Feminist Decolonial Futures: Tactics of Teaching Digital Humanities

Introduction

I bring the words and dreams of our collective Feminist Trouble together in dialogue with critical pedagogy in digital humanities teaching to offer transparent praxis and justice-based mutual aid in pedagogical labor. I resist the perpetuation of capitalistic, zero-sum, neoliberal pursuit of pedagogical innovation, particularly the unseen cycles of (often female) labor involved in “good teaching” in digital humanities courses with commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I encourage others to transform universities as sites of producing “good students” and “good laborers” and to rethink the scholar-educator as part of this labor and learning system. I offer slow tactics within class design of digital humanities courses to resist neoliberal university systems that demand impossible labor structures of productivity and technological innovation from digital humanities scholar-educators. I situate a feminist and decolonial critique of university systems within the specificities of digital humanities teaching, which often necessitates immense time, labor, and financial resources from instructors to learn, practice, and “stay up to date” with changing technologies and tools. Furthermore, digital humanities teaching navigates complex and uneasy expectations from a diverse student body. At times, digital humanities is associated with the professionalization of students for “concrete marketable skills” to prepare humanities students in an impossible market. At other times, students who end up in digital humanities courses come from across the campus, and instructors are tasked with the challenging labor of grounding students in liberal arts, humanistic, and social scientific critical approaches and cultural contexts.

This piece is part of a commitment to sharing and creating human communities of care alongside the materialist structures of support that constrain the everyday, such as time and resources. Interwoven with feminist and decolonial praxis, this piece includes a collection of critical pedagogy tactics, as well as syllabi excerpts from two digital humanities classes and an information studies class, and concludes with experimental dream classes for digital humanities. I also draw from my decade of teaching across disciplines and K–16 curricula and my commitments to critical pedagogy to reflect upon the specific experiences of teaching digital humanities courses this past academic year (2023–2024) that focused on historical data and visualization with a commitment to feminist and decolonial approaches. This past year, I taught a graduate introduction to digital humanities course with a focus on project management and public communication and a capstone undergraduate course focused on French colonial Vietnamese historical data. I also taught a graduate course on global libraries and decolonial futures primarily for graduate students completing their master’s degree in library and information science. I facilitated specific assignments and transparent reflexive modes of communication in a frenzied pursuit of an alternative to the current status quo, a current world marked by invisibilized labor and erasure of disabled whole selves, where students and instructors carry a hegemonic weight of capitalistic linear time defined by benchmarks, grades, progress, bureaucratic evaluations, and pursuit of transferable skills to serve an anonymized impossible market. Drawing wisdom from communities of laboring scholar activists and artists, I conclude with aspirational models for teaching and researching digital humanities that center the whole selves of students and instructors as part of the world and committed to decolonial futures.

For my reflections on digital humanities teaching and course design, I build on the labors, wisdom, and tactics of many others, specifically Ashley Sanders, Chris Johanson, Miriam Posner, Michelle Caswell, Thuy Vo Dang, and Caroline Kong, who shared with me their institutional knowledge of teaching at UCLA, as well as Quinn Dombrowski and Amanda Licastro on digital humanities teaching. My own critical feminist and decolonial efforts for digital humanities transformation in teaching and learning draw from a vibrant history rooted within the labor and thinking of activist academic collectives, crafting manifestos, curricula, and codes of ethical collaboration such as #transformDH, #AnticolonialDH, #OurDhIsFemTechNet, and Feminist Data Manifest-No. I specifically was deeply informed by Ashley Carnto Morford, Arun Jacob, and Kush Patel’s DHSI course “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Critiques & Praxis,” which I drew from to design my recent decolonial digital humanities courses. In my digital humanities teaching, I feature projects and speakers from transnational and community efforts, thus decentering the global north resource-rich institutions in digital humanities scholarship. Here I draw attention to the efforts of transnational digital humanities collectives such as the Create Caribbean Research Institute and Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective.

