We are beyond excited to welcome Dr. Roopika Risam to campus next week! Join us for her talk on September 20th, 2018 at 5pm in Northen Auditorium. Refreshments will be served.
Historicizing the College Color Line: Digital Humanities, Activism, and the Campus Climate
As our students renew demands for equity and justice on their campuses, how can digital humanities be engaged to address the college color line? Risam begins this talk by exploring the complicated relationship between digital humanities, public scholarship, and activism through her work on the Torn Apart/Separados team. She then considers how digital humanities can be used to assist activist-minded students in addressing pressing issues of race on our college campuses, based on her work at Salem State University. While Risam urges caution against quick conflation of digital humanities and activism, she argues that its methods can be effective tools for shedding light on histories of campus activism and supporting today’s student activists.
Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English, Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives, and Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, and Coordinator of the Secondary English Education BA/M.Ed. Program at Salem State University. Risam is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Worlds in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP) and co-editor of The Digital Black Atlantic for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). She is the director of the NEH and IMLS-funded Regional Comprehensive Digital Humanities Network and co-founder of Reanimate (http://reanimatepublishing.org), an intersectional feminist publishing collective. Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Popular Communications, South Asian Review, and College and Undergraduate Libraries, among others. Risam is also a recent recipient of the Massachusetts Library Association’s Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record. More information and her CV is available at http://roopikarisam.com.