Last April I was thrilled to present a talk titled “Networks of Injustice: Reflections on Teaching Digital Public History and Data Literacy” as part of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) speaker series. Thanks so much to the DEFCon team for inviting me to participate here, and double thanks to Roopika Risam for introducing me and for facilitating our Q&A.
Here’s the talk description:
How can our approaches to data literacy reveal and resist extractive and dehumanizing ideas and uses of data? Where and how can we model best practices in more deliberate, collaborative, and community-centered methods of digital public history in the classroom? This talk focuses on “Mapping Violence,” a 2020 undergraduate ethnic studies course co-taught by Monica Muñoz Martinez, Jim McGrath, and Edwin Rodriguez at Brown University on histories and legacies of state-sanctioned racial violence at the Texas and Mexico borders in the early twentieth century. My hope is that these reflections will inform a more general conversation about pedagogical collaborations, assignment development and scaffolding, and creating conditions of care and support for students in courses at the intersection of digital humanities and ethnic studies.
You can view a recording of the talk on YouTube (or via the embed below).
It was great to look back on the Spring 2020 “Mapping Violence” course and to reflect on my time with this project while I was a postdoc at Brown. I also have a book chapter documenting these experiences that is part of a collection under contract; more details on that down the road!
Additional Links of Potential Interest
Mapping Violence Links
“Networks of Injustice” presentation slides (Google Slides)
“Mapping Violence” Spring 2020 Course Syllabus (Monica Muñoz Martinez, Jim McGrath, and Edwin Rodrigues, Brown University)
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Monica Muñoz Martinez, Harvard UP)
“Mapping Segregated Histories of Racial Violence” (Monica Muñoz Martinez, American Quarterly)
“Mapping Violence: A Case Study on Project Development, Iterative Approaches to Data Collection and Visualization, and Collaborative Work with Undergraduates” (Jim McGrath, The Design for Diversity Learning Toolkit; 2019)
“Monica Muñoz Martinez Is Setting the Record Straight on Texas’s History of Border Violence” (Texas Monthly, September 2021)
Further Reading (texts and projects referenced in talk)
“The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes” (Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, Slate)
“The Border” (The Baffler; three-part series by Michelle García referenced in talk)
Brown & Slavery & Justice (Brown University)
Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (Margaret Burnham et al, Northeastern University School of Law)
“Editing The Gray Lady” (@nyt_diff, Twitter account)
Lynching in America (Equal Justice Initiative)
Lynching in Texas (Jeffrey Littlejohn et al, Sam Houston State University)
“Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” (Jessica Marie Johnson, Social Text)
“The mass graves of Tulsa” (Ranjani Chakraborty, Vox)
Monitor da Violência (G1, Center for the Study of Violence at University of São Paulo, Brazilian Forum of Public Security)
“Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (Ed. Lisa Gitelman, MIT Press)
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Project Gutenberg link to full text)
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Penguin Random House)
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (bell hooks, Routledge)
Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 (NAACP, Internet Archive link to full text)