#Disrupting Digital Humanities at the GWU

"Let's reconceptualize the humanities as a space not of authority but of care." 

Eileen Joy
@EileenAJoy #gwdh15 #DisDH

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GW Digital Humanities Symposium: DISRUPTING DH

Date: Friday, January 30, 2015 9am – 4pm

This symposium explores critical approaches to the digital humanities (DH). What happens when academics, activists, and publishers join forces to rethink how we research, teach, and generate knowledge? How can digital humanists mobilize online media and social networks to radically transform the spaces of the ARCHIVE, the CLASSROOM, and the IVORY TOWER?

Sponsored by the GW Digital Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Department of English, Creative Writing, Department of History, Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program, Disability Support Services, GW Libraries, GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and the DH Graduate Working Group 

Event website: gwdhi.org/gwdh15

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#Disrupting #DH

When Co-director and co-founder of the George Washington University Digital Humanities Institute (GW DHI) Jonathan Hsy sat down with me in early Fall 2014 to build the website for the DHI and to plan the Disrupting DH symposium, we returned to the question: what is the purpose of the DHI? Before we build something, what do we want that thing to do? In the end, we agreed that the mission of the DHI at GWU would be to use its "institutional" nature to be a spotlight for more disruptive projects going on in the digital humanities. We would use our place in the university structure to create spaces, forums, and nodes where the wild world of digital activism, arts, and humanities can speak to one another and to a wider audience.

This became our launching point from which the #DisDH symposium grew. Six speakers were sought out from a variety of professional, educational, social and biopolitical backgrounds to showcase the vital energies that give critical power and resistance to the institutions of the digital humanities: Angela Bennett Segler (creator of Material Piers), Eileen Joy (Director, punctum books), Dorothy Kim (medievalist, feminist, digital humanist), Roopika Risam (Co-founder, Postcolonial Digital Humanities), Jesse Stommel (Director, Hybrid Pedagogy), and Suey Park (Co-founder, Killjoy Prophets). 

With such a power-house of speakers, writers, scholars, educators, publishers, activists, tweeters, and bloggers, we worked hard in the following months to create the foundations and channels for the intellectual energy to flow once it all came together. Not least, this included bringing in Shyama Rajendran to serve as my successor once I left my assistantship to the DHI and returned to teaching in Spring 2015. Once the work got going, more and more groups joined the network to help #DisDH: the GWU Department of English, Creative Writing, Department of History, Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program, Disability Support Services, GW Libraries, GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and the DH Graduate Working Group.

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#Archive

The day of the event, Hsy introduced the symposium's mission to the community of digital humanists in the room and tapped in through social media, as well as thanking the speakers, sponsors, workers, and the ASL interpreters who showed up to support the event. Then Diane H. Cline and Jeffrey J. Cohen took the stage to introduce the first panel of speakers, Angela Bennett Segler and Dorothy Kim, discussing revolutions and institutions of DH archives.

Bennett Segler and Kim set the tone for the rest of the day by grounding the disruption of dh in social justice, the invisible labor and exploitation of women, people of color, and other under-paid, under-publicized radical librarians who have been leaders in the movement to digital archives but have since been erased as institutions, directors and users who recode these projects as typically white male spaces. This is perhaps not surprising, notes Bennett Segler, "today's revolution is tomorrows institution" but this domesticating of women of color's digital labor can be resisted. Kim added that by refusing to see archives as a politically "neutral space" of universal access we can redirect social and financial capital back towards the exploited and forgotten progenitors who continue to revolutionize the field and disrupt the digital humanities.

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#Classroom

After a short coffee break, catered by Whole Foods, the symposium returned, to discuss the disruptive possibilities for digital Pedagogy and how to make the classroom and digital spaces "safe but not comfortable." Holly Dugan and Kavita Daiya came to the podium to introduce the next pair of speakers, Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, discussing the many audiences and orientations that come together, create and conflict in the digital classroom.

Stommel and Risam expanded the scope of discussion of social justice from a presumed institutional context to consider the wider audiences that are connecting to the humanities through digital education spaces. Stommel represented what he believed the disruptive potential of Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs) through the opening lines of William Shakespeare's Hamlet tattooed on his arms: "Who's there?" and "Stand and Unfold Yourself." No one authority can police or direct the tens of thousands of participants in MOOCs and Stommel contends that this adds to its radical potential for a non-enclosed and non-authoritarian approach to pedagogy where ideas are shared not only with those at the center of university life but with all those standing in the digital margins, listening, watching, and waiting for their chance to stand up and contribute. Risam continued to press on the ethos of liberation from and by digital classrooms, by addressing the colonial models on which education has long functioned. By expanding and empowering the marginalized, digital educators can help de-colonize the classroom.

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#IvoryTower

In the afternoon, following a lunch break where speakers, organizers, and attendants were able to informally get to know each other, the symposium returned to tackle the institutions that support and set limits on disrupting potentials of the digital humanities. Dolsy Smith and Jennifer Chang took turns introducing the final set of speakers, Eileen Joy and Suey Park, discussing care, cloud feudalism, and danger in and outside the Ivory Tower.

Joy and Park ramped up the issue of social justice to consider the radical threats and potentials to intellectual life for those connected with digital forums for public scholarship. Tackling university (academic) and cloud (digital) feudalism, where institutions set prohibitive limits on who gets to speak and who gets to listen to intellectual discussions, Joy defended "the importance of illegitimacy." English studies, among other fields in the academy, Joy argues, has its roots in the non-institutional settings of living rooms and salons where creative communities burgeoned not because of a culture of authority but of care. Park carried forward Joy's call to create support systems for "bastard thought" through the current activism and poetic politics of twitter and other non-institutional forums. Park warned that while such digital spaces have allowed for alternative communities to form for women and people of color, they too become battle-zones where colonization and marginalization continues. If the Ivory Tower is a supposedly safe space for intellectual community, accessible to a chosen few, than the battles in digital spaces outside its walls witness the need for ethical coalitions to form to defend and protect the lives and creativity of vulnerable communities.

