Adeline Koh, a visiting faculty fellow at Duke and assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, and Roopika Risam, a PhD candidate at Emory, have launched a new site dedicated to “Global explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability within cultures of technology.” The site includes Founding Principles (including alt genealogies of DH), a call for submissions, and a Mission Statement.
What is postcolonial DH? As Koh and Risam outline in the site’s mission statement:
Grounded in the literary, philosophical, and historical heritage of postcolonial studies and invested in the possibilities offered by digital humanities, we position postcolonial digital humanities as an emergent field of study invested in decolonizing the digital, foregrounding anti-colonial thought, and disrupting salutatory narratives of globalization and technological progress. We have three major goals: to define the postcolonial digital humanities, to locate ways postcolonial studies can and should shift in response to digital changes and challenges, and to write alternative genealogies of the digital humanities.
We note that defining the digital humanities is highly contested (Kirschenbaum, Fitzpatrick, Spiro, Svensson, Alvarado, Scheinfeldt, Gavin and Smith in Debates in the Digital Humanities; also see a community definition of the digital humanities in the Day of Digital Humanities 2012). For our purposes, our working definition of the digital humanities is a set of methodologies engaged by humanists to use, produce, teach, and analyze culture and technology.
Beyond the new Postcolonial Digital Humanities site, Koh and Risam administer the #DHPoco tumblr and can be found on Twitter @dhpoco.
