Digital Humanities Caucus Scholarly Panel: To Engage, Mobilize, or Refuse - Disassembling Improvisation

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Improvisation has long functioned as an integral feature of the Black Digital Humanities. Even when indexed under other key terms, it animates concepts, projects, and praxis including “hashtag activism as digital practice,” “digital space as a locus for the (im)possible” (“A Fugitive's Reflections,” Taller Electric Marronage), and “minimal computing” (Gil and Rissam, 2022). Across these frameworks, the capacity to create under and beyond the constraints of institutionalized precarity, racism, sexism, and erasure has been central. Such practices do more than introduce new theoretical questions that unsettle implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital humanities; they also enact forms of work that exceed, and at times refuse, the limits of the institution itself. Bringing together experiments, projects, and papers on sound, history, Artificial Intelligence and community praxis, this panel turns to ongoing work to disassembling the conference theme of improvisation by tracing the ways in which practitioners improvise and mobilize, or refuse, seemingly fleeting gestures, or the ephemeral, to build towards critical change.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nadejda Jahi Webb, Johns Hopkins University

Panelists

• Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, University of Chicago

• Kyle Lindsey, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Casidy B Campbell, Barnard College

• Kaillee K Coleman, Tulane University of Louisiana

• raney antoine, Loyola University New Orleans

Biographical Information

Pyar Seth is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Kyle Lindsey is a Ph.D. candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil is a dramaturg, community educator, and Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago.

Skylar Jones is a New Orleans native and an undergraduate student at the University of Notre Dame, where she is obtaining her degree in Gender Studies with a minor in Global Health.

Kaillee Coleman is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies and Art History at Tulane University.

Casidy Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.