The Futures of Digital Humanities Pedagogy in a Time of Crisis

Higher education has long been in crisis, both by design and by circumstance. In the United States in particular, the systematic dismantling of public higher education, the ever-increasing burden of student debt, and the growth of adjunctification and precarious labor conditions for faculty and staff have all created an unstable and toxic system.1 As I write this essay in spring of 2020, more specific emergencies have taken hold. An international public health crisis has deepened, exacerbating already extant systemic inequality. In higher education, the Covid-19 pandemic has led, and will continue to lead, to widespread budget cuts, hiring freezes, and concerns over how we can teach without killing our students and each other. Against the backdrop of this emergency, the murder of George Floyd by police has brought renewed attention to the ongoing struggles of Black people against widespread police brutality and systemic racism, on campus and beyond.2 To be clear, these two most recent moments of crisis intersect,3 and they are not new: they represent merely the most immediate and emergent manifestations of longstanding systems of discrimination that will continue to persist once this news cycle fades.4

The future of graduate education in digital humanities (DH) lies in the field’s ability—or lack of ability—to direct its pedagogy to respond to and take account of its complicity in these crises. Chris Sula, S. E. Hackney, and Phillip Cunningham note that the development of certificates and degree programs in DH in recent years might appear to be part of a growing and healthy field, but like the institutions of which they are a part, Boyles et al. assert that the field is streaked with inequitable labor practices, and Bailey points to prevalent white supremacy in the community (Sula et al., “Survey of Digital Humanities”; Boyles et al., “Precarious Labor”; Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists”). It can feel impossible to answer the questions that moments like the present ask of us. How do we teach right now? Why do we teach now? And, for this audience, what might DH pedagogy in particular have to do with and for this moment? It is impossible to ignore these questions now, but even so, we must recognize that this sense of urgency should have always been central to our practice. As Kevin Gannon notes in Radical Hope, “Pedagogy is political,” and, “our students and our academic communities need more from us” than a pedagogy of neutrality (22, 21). In the United States, given persistent attacks on higher education from the political right, it is not a given that there will be a future for graduate training in the humanities, much less a digital one. For there to be any kind of DH teaching worth having in the years to come, the field needs to be founded on a critical and engaged pedagogy that acts beyond the classroom. This moment can be an opportunity to take actionable steps toward big change: to reevaluate the nature of the teaching we do, to stand in solidarity with those who have long struggled for a more just and equitable DH practice, and to shape a DH that labors in the midst of present crises for a better future.

The idea of reworking one’s approach to teaching might seem daunting, because time is at a premium for many in the academy right now, particularly for women who have been disproportionately affected by caregiving responsibilities as schools close and demand that work and learning continue.5 One can, however, start small, advancing a more just pedagogy in the classroom itself, following the examples set by those already engaged in this work. As Matthew Cheney and Catherine Denial argue, we can frame our syllabi and course practices as instruments of trust and community building rather than abuse.6 Roopika Risam calls for a digital pedagogy informed by postcolonial studies that “empowers students to not only understand but also intervene in the gaps and silences that persist in the digital cultural record,”7 and instructors might engage students in course projects that address local issues to do so. In a related blog post titled “Against Cop Shit,” Jeffrey Moro calls for a movement against those pedagogical practices and technologies that rely on punishment and surveillance. These steps, even if they might feel small at times, can begin to redirect DH teaching practices toward the pursuits of freedom, hope, and self-transformation.8

Beyond course practices and course assignments, though, this is a time for pedagogical action, for critically engaged teaching that sees the work of pedagogy as moving beyond the classroom. Sean Michael Morris speaks of a pedagogical habitus, “embodied practice, often uninspected or subterranean to a person’s own thinking about themselves,” that forms the “genetic makeup” of one’s teaching (“Habitus of Critical Imagination”). Accordingly, the ways we carry out projects reflect our outlooks toward students.9 Model examples of a lived commitment to pedagogy are the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities Initiative at the University of Maryland and the US Latino Digital Humanities Center at the University of Houston, both of which center on mentoring and community building even as they advance research agendas.10 In this line of thought, pedagogy transcends classroom practice in the same ways that students’ lived circumstances outside of our courses affect their ability to learn. Sara Goldrick-Rab’s work at the Hope Center on food insecurity, homelessness, and poverty among students is emblematic of the ways pedagogy can join with advocacy beyond the classroom.11 Pedagogy is a generalizable outlook toward all that one does in relation to students, and it should lead to action beyond teaching. Teaching the whole student means caring for their lived experience and, as several essays in this collection propose,12 helping them to fit their education to that reality rather than the other way around.

The ways we theorize and practice DH teaching and research can also intervene in the institutions around us, and they can both reflect and enact infrastructural changes. Digital humanities teaching and mentoring regularly happen in interstitial university spaces, and this positionality can be leveraged to make administrative interventions that recognize their intersections with equitable pedagogical practices. By viewing budgets as moral pedagogical documents, we can advocate for better conditions for students and postdoctoral fellows.13 When called upon to offer professional development to students, we can make sure that the work we do with them is informed by organizations like the Academic Job Market Support Network, which offers materials and resources for a range of different career paths. We must join pedagogical innovation with an activist spirit that pushes for infrastructural change.14

I am especially aware of my privilege and positionality in writing this piece as a cisgender, heterosexual, white man. There are, of course, DH practitioners, largely Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), who have already been engaged in this work for years. The work of activists involved in the creation of #TransformDH, Postcolonial Digital Humanities, and DHWOGEM, to name a few, has made the field a better space.15 It is incumbent upon people with privilege like mine to assign and cite these projects, to amplify and support these scholars, and to take part in this work. Similarly, look to local communities to find those people already engaged in this labor. Amplify and support the student activists fighting to unionize, the adjunct and precarious faculty working toward better working conditions, and the BIPOC staff and students fighting for justice on campuses dominated by white supremacy. No one person can affect change at all levels. More than or in addition to individual efforts, this is a moment for collective action, pedagogical and otherwise. And, to echo the title of a recent piece by Arteaga et al., “We all have levers we can pull.” It is all too common for higher education workers to support these actions in spirit and conversation but not in practice, to see unionization efforts but not join them, or worse, to actively undermine them. Now is the time to act in accordance with our professed political and pedagogical values. Now is the time to pull the levers.

It may appear that I am offering a mercenary argument: DH pedagogy must serve the ends of equity and justice so that it can survive. That is not my aim. Instead, I hope to echo Kathleen Fitzpatrick in “Your Institution Does Not Deserve to Survive,” where she speaks of universities’ plans to reopen while Covid-19 continues to spread: an institution does not deserve to survive unless it is “committed to the survival of the people who make up and serve that institution first, foremost, and above all.” The same can be said for DH and its associated pedagogies: if they are unconcerned with acting toward a more just vision of the world and safeguarding better conditions for the communities they affect, then they do not deserve to survive. This is finally true of pedagogies beyond digital humanities as well. Disciplinary training is an important part of graduate education, but it cannot operate in a vacuum, closed off from the social and political world. Our students’ lives do not end at the doors of our classrooms, and we cannot teach as though they do. The future of our work, if there is to be one, must act in the present.