Professor: Maria Dikcis

Th - 12:45 pm to 2:45 pm

This course will introduce students to critical race approaches to digital culture, primarily through Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx perspectives on and experiences with settler colonialism, racial capitalism, state violence, war, and empire. Together, we will explore how racial formations in the U.S. have shaped and been shaped by the infrastructures and interfaces of our digital world, as well as how communities of color give voice to their histories, desires, and creativity through digital cultural production. To guide our explorations, each week we will examine several projects that foreground the intersection between race, politics, and culture, including curated digital archives, mapping projects, database storytelling, network visualizations, born-digital literature, and longform, media-rich journalism. Additionally, this course is designed to be very hands-on and oriented toward digital humanistic research (also known as Digital Humanities) as an applied field of knowledge. Students will therefore have the opportunity to experiment with and engineer their own digital tools that center communities of color. (No prior technical knowledge is required.)