DH9: Digital Humanities in Practice
About
Building on our series of workshops in 2021–22, in 2022–23 this working group will continue to lay the foundation for a multi-year digital storytelling and oral history project with BIPOC students and alumni of the University of Rochester and Syracuse University. This project will focus on our own institutions' racist pasts in order to envision and enact new institutional futures.
Open to New People
Active since: 2018
- University of Rochester
Collaborative Goals
In 2021–22 our working group held a series of workshops on digital storytelling and project building, with a focus on issues of marginalization, representation, and allyship. Over the course of the workshops, we explored how stories of the past might help us to envision and enact new institutional futures. In 2022–23 our working group plans to continue this work in order to lay the foundation for a multi-year digital storytelling and oral history project with BIPOC students and alumni of the University of Rochester and Syracuse University. At a moment when our institutions (like many others) are making swift and sweeping structural and curricular changes in the name of racial justice, our institutions’ racial and racist pasts are at risk of being forgotten, whether by accident or on purpose. One of the primary aims of this project, then, is to acknowledge that our institutions’ racist pasts live on among both those who lived through them and those who currently participate in the institution—and that it is only through acknowledging this that we can envision and enact truly just and equitable institutional futures.
Group Organizers
Anaar Desai-Stephens
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology; Affiliate Faculty, Susan B. Anthony Institute, University of Rochester
Activities
Digital Storytelling and Alternative Institutional Histories: Part II
Nov. 5, 2021, 2 p.m.
Digital Storytelling Workshop
Sept. 24, 2021, 2 p.m.
Group Outcomes
Our Working Group explored how we might develop a multi-year digital storytelling and oral history project centered on how to understand our own pasts and envision new institutional futures. Our events, which brought together people already engaged in this kind of collaborative work, provided both an inspiration and useful blueprint for how to move from theory to practice. We are still at the planning stage and intend to explore next steps during the next academic year. Our activities helped us to clarify our questions and vision.
Beyond this, the workshops expanded our network at the University of Rochester and beyond. The workshops put us in touch with a range of individuals differently situated across the institution who share an interest in public digital humanities and digital storytelling with a focus on equity. By asking people to sign up in advance, we ended up with a long list of people interested in this kind of work. The workshops also exposed graduate students to people doing archival, strategic, and collaborative community work in non-academic or academic adjacent spaces.