JITP Themed Issue 29 

Rethinking Making in the Digital Humanities: Critiques and Pedagogies That Transform

Issue Editors:

Nikki Fragala Barnes, University of Central Florida

Asma Neblett, CUNY Graduate Center

Kush Patel, Manipal Academy of Higher Education

 

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) call for Themed Issue 29 invites consideration of how critical discourses on making with digital and computing technology can serve as both an approach to and a form of scholarship. Within and beyond digital humanities (DH) cultures of makerspaces, pedagogy pop-ups, gamification, and experiential learning, we are interested in how making can be rooted in the ethics and politics of collaboration and transformative critiques; how maker-based pedagogies offer a lens for historical and theoretical reflection involving bodies, lands, and infrastructures both implicated in and impacted by making practices; how research through making shows up in the classroom, communities, and/or the world; and how making discourses are also discourses on labor, power, and colonial oppression. Together, these modes constitute a rethinking of how making scholarship bears upon contemporary social and disciplinary debates.

Specifically, for issue 29 JITP is seeking contributions that consider any one or more of the following questions—and those that may respond to this framing more broadly as well: 

• How do making epistemologies shape our use of and approaches to digital tools and techniques?
• How have we come to understand the form, constitution, genealogies, and politics of digital tools and techniques through making practices? 
• What transformations and shifts in thinking about bodies, technologies, practices, and spaces become possible with pedagogies of making—and unmaking?
• What new vocabularies of partnership, praxes of anti-oppression, and approaches to making labor visible emerge in and through making practices in the digital humanities?

Possible topics might include:

• Making that studies the relationship we have with our tools, research and practice fields, and communities.
• Feminist, Queer, and Trans making practices in and beyond the classroom.
• Local and culturally situated knowledge practices, including Indigenous practices and practices outside the commonplace Global North reference.
• Labor practices as explicit components of the work of community; efforts of creativity; and critical engines of remaking worlds.
• Critiques of and interventions within colonialist-capitalist infrastructures of making, especially against the exploitation of peoples, material resources, and knowledges in the Global South and Indigenous lands everywhere.
• Making as embodying humanistic questions at the core and constituting a frame for addressing, expressing, and mediating community histories and engaged pedagogies.
• Making not as a pivot to the so-called age of AI but one as modeling an epistemic view and critique of “the machine.”

Brief Guidelines for Submissions

Research-based submissions should include discussions of approach, method, and analysis. 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.

For further information on style and formatting, accessibility requirements, and multimedia submissions, consult 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 questions at [email protected].

Important Dates

The submission deadline for full manuscripts is June 5, 2026. Anticipated publication via Manifold Scholarship is December 2026. Please view our submission guidelines on Manifold for information about submitting to the Journal.

JITP Themed Issue 29 

Rethinking Making in the Digital Humanities: Critiques and Pedagogies That Transform

Issue Editors:

Nikki Fragala Barnes, University of Central Florida

Asma Neblett, CUNY Graduate Center

Kush Patel, Manipal Academy of Higher Education

 

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) call for Themed Issue 29 invites consideration of how critical discourses on making with digital and computing technology can serve as both an approach to and a form of scholarship. Within and beyond digital humanities (DH) cultures of makerspaces, pedagogy pop-ups, gamification, and experiential learning, we are interested in how making can be rooted in the ethics and politics of collaboration and transformative critiques; how maker-based pedagogies offer a lens for historical and theoretical reflection involving bodies, lands, and infrastructures both implicated in and impacted by making practices; how research through making shows up in the classroom, communities, and/or the world; and how making discourses are also discourses on labor, power, and colonial oppression. Together, these modes constitute a rethinking of how making scholarship bears upon contemporary social and disciplinary debates.

Specifically, for issue 29 JITP is seeking contributions that consider any one or more of the following questions—and those that may respond to this framing more broadly as well: 

• How do making epistemologies shape our use of and approaches to digital tools and techniques?
• How have we come to understand the form, constitution, genealogies, and politics of digital tools and techniques through making practices? 
• What transformations and shifts in thinking about bodies, technologies, practices, and spaces become possible with pedagogies of making—and unmaking?
• What new vocabularies of partnership, praxes of anti-oppression, and approaches to making labor visible emerge in and through making practices in the digital humanities?

Possible topics might include:

• Making that studies the relationship we have with our tools, research and practice fields, and communities.
• Feminist, Queer, and Trans making practices in and beyond the classroom.
• Local and culturally situated knowledge practices, including Indigenous practices and practices outside the commonplace Global North reference.
• Labor practices as explicit components of the work of community; efforts of creativity; and critical engines of remaking worlds.
• Critiques of and interventions within colonialist-capitalist infrastructures of making, especially against the exploitation of peoples, material resources, and knowledges in the Global South and Indigenous lands everywhere.
• Making as embodying humanistic questions at the core and constituting a frame for addressing, expressing, and mediating community histories and engaged pedagogies.
• Making not as a pivot to the so-called age of AI but one as modeling an epistemic view and critique of “the machine.”

Brief Guidelines for Submissions

Research-based submissions should include discussions of approach, method, and analysis. 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.

For further information on style and formatting, accessibility requirements, and multimedia submissions, consult 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 questions at [email protected].

Important Dates

The submission deadline for full manuscripts is June 5, 2026. Anticipated publication via Manifold Scholarship is December 2026. Please view our submission guidelines on Manifold for information about submitting to the Journal.