Events

“Against Microcredentials: Seeding Anti-Colonial and Care-Filled Digital Pedagogical Otherwises” Project Showcase at Virtual GlobalDH 2023 | Wednesday, March 15 | 10-10:30am ET

Presenters: Ashley Caranto Morford (PAFA), Kush Patel (Srishti Manipal), and Arun Jacob (U Toronto)

Register to attend Virtual GlobalDH 2023 at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMnkFGtF16kOJmaYBD0d3cVEB6zZXJ0CD_5mugPpFMOGswMw/viewform

In this project showcase, we discuss the seeds of a free, virtual, global, and ongoing digital humanities (DH) school committed to anti-colonial digital pedagogy and praxis. This school seeks to challenge and work against the institutional defaults of DH, which perpetuate colonialism and border imperialism in DH by centering elite, white, Brahmanical, and Western-centric knowledge production within resource-rich infrastructures. We wish, instead, to foster a learning environment and collective that is sustainable, nourishing, responsible, and equitable. As we will reflect on, amidst the process of creating such a space, we have been contending with the following questions: How might we build a globally accessible virtual DH school committed to anti-colonialism where socially conscious, civic minded material can be pedagogically engaged with the lived locations and material realities of those who are traditionally on the margins of DH knowledge production, especially precariously employed educators, community organizers, autodidacts, international students, disabled community members, and those residing outside of Western nation-states? What form of resistance might such a school offer to and against the increasingly global, micro-credential centered, and skillification focused approaches to open pedagogy in DH, wherein digital competencies are packaged as key instruments that will instill DH learners with the vocational skills to compete in the capitalist market? In conversation with contemporaneous initiatives seeking to build more just otherwises to digital learning practices, we will conclude this showcase with a discussion on what is at stake in how microcredential approaches to DH threaten to unbundle digital pedagogies from the anti-oppressive care practices that critical educators and community organizers around the world are engaged in, committed to, and working to uphold.