San Diego and are immersed in Latinx students’ realities every day. For example, students have shared their difficulties getting to class on time because of border-crossing delays or the need to leave class early so they do not return too late at night when it might be dangerous. We have also heard stories from our students who may not have access to computers at home and rely on using the public library or their mobile phones. These are just a few examples of the inequities that exist on many college campuses and the struggles certain students face getting to class, let alone having the tools they need to be successful. We need to rehumanize our educational institutions to support our students through their struggles, validating them for showing up and doing the work and empowering them to pursue the futures they aspire to have.
We also want our historically underrepresented students to be critical of the current political, sociological, and environmental conditions so that they can help prevent a dystopian future like Front|eras from happening while actively creating the future they desire. Therefore, we introduce the history of technology and science from Indigenous and Latinx perspectives.9 Further, we use digital humanities tools to create space for students to reimagine different trajectories for themselves and their communities using speculation and worldmaking as methodologies. Teaching DH through underrepresented histories is critical to counter the colonial logics that framed Indigenous peoples as barbaric and backward and that underpinned the use of technology and science as methods for human and environmental control, violence, and occupation. Learning such history empowers students to craft critical and often regenerative DH projects. We urge students to envision and write themselves into alternative decolonial futures to challenge existing relationships with people, land, and the state and to open up new possibilities for transnational solidarity and equitable futures. Using DH to examine decolonial theory, Indigenous futurism, and technology, we can deepen the awareness of place-based struggles, overlapping oppression, and the interconnected nature of decolonial DH and transnational solidarity as tools of cooperation and worldmaking.
We argue in our teaching that visualizing transnational partnerships, connections, and care through a storytelling and world-building platform such as Twine can play an important role in offering possibilities of solidarity. The process of collaboratively designing our game and coordinating the moments where our characters’ realities crossed paths in our imagined world allowed us to apply the practice of collective worldmaking. Prototyping the San Diego border region in 2049 allowed us to test out ideas and concerns we had in the present for ourselves and our communities by playing out the thread of thought to the point of completion, where our character was interacting and living the life of our imagination and experiencing the implications of decision making from 2019 and beyond.
Portraying solidarity and resistance among our characters as they would appear in 2049 required reconceptualizing solidarity practices in a game world where the tech-transportation and tourism industry had taken advantage of solidified borders by capitalizing on future ride-share drivers’ labor and experiences without the consumer ever having actually to speak to the driver. For example, Benny’s story is a Haitian refugee living in Mexico and working as a ride-share driver. Communication between the passenger and driver transpires only through the company’s app. The passenger could access stories, recommendations, and conversations from the driver by the touch of a button. This story was inspired by the rush for driverless cars and the option for “silent” ride-sharing experiences. Simultaneously, major ride-share companies exploit driver labor for profit, classifying them as “independent contractors” and not employees in order to skirt paying real benefits and sharing profit with their employees. Twine gave us the ability to extrapolate the concerns of the present and reveal how the consequences of current policies might take shape in a dystopian future.
ContraVR, the radical resistance group in our game, provides another example of how we envision the possibilities for cross-border transnational solidarity. With limited or no access to VR technologies in this future, the people comprising this group (primarily low-income immigrants and people of color) seek to hack the system and recode their own prototyped VR technology so that they too may have access. Again, this exemplifies one of our DH project’s purposes—bringing visibility to open-access and technology issues, especially for those from marginalized communities. Similar to how we represent transcending physical borders, Maria’s character overcomes abstract borders through her various identities and roles. She holds an intersectional identity as a VR worker, a transfronteriza, an immigrant, and social activist. Players get a glimpse of some of the struggles that characters such as Maria and Benny experience. Depending on the storyline one follows, players may be exposed to moments of transnational solidarity and community/world-building through the ContraVR group. Consider this scene from Front|eras:
Everyone’s eyes shift from one to the other. Capturing a true moment of hope and solidarity among them. So many years have gone by without any progress, without any sort of belief in the future. Time seems to stand still while everyone is suspended in silence, waiting for Matador’s orders.
