Editors’ Note

Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano

Welcome to the November 2024 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities. We hope that you are all taking care of yourselves and your communities in light of the turmoil and uncertainty in the world right now. The kinds of interventions featured in this month’s issue, a topic issue on “Digital Pedagogy as Feminist Worldmaking” edited by our social justice pedagogy topic editors Danica Savonick and Kush Patel, are filled with visions for new worlds, and we hope you’ll find inspiration within them.

We’re grateful to Danica and Kush for their keen editorial vision and leadership. The clarity with which they articulate the stakes of social justice pedagogy is especially powerful. Their collaboration and this important issue of Reviews that has emerged from it is precisely the kind of work that we hoped our experiment with topic editors would facilitate. We hope you enjoy reading.

Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Want us to review your project? Contact the editors, Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, by email or through the Twitter, Bluesky, or Mastadon hashtag #ReviewsInDH.  

Topic Editors’ Note

Danica Savonick and Kush Patel

This is the first of two special issues on digital pedagogy as feminist worldmaking: how people are using digital technologies to facilitate learning that challenges social oppression and builds more just, equitable, and pleasurable worlds. By “feminist,” we mean to signal an anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, anti-caste, anti-queerphobic, anti-transphobic, and anti-ableist feminism informed by the work of scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa, micha cárdenas, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Marisa Elena Duarte (Yacqui/Chicana), bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gail Omvedt, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

The projects in these special issues build on longstanding collaborative discussions about teaching, learning, technology, and social justice. Ever since the early 2000s, organizations and collectives like the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (2001), HASTAC (2002), The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) (2011), and FemTechNet (2012) have brought together educators, scholars, activists, teachers, and artists to discuss the ways that new digital technologies both exacerbate and can challenge social inequities and injustice, and how best to teach and learn about these issues. In more recent years, transnational networks like the Whose Knowledge? Network (2018) have continued these efforts by centering the knowledges of minoritized communities, both online and offline, and by working to construct a feminist internet across the Global South. For readers interested in learning more about feminist digital pedagogy, we recommend Roopika Risam’s chapter on “Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” in New Digital Worlds (2019), articles in JITP, including the recent special issue on “bell hooks’s Liberatory Legacy,” and the entries on “Digital Divides,” “Disability,” “Gender,” “Intersectionality,” “Queer,” “Race,” “Sexuality,” and “Social Justice” in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (2020).

As editors, we selected projects that did at least one of the following:

• challenge patriarchal power inequities in learning spaces and in society;

• expand access to transformative learning beyond the boundaries erected by capitalism, racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism;     

• aim to effect material, cultural, and political change, including through embodied and situated practices;

• foreground marginalized and suppressed histories of movement-, institution-, infrastructure-, and self-building;

• honor pedagogical traditions, and the work of those who came before us, so that we can learn from, align with, and build upon, each other’s efforts; and

• offer concrete ways to imagine and collaboratively build alternative digital spaces, archives, technologies, support communities, and even alternatives to the internet as we know it.

In addition to meeting one or more of the aforementioned criteria, the projects in these issues also reflect our editorial values. They value the process, as well as products, of learning; address teaching both within and beyond formal institutions and in varied geographical locations; consider material contingencies, power disparities, vulnerability, and the historical dominance of whiteness and upper casteness and their connections to patriarchy; emphasize creativity, care, and joy; embrace the unpredictable and unwieldy nature of learning; invite reflections on intersectional feminist digital humanities pedagogies across differences; recognize digital infrastructures that allow feminist pedagogies and projects to take shape, participate in strategy-sharing, and, following the writings of Indigenous scholars, return the question of the digital to the land and body.

Feminist pedagogy encourages radical collaborations across borders and differences. But as we bring this issue into the world, we also want to acknowledge the historic and ongoing forces that impede such efforts. There can be no such collaborations with our Palestinian colleagues while Israel’s settler colonial genocide destroys their lives, families, homes, cultural records, and learning institutions. The possibilities for collective study are also attenuated by an ongoing pandemic that has disproportionately harmed women, people of color, and Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, disabled, working class, and Global South communities.

The projects in these issues help us better understand the uneven distribution of resources, care, health, and safety along embodied axes of difference. They highlight intellectual traditions we can use to navigate and challenge the structural violences of our present. They also document histories of resistance to destructive forces and preserve the stories of activists — lessons from the past that we can learn from and build on today. 

In this issue, we include:

• Feminist Freedom Warriors, a digital video oral history archive of conversations between the project’s creators, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty, and activists involved in anti-capitalist, anti-racist feminist struggles, reviewed by Kayla Abner;

• Nursing Clio, a collaborative blog about the history of gender and medicine, directed by Sarah Handley-Cousins, Jacqueline Antonovich, Vicki Daniel and RE Fulton, and reviewed by Dominique Tobbell;

• Black Diasporic Visions: (De)Constructing Modes of Black Power, a collaborative publication and open educational resource on Black liberatory thought created by graduate students and their instructors, directed by Javiela Evangelista and Carla Shedd, and reviewed by Maia L. Butler; and

• Celebrating Simms: The Story of the Lucy F. Simms School, a physical exhibit and website dedicated to the history of African American educator Lucy F. Simms and the Virginia School named in her honor, directed by Mollie Godfrey and Sean McCarthy, and reviewed by Brian Daugherity.