I also was and am in constant dialog and collaboration with transdisciplinary scholars of color, feminist practitioners, and disability justice scholar activists, and I modeled my decolonial libraries class from Cynthia Vazquez’s Decolonizing Education course. My reflections on teaching intersected with the formation and dreaming of Feminist Trouble together with Tara Tran, Nicole Yow Wei, and Theresa de Langis. I am deeply appreciative to the editors of this special issue, Matthew N. Hannah and Gabriel Hankins, as well as my peer reviewers Danica Savonick and Kush Patel, who provided generous feedback and encouraged me to cite intentionally.1

Radical Kinship, Slowness, and Play: Transforming Labor in the Academy

To begin, I open with the collective words of Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia:

As a declaration of a new chapter, we seek to transform academic labor (from teaching to research to publication to organizing) with the centering wisdom of radical kinship, of slowness, of play. We invite others in to give it a try.

Radical Kinship: Embrace whole selves, sensations, needs, and dreams to create a new culture of scholarly discourse and labor. Make kin with each other and our work, in a commitment to reciprocity and humanizing epistemologies.

Slowness: Decelerate, slow down, move at a pace of life that lovingly tends to gardens as needed. Create a non-linear time world where work happens between joy and pleasure and rest.

Play: Center laughter and playful experimentation. Find co-conspirators within and beyond the academy who embrace a mischievous criss-crossing of fields, generations, and borders towards dreamy worlds of possibility.2

We wrote this invitation as a grounding guide for both ourselves and others over the course of 2022 to the present, from the time we gathered online and in person for our initial roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia in Daegu, South Korea to our collective writing of the forthcoming piece “Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia.” I open with these words as a generative invitation to bring together radical kinship, slowness, and play into the labor of digital humanities. Concepts of slow work and slow scholarship have received extensive attention in the past decades as an urgent call responding to capitalist demands for speed and productivity in the neoliberal transformation and exploitation of university work. The uneven health and economic impact of a global pandemic further exposed the fragility of social systems and care labor in university environments, many of which were and still remain carried by contingent faculty and staff, women of color, and first-generation scholars. Over the past decade, invitations from feminist collectives call for an urgency of slow scholarship, and critical archivists center on how slowness gives time and space for relationality, kinship, and positionality within knowledge production (Mountz et al. 2015; Christen and Anderson 2019). Disability justice scholars and decolonial scholars call for the refusal of certain types of neoliberal work, questioning the extractivist processes of academic knowledge production within university institutions (Chen, Khúc and Kim 2023; Tuck and Yang 2013). The centering principles of Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia on radical kinship, slowness, and play contribute towards the future of a “something else,” a social justice world of liberated possibility grounded by what adrienne maree brown declares as “pleasure activism” and Hannah Alpert-Abrams describes as justice-oriented scholarship driven by values, intention, lineage, community, and pleasure. Situated within digital humanities labor and drawing from disability and Black studies scholars, Moya Bailey calls for a “slow dh,” reimagining an ethics of pace that “privileges process over product,” centering a slower “speed of trust” that nurtures relationships in collaborative digital humanities scholarship (Bailey 2021, 288).

Teaching through the pandemic and navigating the job market, layered with postpartum, death too close to home, and health unpredictability, have left me beyond exhausted. Intentional slowness in teaching is a tactic of self-preservation and rest, as well as an act of feminist resistance to the academic ivory tower “life of the mind of able-bodied white men,” whose status quo was built on the invisibilized emotional and intellectual labor of women of color (Bailey 2021, 288). These are suggested tactics that can be reinvisioned depending on your institutional context of the demands for teaching and research and can be recalibrated based on your needs and the needs of your students. Throughout the past years of my teaching experiences I collected some of these tactics as a worldbuilding provocation for teaching and learning (Nguyen 2023). I have grown so deeply as an educator from the generosity of others who shared their wisdom so that we might move away from a “teaching fails and successes” framework, to a “something else” informed by rest and play. I counter both internal and external pressures to continually improve or innovate my teaching with a set of slow tactics:

1. Each time I teach a course, I permit myself to only gently “innovate” (change the structure of the course) in either content or form. That means I only change the reading/topics or change the structure of assignments/modality.
2. I offer assignments that invite in slowness from students rather than structurally adding more. For example, rather than another paper or project, I task students with a portfolio assignment that recompiles and reflects on previous work within the classroom.
3. Topics are substantively aligned vertically instead of pressuring towards horizontal expansion. We take “one thing” and create opportunities to dive deeper, offering space for comparative wonderings but recognizing that expertise in all the things is impossible. A final project that hones into the “one thing” allows students to slowly explore.
4. Instead of having quizzes that assess student performance through grades, I think about check-ins/outs and a reflection process. A quick check-in can be organized via a blank paper and one question, Google forms, or the learning management system with simple questions. They could be unsigned so that students do not feel they are being surveilled and evaluated, or they could be named as a way to check in with students who might need more help. I spend time explaining to students that these are ungraded check-ins, to give both myself and the student feedback to shift the structure of class, spend more time on a topic that is difficult, and to receive immediate feedback on the lesson plan or topic at hand. I build these check-ins with other forms of feedback communication, including mid-term evaluations, reflection assignments, and the cumulative portfolio activity for class reflection.
5. At the heart of slowness is creating a class culture and community. As instructor, I dedicate time to learn about students through:
   1. A simple student questionnaire
   2. First class session on building a collective class charter. See Example Class Charter or Video Interview on “Building Class Community Through Charters” for Brown University Digital Learning and Design, 2020
   3. Revisiting personal goals and experiences in the middle of term through a check-in questionnaire
   4. Creating space to celebrate and commemorate the class journey through a shared activity such as collective “yearbook” or “movie trailer.” See extended discussion of yearbook celebration and other assignments in my Teaching Workshop

The Asian American Crip Manifesto “Work Will Not Save Us” has been deeply transformative to my work and is a must read for anyone, particularly anyone holding contingent teaching positions or who has experienced racialized labor demands of perfectionism and care that often fall upon Asian American women (Chen, Khúc and Kim 2023). Some of the pedagogical interventions that continue to shape my work include the following: “Let your students be unwell—this actually takes less work than forcing them to constantly perform wellness” and “Rethink ‘rigor’ outside of traditional scholarship and pedagogy.” Mimi Khúc’s (2024) recent book dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss also offers deeply transformative work in critical disability studies and the labor of teaching. I hold Khúc’s words to heart: the feminist and anti-capitalist reminder to “show up messy” and the permission to “be a bad student” and “be a bad worker.” These principles are liberatory, offering a permission slip to break free from gendered societal pressures of perfectionism and physical appearance as well as the idealization of an instructor as a non-human beacon of one-directional knowledge and surveillance of moralized ability and student performance.

During the rawest and most personally meaningful moment in our class last spring at the height of events unfolding on campus, we opened up together the community project that was led by Khúc’s “Open in Emergency” kit, an experimental toolkit on Asian American mental health. Ironically, I had purchased my copy of this special community toolkit back in 2016, and I had carried it with me through graduate school, six years of the job market, the pandemic, and postpartum, and I did not have the mental framework to even open it until spring 2024 together with my students. I had students from my global libraries graduate class unbox it, describe what they saw, pass it around, and collectively read “The Student” tarot card, the first part of which reads,

The Student is the twenty-ninth card in the major arcana, sometimes known as the lost card. The Student cried the day of graduation. They play one role for the Mother, another for schools, another as the Daughter, another for workforces, another as the Model Minority, another for the state, always in the pull of the annihilating void. The Student is, at essence, a note-taker: be grateful/ always be ok / chase the promise of/this, for hours/ never complain never be sick keep going / nothing is ever enough the work goes impossibly on/ is college life normal stress?