Matador whispers, “Get ready for a new beginning.”
Ultimately, we argue DH has the power and capacity for helping imagine and build sustained transnational solidarity and mobilization. Solidarity, expanded and reconceptualized from its original localized forms, can now mean more transnational supportive interrelationships connecting people worldwide.
Working toward Change and Transnational Solidarity in DH
Our experiences as educators, researchers, and first-generation women of color from low-income and immigrant families have shaped our own visions of the positive impact we hope to make, especially to foster transnational solidarity in the digital humanities. We want to inspire a generation of future projects and conversations, both inside and outside the academy, told by these communities themselves. In our efforts to expand transnational solidarity through projects like Front|eras, we implemented world-building activities inspired from the game’s characters into our own classes—a practice that offers a final example of how future researchers and educators might work toward similar goals.
“No one’s ever asked me about what I think about these things before. I’ve never had to think about designing the future. I just always thought it was too hard to change, but now I see how we can actually start making changes.” This testimonial comes from a student in our Chicana/o studies history class at a San Diego community college. This student reflects on their experience with this activity, specifically, how they chose to design a future San Diego border region in response to their assigned character’s needs and life trajectory.
Students were also asked to take stock of the systems necessary to build a future that took into account the history and current developments of the region. For example, what do food, social services, waste management, technology, air quality, and politics look like in 2049? What does a day in their character’s life look like, and what systems and issues do they encounter? What are their character’s priorities, and what kind of community-building/action makes sense for their reality? Students represent their character by working in small groups to collectively draw out their vision of the San Diego border region in 2049 on a large poster board throughout three class sessions.
The next step in this activity is the moment of transnational solidarity and collaboration we hope to initiate. Once the groups present their collectively created drawing and storyline, the poster boards are then displayed around the classroom, and students take turns going on a tour of the future. After engaging with the other groups’ renderings, students revisit their story and find ways to connect with each other’s characters and modify their original version to support the visions of others. For example, one group described a pollution problem in the Tijuana region. Another group based in San Diego created a cross-border clean-up system using new technology that provided jobs, clean water, and a cross-border community garden to address food insecurity.
Using Front|eras and prompting questions helped our students get started. From there, our students analyzed transnational challenges and opportunities to rethink connections across the border region. Most strikingly, students expressed feelings of inspiration and responsibility to create equitable relationships in their imagined future because they felt empowered to think beyond the constraints they experience in real life. One student remarked, “I never thought of myself as a designer before,” and now she feels more optimistic about the future. After completing this activity, many students expressed an interest in pursuing a path in urban planning, policy making, and digital humanities.
Whether it is thought experiments manifested in the form of a game like Front|eras, classroom activities such as the one above, or a resource like our DH toolkit, our call to research action urges scholars to consider the role of digital humanities as a transnational vehicle for solidarity and decolonial knowledge. Starting with everyday realities for people of color and prioritizing spaces for marginalized communities to collaborate and implement recommendations can improve our research methods and strengthen our relationships as social justice–driven digital humanists.
Notes
1. Run the Front|eras game at https://ucsd-fronteras.itch.io/fronteras.
2. See Diwakar.
3. We define “home-making” in the context of displaced people, especially refugees, who are driven out of their home country by political, social, or economic strife or degraded environments and, as a result, must remake their home in a different country while simultaneously attempting to (re)learn aspects of their original homeland such as culture, language, and history.
4. Twine is an “open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.” We will discuss the benefits of using this platform at length in a later section.
5. For historical context and discussion of Indigenous communities’ history and engagement with science, technology, environmental racism, and communication technologies, see Duarte and also Voyles.
6. See Risam, “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities.”
7. For Torn Apart, see http://xpmethod.columbia.edu/torn-apart/volume/1/. For CRSC, see www.criticalrefugeestudies.com.
8. See the Ethical EdTech Wiki at https://ethicaledtech.info/wiki/Meta:Welcome_to_Ethical_EdTech.
9. See Dalton; Tu and Nelson; and Benjamin.
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