Black Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Praxis

In the recent past, black people have created and utilized a variety of digital spaces and media to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be human. How do we as scholars, educators, librarians and archivists use specific cases and experiences to teach habits of critical thought and practice about the intersections between race and technology? This talk is at once a theoretical and practical reflection on an Africana/Black Studies-centered approach to the digital humanities in and outside the classroom. It, then, is a forum for considering the black digital humanities as the use of digital tools and platforms to teach and produce scholarship about the complex histories, societies, and cultures of people of African descent in the United States, Africa and the larger Diaspora. However, I hope to also think about the black digital humanities as concerned with how theories of race and blackness come to bear on and transform technological activity and processes, affording us opportunities to ask new and different questions about humanity.

Speakers

Kim Gallon
Kim Gallon
Assistant Professor of HistoryPurdue University

Dr. Kim Gallon is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. She is also the founder and director of the Black Press Research Collective and an ongoing visiting scholar at the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century black press. She is also the recipient of several major digital humanities grants to develop digital projects on the black press and create deeper connections between Africana/Black Studies and the digital humanities.