As the wheels turn... AADHum rolls along
As a place for Black digital studies and digital humanities at the University of Maryland, AADHum cultivates diverse communities of practice, sites wherein people can discover, make, evaluate, or even discard digital tools and methods in ways that assert the specificity, nuance, and intentionality of the stories they wish to tell. Our initiatives highlight our capacity to bridge humanistic inquiry with other kinds of practice, most notably immersive media, digital and physical craftworking, and design.
Intellectual Justice + Humanities Design
= #BlackDH @ AADHum
AADHum continues to cultivate an expansive and inclusive vision for what it means to explore and implement Black digital and experimental humanities thinking and modalities. This third phase focuses on enlarging the terms of scholarly practice while also highlighting possibilities for multilateral knowledge transfer and engagement in UMD’s regional communities.
AADHum’s demonstrated capacity to construct, in parallel, robust student to scholar pipelines, communities of care and practice, and innovative tools and methods, works in the service of our larger vision for more dynamic, inclusive, and justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production. For us this means:
- Using digital and analog craftwork to connect people to larger humanities questions
- Broadening approaches to technological access in Black communities
- Engaging audiences through methodological expansions of Black Study
- Sharing in explorations of storytelling through cutting-edge technologies, while also modeling how users might recognize and address technologies’ attendant ethical implications
From Clay
to Code
AADHum’s approach to humanities design reflects our sense that the things
Black people make and the stories they tell are critical to humanistic
traditions in the Americas in general. As a humanities design
incubator, we stem our methodology in the notion that digital and
experimental approaches are useful for representing, interpreting, and
archiving those stories. Much as how, in traditional humanities work, the
possibilities for any good idea are greatly amplified through research,
writing, and revision, at AADHum we emphasize explorations of digital and
material production underwritten by critical theory and historical
understanding.
In other words, we encourage our constituencies to think with their hands, using material practices of crafting as pathways into discovering use and purpose for digital technologies in their own work, from clay to code. Experimentation and interdisciplinarity have always been at the heart of Black expressivities, with artists and scholars constantly moving across ways and means, searching for better and more expressive tools. AADHum’s methods intentionally resonate with larger histories of Black representational strategies, enacting an inclusive vision for recognizing and expanding the work of Black intellectual traditions
Flow with
the Knowledge
We’re also motivated by how humanistic investigation and expression— articulating the big questions, making the big connections, excavating the local to add contour to the very idea of human life— is not solely a property of schools, the academy, nor of GLAM institutions— even at the level of practice. All kinds of people care about the humanities, even as they might use different modalities of expression for that care. AADHum 3 rethinks how knowledge flows, inspired by the places where Black people already come together to learn, think, and play. Through the initiatives enabled by this grant, we seek to:
- Trouble persistent assumptions in how higher-ed articulates the who , what, where, and how of humanities inquiry
- Encourage “thinkers” and “makers” to appreciate, respect, and learn from one another, in the interest of new kinds hybridized scholarly narratives
- Offer audiences new paths across the persistent racialized gaps— even within colleges and universities— that characterize access to opportunities attached to digital technologies
- Work alongside communities to increase participation in larger conversations around digital justice: In exploring both new digital and experimental storytelling tools, we are also co-creating and refining vocabularies through which communities might more easily identify and advocate for themselves as people invested in the possibilities and perils inhering in new technologies
Making
it Happen
By way of implementation, AADHum’s current initiatives can be distilled into four programmatic containers:
- Fellowships and residencies that expose our broad and diverse constituent base to cutting-edge work aligned with our digital and experimental storytelling workshops and humanities + design programs
- Specific programs like the Social Media Corps, Splash Fellow, and Project Igniter programs, which connect scholars across Black Studies to other kinds of design professionals— while also cultivating opportunities for students and community participants to find pathways into tech and humanities design
- A mobile Critical Making Labs program, featuring pop-up programming and a humanities ice cream truck— Big ideas, hands-on discovery, and… ice cream!
- Student microgrants, course development support, and a small inter-institutional sub-granting program, put in place to grow networks through the exchange of ideas and the sharing of grant resources
Learn more about AADHum’s team, communities, programs, and research @ https://aadhum.umd.edu
Learn more about AADHum’s methodological perspective:
Mitchell Cohen:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F05%2FParhammarisa.jpeg)
Learn more about our Phase 3 – our Mellon Foundation Grant!
AADHum