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#DHRoundtable

Bringing the symposium to a close, Jonathan Hsy returned to the stage with the DH Graduate Working Group Co-Founder Lori Brister to lead a roundtable of all the speakers in order to tease out themes from the day that would continue #DisDH into the future. Comments were developed and explored from moderators, speakers, audience members and twitter.

The group began the roundtable by discussing the role that students play in shaping in academia, noting how the digital humanities can serve as a gateway drug to an intellectual community. This challenges university administrators to not view education as a business (although it may adopt certain business practices) and instead as a resource for developing new fields of knowledge. Likewise, it falls to those with power to create spaces and cultures of safety for vulnerable communities (such as graduate students) who cannot afford the luxury of being able to survive failure or abandonment. All of this, affirmed the speakers, requires recognition and support for all the labor that is put in by the marginalized, institutions committed to change, educators, radical librarians, publishers, activists, artists and digital humanists who work to create a more livable, more safe, less comfortable, more just, more caring world.

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Crip/Queer Studies @ the George Washington University

"The primary idea was to address 

an emerging interest in intersectionality studies – 

the ways in which we all occupy 

multiple identities"

David Mitchell
The GW Hatchet

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Recently, the GW Hatchet did an article,
"English professors combine areas of study 
for new specialization" by Chase Smith, 
on the emerging area of Crip/Queer studies 
in the George Washington University English Department.
I was interviewed and briefly quoted in the article.
Here is a more complete version of what I said.

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The value that Crip/Queer studies at the George Washington University has in the wider academic community was perhaps most clearly evidenced for me as I was preparing to leave GWU after completing a Masters Degree. At that time, I was fortunate and privileged enough to be accepted into substantial Ph.D programs, any of which I would have been immensely gracious to attend. It is this bounty of offers that drew my attention back to GWU. In some of the correspondence I received inviting me to join the university, it was mentioned that they wanted someone like me, doing what I do. They had no one else. Thinking this over, I found that they may very well be right. 

Indeed, what we do here at GWU is in many respects unique, or at least rare - too rare. Universities offer a bounty of gifts that no student can repay, but GWU offers a unique combination of resources and mentorship that cannot be found anywhere else - what we call our Crip/Queer Studies. In the end, I chose to go to GWU for my Ph.D because I am a unique scholar, with a unique project, and the unique programs at GWU, especially in Crip/Queer and Medieval Studies, creates a unique convergence of opportunities that I want to grow in and further throughout my career.

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What characterizes myself, my project, and Crip/Queer studies is not only an attention to the uniqueness of particular persons but the movement that turns from individual to collective struggles. It is not unheard of to have centers for Disability Studies and LGBT Resources, but often the premise of these programs is the policing of borders around identity categories. There are critically important issues and violences that stick to our bodies with the glue of identity and this should never be underestimated. However, identity can too often work by turning away from the shared experiences of those who are not recognized as sharing an identity. Too often, for instance, transgender is left out of the considerations of LGBT activist groups because the issue of gender is often handled separately from the issue of sexuality (which has become the focus of the organization). 

Likewise, to use the same example, transgender is rarely considered a part of the disability rights movement, despite the shared experiences with social mechanisms of diagnosis, treatment with drugs or surgery, and a history of alienation, stigma and incarceration. In academia, in part propelled by the work of the scholars here, the words Crip and Queer signify not merely a more elastic collection of experiences but a methodology that critiques identity as itself a part of the mechanisms of social control. Rather than close off the conversation, Crip/Queer studies embraces the collective struggle of the Trans, the Crip and the Queer with countless other marginalized modes of living.

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As a transgender woman completing her Ph.D with a dissertation on transgender in the middle ages, GWU's Crip/Queer studies area offers the unique resources and support systems that make my scholarship possible. Any time you enter into careers where your community and your area of work are underrepresented or unrepresented, there are bound to be countless roadblocks as people find it difficult to even imagine the possibility of your existence within the field. The choice to come out as transgender and transition occurred to the sound of countless doors closing - relationships I would never have, conversations I would never hear, jobs I would never get. 

The unlikeliness of finding work only compounded when I made the decision to pursue the study of transgender in the middle ages, a time and area of research, many too readily assume, in which discussions of transgender has no place. One of the first investments GWU's Crip/Queer Studies offered me was to open the door to give me entrance into a shared academic space. It does more than imagining the possibility of a more inclusive and diverse social project, it makes continued investments in students, faculty, staff, and programming to make those possibilities into a reality.

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In particular, it is worth noting a few features of GWU's Crip/Queer studies area that make it a fantastic resource. First, the quality and diversity of the faculty in the Crip/Queer area of study makes GWU a powerhouse that supercharges intellectual energies not only here, in the US, but transnationally. Students of Prof. Robert McRuer and Prof. David Mitchell travel abroad to places like the Czech Republic and Germany to experience the living material cultures of crip and queer subjectivities past and present. They also attract scholars from around the world to visit to give scholars at GWU perspectives on issues of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability that are otherwise difficult to get in and around DC. 

This influx of academic resources are none the more evident than in the Disability Studies conference hosted at GWU every couple years, where the University becomes a magnet for the critical work of leading scholars from around the world. The coursework provided by the Crip/Queer faculty and graduate students widen the discussion of medieval, early-modern, american, and british, post-colonial literatures to include often elided topics. As a result, the unique scholarship being produced from the undergrad level, to the Ph.D, to the faculty are demonstrating in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways the invaluable products of hosting a Crip/Queer studies group at the University.

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