Link to Publication on Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy:
Excerpt: “This piece is part of a commitment to sharing and creating human communities of care alongside the materialist structures of support that constrain the everyday, such as time and resources. Interwoven with feminist and decolonial praxis, this piece includes a collection of critical pedagogy tactics, as well as syllabi excerpts from two digital humanities classes and an information studies class, and concludes with experimental dream classes for digital humanities. I also draw from my decade of teaching across disciplines and K–16 curricula and my commitments to critical pedagogy to reflect upon the specific experiences of teaching digital humanities courses this past academic year (2023–2024) that focused on historical data and visualization with a commitment to feminist and decolonial approaches. This past year, I taught a graduate introduction to digital humanities course with a focus on project management and public communication and a capstone undergraduate course focused on French colonial Vietnamese historical data. I also taught a graduate course on global libraries and decolonial futures primarily for graduate students completing their master’s degree in library and information science. I facilitated specific assignments and transparent reflexive modes of communication in a frenzied pursuit of an alternative to the current status quo, a current world marked by invisibilized labor and erasure of disabled whole selves, where students and instructors carry a hegemonic weight of capitalistic linear time defined by benchmarks, grades, progress, bureaucratic evaluations, and pursuit of transferable skills to serve an anonymized impossible market. Drawing wisdom from communities of laboring scholar activists and artists, I conclude with aspirational models for teaching and researching digital humanities that center the whole selves of students and instructors as part of the world and committed to decolonial futures.”
Backstory: This publication took decades to write, in part, because it was an embodiment of so many life stages–graduate school, job market, postpartum, covid, now on the tenure clock. In earlier stages, it was written here during a collective writing sprint session: https://cindyanguyen.com/2023/12/08/on-slowness/ This new version of the piece is also my grappling with teaching this first academic year at UCLA…a former version of myself wouldn’t have necessarily connected the dots that the first year as professor, the classroom space was so deeply consumed by discussions of academic labor, and the ‘vibe’ of our class was so deeply anti-capitalist, anti-institutional, and exhausted in every direction.
Cindy A. Nguyen 