Everything I did with this class felt urgent and honest to both the needs of the students and myself as an instructor at a loss as to what to do in the classroom space during those moments of disappointment and distrust in institutions.

The permission to be messy and unwell has deeply reshaped my framing of whose metrics and whose rules of success and goodness I had been following and perpetuating within the classroom. I have experienced this most acutely as someone raised by a morality abstractly defined by Confucian duty, Catholic guilt, and Vietnamese refugee fears of the unknown. These universalizing claims of goodness intersected with gendered demands on care labor specifically in the space of the classroom and community. Living, working, and surviving in capitalist America as a first-generation female academic added another layer of additional mental, emotional, logistical labor of running around figuring out this unwritten secret curriculum of success. For most of my time as a first-generation undergraduate, graduate student, and in my early career as a postdoctoral fellow, I navigated my positionality in the American academy by the only way I knew how, to become a white man from the global north. I enrolled in theater courses, changed the way I spoke, stood up taller and bigger in an attempt to take up space beyond my five-foot, three-inch Asian female frame. I learned the social script of elevator pitches to hone my expansive dreams into pithy convincing arguments, offering just enough intrigue to convince and justify. I used the words significance, importance, rigor and emphasized the “I” as a genius solitary intellectual in my labor and contributions.

As I navigate success for myself as a scholar-educator, I invite students into navigating their own meaning of success as a student. As part of redefining success metrics, I center intrinsic motivation through play and pleasure in my teaching, most notably by implementing ungrading or contract grading. Centered on individual reflection and community experiences, I design space in class activities and final projects for self-directed learning, non-linear exploration, and making a mess. Yet I also struggle with the labor it takes to carry that out as an instructor to guide students on how to unlearn existing structures of extrinsic motivation that students have been conditioned on by the time they arrive at university and in their graduate education. Ironically, centering play and pleasure, slowness and repair necessitates more intellectual and emotional labor from me as an instructor and human. Careful, intentional, meaningful work is labor, yet also signals a shift in the kind of work that is possible. I believe in the ultimate purpose of this added labor not for the purpose of pedagogical innovation, but urgent societal intervention and transformation. In our forthcoming piece as part of Feminist Trouble, I declared that “I’m tired…but also that this declaration reconfirms the capitalistic American-centric work culture of academia. Revolutionary overthrow of any system takes labor, takes all of me and the whole of me, but not only me…” As an invitation to collective feminist and decolonial transformation, I share some messy experiments and lessons in digital humanities teaching below.

Dreamy Experiments of Possibility in Digital Humanities Teaching

Teaching digital humanities has been incredibly difficult given that so much of digital humanities is not necessarily reproducible through repeatable curricula and lesson plans given the short shelf life of certain technologies and websites. When I began dabbling with digital humanities a decade ago, the landscape felt familiar and relatively simple. A teacher could focus on digital humanities methodologies such as spatial (maps), text (literary analysis), and networks. The course might be ambitious and involve time and multimodal digital resources such as visual and sound. Yet even a decade ago, digital humanities was already confronting a breaking at the seams, a reinvention and critical reflection on method and modality, on who was “in” the ever-expansive big tent, where the boundaries of new media and critical data studies sometimes confronted a digital making and technical hacking culture (the hack v. yack debate), and how to sustain, support and collaborate with digital libraries and data repositories. New methods, approaches, and literature continue to transform what “is” digital humanities, let alone what students think digital humanities might be. How do we teach what is constantly changing?

