The DEFCon Speaker Series returns on Monday, April 25th at 5:00pm Eastern/2:00pm Pacific with a talk by Dr. Jim McGrath, whose work at the intersections of digital humanities, public history, and digital pedagogy has been celebrated for the creative ways it brings together faculty, students, and community partners to tell new stories.
Networks of Injustice: Reflections on Teaching Digital Public History and Data Literacy
How can our approaches to data literacy reveal and resist extractive and dehumanizing ideas and uses of data? Where and how can we model best practices in more deliberate, collaborative, and community-centered methods of digital public history in the classroom? This talk focuses on “Mapping Violence,” a 2020 undergraduate ethnic studies course co-taught by Monica Muñoz Martinez, Jim McGrath, and Edwin Rodriguez at Brown University on histories and legacies of state-sanctioned racial violence at the Texas and Mexico borders in the early twentieth century. My hope is that these reflections will inform a more general conversation about pedagogical collaborations, assignment development and scaffolding, and creating conditions of care and support for students in courses at the intersection of digital humanities and ethnic studies.
Bio: Dr. Jim McGrath is a white academic living and working on the lands of the Massachusett and Pawtucket peoples. He is currently an Instructional Designer at Salem State University and a Faculty Associate in Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. He has worked on several digital public humanities projects, including Mapping Violence, The Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive, and Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive. His writing has appeared in Doing Public Humanities (Routledge, 2020), American Quarterly, The Public Historian, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Reviews in Digital Humanities. More information on Jim can be found at his personal website, and he is on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.
