[Inés Vañó García (she/her/ella)]

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy

Themed Issue 24:

Digital Humanities: Labor, Political Economy, and Activism in the Age of Digital Mediation

Issue Editors:

Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue University

Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

Anna Alexis Larsson, Indiana University

 

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) seeks scholarly work at the intersection of technology with teaching, learning, and research for a special issue on Digital Humanities, labor, political economy, and activism. 

Given the uncertainties and potentials of academic labor in the twenty-first century, we welcome submissions that examine and interrogate the intersections of labor, class, and political economy within the Digital Humanities, broadly conceived.

Digital Humanities: Labor, Political Economy, and Activism in the Age of Digital Mediation

We are all digital humanists now: we are all interpellated as users of platforms, workers in the marketized university, subjects to a changing political and technological economy. The shifting relations between labor, technology, class, and political economy pose urgent questions for the pedagogy and the politics of teaching in the humanities. We confront an uncertain future for labor activism and organizing as technologies such as artificial intelligence threaten to replace, deskill, or enshittify entire swathes of the “knowledge economy” in academic as well as industrial contexts. Whether the current shifts in the economy tend towards “neofeudalism,” surveillance capitalism, or “Something Worse,”  they are profound. We see the disciplines and fields that make up the Digital Humanities as in dialectical relation to the changes and contradictions in the political economy around them, contradictions yet to be fully named and explored. We seek papers along two axes of the dialectic of theory and praxis, “Political Economies of the Digital” and “Synthesizing Political Resistance,” for a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. We especially welcome contributions from graduate students, non–tenure-track faculty, academic or tech union organizers, and staff within DH spaces.

1. Political Economies of the Digital in the Humanities

In the first cluster, we seek papers, manifestos, and creative works that take seriously political and economic critiques of DH teaching as embedded in neoliberal capitalism; the mediation of the human by digital technologies; and the mediation of specific fields and activities by the marketized university. Potential topics include:

• The role of academic labor in an era of austerity
• Practices of digital commoning in the neoliberal “university of excellence”
• Critical University Studies and DH 
• Political economy of DH
• Capitalist ideologies present in DH 
• Marxist and materialist theorizations of/and DH
• Intersections between economics and class, race, and/or gender in DH
• EdTech, the rhetoric of innovation, and DH
• Material costs of DH centers/initiatives
• The economics of grants in DH

2. Synthesizing Political Resistance

In the second cluster, we hope to synthesize one possible approach to the relationship between university labor and the digital. We seek papers, manifestos, and creative works that offer practical strategies and analysis of how to organize labor as a mode of resistance both within the university and within digital spaces.Topics of interest to this cluster:

• Graduate student / NTT organizing and the praxis of digital labor
• How to build cross-rank, cross-institutional, cross-rank solidarity
• Careerist structures of feeling and acting and how to collectivize them
• Practices of commoning and networks of care in pedagogical settings
• Labor organizing and DH
• Digital Humanities as a site of resistance

Brief Guidelines for Submissions

Research-based submissions should include discussions of approach, method, and analysis, so as to provide a teachable model for future researchers. When possible, research data should be made publicly available and accessible via the Web and/or other digital mechanisms, a process that JITP can and will support as necessary. Successes and interesting failures are equally welcome. Submissions that focus on pedagogy should balance theoretical frameworks with practical considerations of how new technologies play out in both formal and informal educational settings. Discipline-specific submissions should be written for non-specialists. Collective, collaborative, and/or multi-author forms of publication are welcome. 

For further information on style and formatting, accessibility requirements, and multimedia submissions, consult JITP’s accessibility guidelines, style guide, and multimedia submission guidelines.

 

Submission and Review Process

All work appearing in the Issues section of JITP is reviewed by the issue editors and independently by two scholars in the field who provide formative feedback to the author(s) during the review process. We practice signed, as opposed to anonymous or so-called “blind,” peer review. We intend that the journal itself—both in our process and in our digital product—serves as an opportunity to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practices.

As a courtesy to our reviewers, we will not consider simultaneous submissions, but we will do our best to reply to you within three months of the submission deadline. The expected length for finished manuscripts is under 5,000 words or an equivalent length or scope for timed or other forms of media (e.g. roughly 20–25 minutes of dialogue, 45 minutes of a spoken presentation, etc.). Both text-based and multimedia should be prepared to undergo review for their relationship to scholarly and related conversations, as well as be amenable to revision. All work should be original and previously unpublished. Essays or presentations posted on a personal blog may be accepted, provided they are substantially revised. Please contact us with any questions at admin@jitpedagogy.org. 

Important Dates

Submission deadline for full manuscripts is 15 June 2024. Anticipated publication via Manifold Scholarship is December 2024. 

Please view our submission guidelines for information about submitting to JITP.

This topic was also posted in: Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL's), Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), CUNY Distance Learning Archive, CUNY Technology Group, Digital Humanities Initiative, Digital Media Studies Group - Forum, Futures Initiative, GC Digital Initiatives at the CUNY Graduate Center, GC Humanidades Digitales, GC Online, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (Public Group), New Media Lab - Forum, Open Pedagogy Fellows, Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant Recipients, Teaching and Learning Center, The WAC Resource Center, Transformative Learning in the Humanities, CUNY GC ITP Program - Forum.

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