1st Edition
Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality A Practical Guide
Based on the auto-ethnographic work of a team of scholars who developed the first Black Digital Humanities program at a research institution, this book details how to centralize Black feminist praxes of care, ethics, and Black studies in the digital humanities (DH).
In this important and timely collection, the authors Catherine Knight Steele, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead—of the first team of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative—center Black scholars, Black thought, and Black studies in creating digital research and programming. Providing insight into acquiring funding, building and maintaining community, developing curricula, and establishing a national network in the field, this book moves Black persons and Black thought from the margins to the center with a set of best practices and guiding questions for scholars, students, and practitioners developing programming, creating work agreements, building radically intentional pedagogy and establishing an ethical future for Black DH.
This is essential reading for researchers, students, scholars, and practitioners working in the fields of DH and Black studies, as well as graduate students, faculty, and administrators working in humanities disciplines who are interested in forming centers, courses, and/or research programs in Black digital studies.
Introduction. Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black 1. I Don’t Love DH; I Love Black Folks: Building Black DH Programming 2. Where Are All the Black Scholars in Black DH?: Creating Space for the Field of Black Digital Studies Kevin Winstead 3. What Are We Going to Eat?: Care and Feeding as Radical Method and Praxis Catherine Knight Steele 4. If You Teach it, They Will Come: Developing Pedagogy for Black DH Jessica H. Lu 5. When and How to Walk Away
Biography
Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland. She served as the founding director of the African American Digital Humanities initiative and now directs the Black Communication and Technology Lab and is Co-PI for the Mellon-funded Digital Inquiry Speculation Collaboration and Optimism Network.Dr. Steele's research has been published in journals such as Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies, and Television and New Media. She is the author of the award-winning Digital Black Feminism (2021).
Jessica H. Lu is Associate Director of the Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) living-learning program in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an Adjunct Professor in the Master's program in Engaged & Public Humanities at Georgetown University. She formerly served as a founding Postdoctoral Associate and, later, Assistant Director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative. Dr. Lu's research has been published in Rhetoric and Public Affairs and Information, Communication & Society, while her teaching pursues care- and justice-centered approaches to digital humanities, creative language practice, and technological innovation.
Kevin C. Winstead is a Project on Rhetorics of Equity, Access, Computation, and Humanities (PREACH) Lab Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He formerly served as the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Black Data Curation with the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. Kevin was the founding Project Manager for the African American Digital Humanities Initiative. Dr. Winstead’s research has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology Compass, and Critical Intersections in Contemporary Curriculum & Pedagogy. Kevin’s teaching focuses on restorative learning practices, justice-centered digital studies, and critical histories.
In just a few well-crafted chapters, the authors masterfully articulate a Black technocultural praxis through a centering of Black everyday life as the essence of the digital humanities. Orienting digital humanities to prioritize culture over tool use is a phenomenal recalibration of an overwhelmingly technical field, but Steele, Lu, and Winstead also present Black life as a source of theoretical reflection on itself. Taken as a whole, this book does much to enrich the futuristic and archival possibilities for Black culture that digital humanities has always promised but rarely delivered. An extraordinary work.
- André Brock author of Distributed BlacknessAttending to an ethics of institution building grounded in love for Black communities, and calling for an intentional critique of digital tools and technologies, this book is a gift, an offering, and a treasure. Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality is essential reading in the fields of Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies and for those invested in creating change within higher education.
- P. Gabrielle Foreman Founding Director, The Colored Conventions Project