Surveying my undergraduate students on why they wanted to complete the digital humanities minor, currently the most popular minor at UCLA in the year 2024, they answered, “It is the only place where you could learn about marketing in a concrete way.” The skills they learned in digital narrative and storytelling, for website design and portfolio management, on digital research design translated to students as a marketable, flexible, and enjoyable skill that could be woven into their disciplinary interests. My graduate students also expressed similar concerns of diversifying their skills in order to expand job market prospects. Naively I did not anticipate that so much of my class discussions would hover around the question of the job market, for both undergraduate and graduate students hoping to pursue all types of jobs and career pathways within and beyond the academy. Many students were also supporting not just themselves but also their families and carrying certain pressures as a first-generation student or young professional to make their degree (and the costs of it) ultimately worth it in the end. Digital humanities surfaced as a structural solution among my students, and I certainly felt a secondhand product-driven pressure to rethink what type of educational ‘service’ I was offering in this shifting landscape of higher education. I navigate this student- and market-driven pressure to teach “useful skills” by focusing on the possibility of these skills to open mindsets and to offer new ways of worldbuilding, imagination, and empowerment.

The labor of keeping up with the technology and shifting methodologies necessary for digital humanities teaching takes so much time and energy for preparation and execution. It is not sustainable, does not leave much energy or time for anything else, including societal transformation. Recognizing the time and intense labor it requires to teach an evolving digital humanities field, how might we redesign a class that can be co-created and sustainable for teachers and students operating at different timescales and abilities? Recent work by Brandon Walsh invites a more flexible and inclusively designed classroom centering student agency to self-navigate and determine the speed at which one moves through hands-on learning of digital humanities (Walsh 2023). Even in our present time, I still carry on with me structural necessary transformations of classrooms through the pandemic, such as FemTechNet’s reminder that simpler is better, or a “minimum viable course.” Adding to this work, I propose a series of experiments in anti-classes, un-assignments, moving at a pace of crip time that “bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (Samuels 2017). These experiments in class design and activities are not driven by outcomes and metrics, but by values and structures of kinship, slowness, and play.

Experiment 1: A syllabus of values-skills and transparent communication of instructor design

We all hate busy work. Students hate it, teachers hate it. Yet somehow we still find ourselves in the structures of busy work, whether it be through reporting and recording (attendance, grades, even when I have gotten rid of grades and class is credit-no credit) or for students finding themselves completing tasks that they do not really care about. I have been dreaming and figuring out how to rework the assignments part of a syllabus that moves away from grading and metrics to instead present this as a guiding compass on how much effort students could dedicate to certain tasks. However, it has been a challenge to communicate with students regarding expectations and to shift the framework of extrinsic motivation (in other words, instructor assessment via grades) to the “something else.” Even in my graduate class where students are more open and committed to the possibility of “anything is possible,” there are struggles with communicating the shape and form of the class. How do I facilitate and guide students to find their voice and interests while we ultimately still operate within the framework that I have to submit a grade as an instructor?

On the first day of class and through an extensive syllabus I emphasize how the class goals are skillful practices and values, and the assignments align with moving towards those skills and carrying out those values. For my digital humanities graduate course, Introduction to Digital Humanities and Project Management, I renamed the “syllabus” portion of the class website as “values.” At the top, where usually course outcomes are written, I write concisely:

Skillful Practices & Values

1. Data Critique & Slowness
2. Project Management & Reciprocity
3. Public Communication & Access

These three skillful practices and values form the foundation of all assignments and class design throughout the term. The skills are focused on tangible practices or “the how” and the values communicate the why we are learning these practices. My intention to focus on the skillful practices specifically was also to move away from technologies and tools to more evergreen social and human practices that are sustainable and resonate with different students regardless of discipline or career interests. Following this part of the syllabus is the description, our collective class charter, schedule of topics. In the next section I include my instructor design philosophy in two parts:

On Learning

The class structure and assignments are designed with the commitment to intentional labor and learning: cumulative work (cultivation of skills that build on top of each other), collaborative learning, critical pedagogical interventions, and public communication as part of the learning process. I’m experimenting with labor and learning that moves away from tedious response papers and a vertical knowledge funnel of assessment (students→teacher) to cultivating multimodal experiences through asynchronous online individual reflection and group discussion, in-person horizontal learning through facilitations and skillful practices, and creation of public resources and digital imprints.

