We Live in a time of Black and Brown erasure, even as emergent digital technologies are lauded as promising tools for visibility, mobilization, and liberation. As researchers in a digitized and interconnected world - where the boundaries between our virtual and "real life" contexts are increasingly blurred and where our understanding of our humanity is constantly mediated through digital artifacts and too.s - we are presented with pressing questions:
- What are your responsibiliites in representing communities at the margins, in articulating and preserving their desires, their struggles, their suffering, their resistance?
- Can we, as researchers, ever know what our communites want, desire, or need?
- Who can be known across the digital and analog spaces? How?
- How do we ask our communities to present to us, and what then are the modalities in which that can most effectively be (re)presented?
- What is true or good or honest or generative about these (re)presentations?
Overall, the aim of this course is to interrogate the affordances and constraints nf methodological tools - namely, GIS mapping and web-scraping - provided by the digital humanities and beyond to collaboratively create a class project that investigates human resistance, struggle, desire, and yearning for liberation. The course will culminate in an exhibition of our work where we examine what it means to visualize history and curate/(re)present the lives of people at the margins.