Digital Humanities: Labor, Political Economy, and Activism in the Age of Digital Mediation

Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue University

Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia (2016) issued a challenge to the field of academic scholarship known broadly as digital humanities (DH), claiming that its most “significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” In this view, the digital humanities have leveraged the prevailing ideology of technological determinism, derived from Silicon Valley, into a profitable and privileged position within the neoliberal university. While much of that polemic is perhaps outdated —hailing us from a time before the latest rise of white nationalism, before COVID-19, before generative AI, before worsening environmental crises around the world—the underlying critique it articulates is worth revisiting. How has DH fared in the 21st century? How should we understand the political economy of the field?

The eight years since the publication of this article have witnessed seismic contortions. Donald Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 inaugurated a surge of hateful white supremacy and political extremism; upheaval of our politics is paralleled, at the time of this writing, by Hurricane Helene’s unimaginable devastation of the Atlantic seaboard, exacerbated by climate change. We have navigated a global pandemic, which killed millions around the world, and are witnessing the influence of artificial intelligence in every aspect of online life. During this time, we have also witnessed universities and colleges closing humanities departments at an unprecedented scale as a response to economic mismanagement.

Where and how does DH fit into all these historical crises of political, economic, social, and ecological processes? How can political economy help us remap the contours of a field uniquely poised to leverage an immanent critique of the neoliberal technological determinism of our moment? Despite substantial investment from digital humanists in advancing the field to include more critical engagement on questions of identity, race, gender, sexual identity, and colonialism, we believe that a dedicated emphasis on the political economy of DH as a field, as part of the digital mediation of the university and economy as a whole, has yet to be fully theorized. We hope this special issue will generate further theory and discourse about the political and economic dimensions of the field, especially as it pertains to activism and pedagogy.

In many ways, we are all digital humanists now. The old divisions between digital makers, hackers, critics, and other workers in the metric-driven university no longer hold. All university workers are interpellated as subjects of self-managing technologies, content-creators on university platforms, intellectual profiteers in marketized education, and academic brand-promoters. We all confront an uncertain future for our labor and organizing, from the threat of deskilling from AI writing and pedagogy to the enshittification of entire swathes of the knowledge economy. We thus need to position the disciplines and field conversations of the Digital Humanities in dialectical relation to changes and contradictions in the political economy of the university as well as the global economy. Those who are most affected by such changes are the “graduate students, undergraduates, staff, librarians, instructors, and lecturers around the country [who] are engaged in labor actions with little public commentary or support from DH professional organizations to which they belong,” as Matthew Hannah (2023) notes in “Towards a Political Economy of Digital Humanities” (15).

Mapping the political economy of DH requires an analysis of the material, economic, and ideological dimensions of the field as it is situated in the context of higher education. Such an analysis must look to the field of critical university studies, to work such as Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: the Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008), and ultimately to Marxist political economic critique: this means attending to the material dynamics that shape how we conceptualize and produce new knowledge as a process of labor. Mapping the terrain of such economic realities can produce moments of resistance or mitigation. This requires us to understand DH as part of the determinations of our moment of platform capitalism and the politics of the information society. As Nick Srnicek (2017, 6) argues, “capitalism has turned to data as one way to maintain economic growth . . . the platform has emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data.” Both platform capitalism and EdTech financial speculation are ways for capital to find new territories to exploit under a stagnating late capitalism; these formations come with new ideologies and social relations meant to sustain it, ideologies and relations which we must understand and contest. This is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence, which has produced a wide range of research that promises to infuse criticality into AI, but which may simply reproduce the technological utopianism of Silicon Valley, whether at the level of conscious planning or unconscious imitation.

Such a commitment to theorizing the political economy of DH responds to the specific challenges facing us today by centering the infrastructural and economic dynamics that impact our teaching and scholarship. A political economy of DH seeks to understand the platform capitalism and metricized neoliberal university logics that DH (and every other field) is imbricated in, logics which have downstream effects on our teaching and research. But digital pedagogy can also leverage digital platforms and knowledge commons for the humanities more broadly. In this issue, Maura McCreight argues that some online platforms can be leveraged to foster “critical and open-ended inquiry,” offering a case study for transforming humanities education through implementing CUNY Manifold as a platform instead of traditional Learning Management Systems. Shifting the site for access to information establishes new information flows that may circumnavigate the large, expensive, and institutionally regulated systems that control access to knowledge.

