LSU Digital Scholarship Lab Hosts Talk and Workshop on Social Justice and Social Justice and Digital Humanities October 24 and 25

LSU’s Digital Scholarship Lab invites you to attend the upcoming digital humanities events by guest speaker Angel Nieves, who will offer a talk and a workshop about his work on race, social justice, and digital humanities.

Talk 

“Intersectional Cartographies: Social Justice,
Digital Humanities Practices, and 3D Visual Heritage in Soweto, Johannesburg” 
When: Monday, 10/24, 11am-12:15pm
Where: Hill Memorial Library 

Nieves’s talk will address the question: Can digital reconstructions of difficult histories be used to harness the tools of restorative social justice in a preservation-based practice that combines both tangible and intangible heritage? Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Digital humanities may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories. The layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, the endangered nature of those archives across South Africa – in particular, those related to the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976.   

 Digital Pedagogy Workshop 

“Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods” 
When: Tuesday, 10/25, 10am-12pm
Where: Middleton Library, Room 295 (Dean’s Conference Room) 

Nieves’s workshop will show how – through an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and CRT (Critical Race Theory) framework – both race and social justice can be central to digital humanities teaching, pedagogy, and practice. The workshop will pay special attention to queer theory, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, WOC/Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and disability studies as they currently help to reshape digital humanities teaching and methods across our university/college classrooms. 

Angel David Nieves is an Associate Professor at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y. and is Director of the American Studies and Cinema & Media Studies Programs there. He is also Co-Director of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) which is recognized as a DH leader among small-liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. He is also a Research Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.