Digital Humanities Caucus Professionalization Panel: Surviving change – notes on resistance and compromise.

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

As critical scholars working within neoliberal and U.S. imperial academic centers, we are familiar with the compromises and questions of complicity that accompany institutional life. This session invites senior scholars to reflect on how they navigate shifting demands of the academy, from institutional compliance with troubling political projects to the widespread and often uncritical adoption of AI technologies in teaching and research. The session will begin with a brief conversation among senior scholars from R1s, teaching-intensive institutions, SLACs, and community colleges about how they improvise responses to these pressures within differently resourced environments. This discussion will set the stage for small-group or one-on-one mentoring conversations pairing senior scholars with junior scholars and other attendees. These exchanges will support candid discussion of professional challenges, career navigation, and strategies for sustaining critical research and teaching, while fostering professional connections and practical approaches to navigating academic life during a period of institutional change and uncertainty.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• David Adelman, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Panelists

• Khanh Vo, Brown University

• Kevin C. Winstead, University of Florida

• Jennifer N Ross, University of Toronto

• George Hoagland, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

• Mollie Godfrey, James Madison University

Biographical Information

David Adelman (he/him/his) holds a PhD in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a lecturer in the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, and through the DISCO Network, he is a collaborator with the Digital Accessible Futures lab. His research interests center disability and crip studies, with a particular emphasis on disability media studies, digital disability cultures, and critical sexuality studies. Through an interdisciplinary crip studies/feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, technology, and desire.

Khanh Vo is a historian, digital humanist, and educator in American history, digital and spatial humanities, STS, games studies, and material culture. Her primary research explores machine labor as it pertains to questions of race, gender, and design. She is the Digital Humanities Specialist in the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University. She was the 2022-23 Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. She completed her doctorate in American Studies in 2021 at William & Mary.

Dr. Kevin C. Winstead is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and AI Studies within the African American Studies program and Sociology department at the University of Florida. Dr. Winstead’s in-progress book-length manuscript, Sankofa Cyberculture: Black Digital Activism and Disinformation, builds on his decade-long research into the Movement for Black Lives and foreign actors’ attempts to influence the American political process.

Dr. Jennifer Ross is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, of Digital Humanities and
Writing jointly appointed between Woodsworth College and the Transitional Year Programme
at the University of Toronto. Jennifer's research centers on contemporary American
literature, digital humanities, literary and cultural theory, and critical disaster and terrorism
studies. Her book manuscript, "Insurgents on the Bayou: Hurricane Katrina,
Counterterrorism, and Literary Dissent on America's Gulf Coast," explores forms of political
resistance put forward in literature and film produced after the flooding of New Orleans in
2005, while new research examines counterterror tactics in U.S. domestic governance and
policing. In 2020-2021, Jennifer was awarded the JHI/CLIR Digital Humanities
Postdoctoral Fellowship.