Even as our pedagogies are transformed by EdTech attention-marketization, digital pedagogy can provide modes of resistance to neoliberalism. Cindy Nguyen describes her experience teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic as a moment to reimagine and dream about what digital pedagogy could be in times of crisis. Her article draws on feminist and decolonial theory and praxis to advance a model for pedagogy in uncertain times, promoting care, kinship, slowness, and play as pillars for DH pedagogy. Nguyen argues that teaching DH opens a radical potential for critique but also to “worldbuild and ambitiously reimagine alternative social worlds.” Such a dream of pedagogy that is antagonistic to the internal logics of neoliberal capitalism—speed, efficiency, productivity—suggests possibilities for DH more broadly to engage critically with the technological determinism to which it is often reduced. A resistance pedagogy that centers on what Catherine Denial (2024) calls the “pedagogy of kindness” will be all the more integral to support students during the next few years.

Indeed, mapping the impacts of platform capitalism on digital pedagogy proves to be an essential part of the political economy of DH. In his contribution to this special issue, Brandon Walsh transforms the economics of neoliberal higher education into pedagogy, using the financialization of the university, and a budget for digital humanities work in particular, as a site for collective understanding about the economic infrastructure of education. Walsh argues that institutions “are spaces of enormous financial uncertainty for many in their communities” and, at the same time, obscure financial and economic decisions that have a massive impact on students, faculty, and staff. Using the DH classroom as a site for political education, Walsh maps the political economy of the university, advancing “budget pedagogy” as a response to the opaque logics of neoliberal austerity.

If platform capitalism is an essential feature of our neoliberal university environments, the role of artificial intelligence promises to have an outsized impact on the work we do as digital humanists, offering both promise and peril. Even as digital humanists scramble to carve out a piece of the AI pie through grant funding, we must consider the sociopolitical impact of such technologies, and their role as catalysts for disintermediation, deskilling, and dehumanization. Salmaan Khan responds to this challenge through a set of tactics designed to use generative artificial intelligence to counter pedagogies based on what Paulo Freire called the “banking model” of education. Even as there are significant challenges produced by AI, Khan and others demonstrate models for digital humanists to leverage such tools for more engaged and critical learning.

Whereas most of the articles in this special issue theorize the classroom as a space for imagining new modes of resistance to neoliberalism, contributions from Estee Beck and Hannah Taylor, Jacob Richter, and Haley Schwartz respectively address the impact of generative artificial intelligence on academic labor itself, arguing that such tools will worsen existing working conditions for precarious labor within the university. While AI may provide new tools in our classrooms, as Khan argues, there are also substantial risks that such tools will replace human labor. “AI-driven technologies such as adaptive learning systems, automated grading platforms, and content development tools are becoming more prevalent,” Beck warns, “reducing the need for human instructors.” To respond, Beck argues we must organize our labor to mitigate and perhaps even resist the rise of AI, and her contribution outlines practical tactics for such organizing.

“Addressing the fissure between techno-critical DH perspectives and corporate-university initiatives around AI,” Taylor, Richter, and Schwartz contend, “allows for institutions to better anticipate the impact of emerging technologies while better optimizing how they are ethically used in classrooms, programs, and pedagogies.” Advancing a “ground up” approach to AI in higher education centers the critical, labor-focused perspectives of educators rather than the “techno-solutionist” frameworks which so many institutions deploy in making decisions about new tools and platforms. Instead of rushing to implement the latest technology into every aspect of higher education, they argue we must instead include perspectives from digital humanists and theorists of the digital whose work foregrounds crucial, ethical questions about technology.

In this special issue of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, digital humanists begin to examine the political economy of DH in an effort to assess how the field has responded or could respond to such crises. We seek to adapt a form of political economic critique that does not simply turn away from radical transformations of production happening now, nor the market logics of our institutions, but rather integrates that critique into a self-reflective analysis of DH within our moment of neoliberal capitalism. We see these essays as the sort of economic-and-political critique that we need in DH, a critique also developed in Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley’s (2024) analysis of “the university as service.” Digital humanities workers and theorists are working through a political economic critique at the level of classroom, the assignment, the budget spreadsheet, and the LMS. These essays engage the political economy of the university in the mode of immanent materialist critique. In his discussion of critical theory, David Harvey (1990) articulates the dynamics of such an analysis:

[I]mmanent critique tests the postulates of orthodoxy by the latter's own standards of proof and accuracy. Upon 'entering' the theory, orthodoxy's premises and assertions are registered and certain strategic contradictions located. These contradictions are then developed according to their own logic, and at some point in this process of internal expansion, the one-sided proclamations of orthodoxy collapse as material instances and their contradictions are allowed to develop “naturally.” (5)

Each author is a practitioner of DH, working within this field, while also exposing and articulating the contradictions within our field, and within neoliberal educational institutions. Unlike some critics of DH, who imagine themselves as victims of neoliberalism rather than as proponents of it, immanent critique collapses the orthodoxy of claims about DH facilitating neoliberal objectives, instead positioning practitioners to critique and contest from within. This collection of provocations thus asks us to consider the radical potential of critique from within DH, and seeks ways to imagine technologies that intervene in and transform a troubled world.

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