On Digital Humanities

How can digital methods reveal and critique structures of power and forms of hegemonic representation in the historic and cultural record? How can a digital humanities research framework grounded in critique-creation contribute to restorative and transformative justice? Rather than using digital humanities methods as a superficial tools-driven application of “representation” through visualization, I seek to showcase that digital methodologies can be integrated throughout stages of critique and creation to facilitate decolonial knowledge and representation.

Following this are the Values-Skills-Outcomes Aligned assignments of readings, individual reflections, group facilitation, in class hands-on practices, and a cumulative final group project of a draft grant proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities grant program. Following the assignments I name and acknowledge the intellectual lineage and labor I draw from to design this class:

• Miriam Posner (DH201), Ashley Sanders (Visualizing History’s Fragments), Quinn Dombrowski (DLCL205)
• Syllabus of Care (Toni Wall Jaudon, Digital Pedagogy Lab)
• Project Management RPG (Quinn Dombrowski)
• Issues in Large Project Planning and Management DHSI Course (Lynne Siemens)
• Making Choices About Your Data (Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam)
• PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities (Stephanie Rodgers, Alan G. Pike, Amanda Salinas, Wayne Morse, Keith Foster, Haniya Vaid, Tiffany Miles, Felicia Bianchi)
• “Awe of What a Body Can Be: Disability Justice, the Syllabus, and Academic Labour” (Jess Dorrance, Julia Havard, Caleb Luna, and Olivia K. Young, specifically Olivia K. Young’s syllabus “Black Contemporary Art”)
• How to Ungrade (Jesse Stommel)

Experiment 2: Nonlinear play and self-guided reflection

Let’s facilitate a place and community to do all the things we (as instructors and students) wanted to do but that the weight of linear time and external pressures forced us to put to the wayside. Learn those programming languages, immerse in readings, share what inspires us (poetry, art, music, movement), dedicate time to vision boarding, study epic digital and social justice projects that inspire us to be in the world, dream for futures and imagine ways of creating them. The following gentle pathways and nonlinear trails can be covered in a few class meetings or structure an entire course:

• Pick five lessons from the Programming Historian and complete them in small groups. https://programminghistorian.org
• Pick a project and complete an extensive study of one digital project through Miriam Posner’s “How did they make that? Reverse engineering the DH project” https://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/
• Sensemaking of past work: Academic terms are too fast. We produce often without reflection or time to take stock of what we have done. Spend time on analyzing data, revising a messy project that needs revision, revisiting a collaborative project that went awry.
• Games
  • Play “DH RPG” created by Quinn Dombrowski to trace the year in the life of a DH project: https://dhrpg.github.io
  • Play “Move Quietly & Tend Things” by Kellynn Wee, a utopia game about recovery, repair, and revelation in Southeast Asia https://wildletters.itch.io/move-quietly-and-tend-things
• Build on work that already exists
  • Research an existing initiative related to a topic of interest and digital humanities, contact the organizers/organization, find ways you can contribute to their work, or organize a community resources event to share and platform their existing work. Create a compelling slide deck, vlog, or podcast introducing the initiative to the class.
  • Platform existing work by hosting or aligning class time with ongoing local events at your institution or other online events such as the annual virtual conference through the Association for Computers and the Humanities (see my regional hub-aligned class session from fall 2024), Michigan State University Global Digital Humanities Symposium or UC Love Data Week.

Bookend these gentle pathways with one to two meeting sessions focused on individual journaling and collective sharing, a vision board of possibilities for the term, a day of reflection on where we went, how we changed, what we learned, what we like/don’t like, why it matters. Each meeting session dedicates time and space for community building, rest, laughter, questions, self-directed learning, and co-teaching. We just completed this gentle pathway from Programming Historian activity in my fall 2024 Information and Visualization course. Here were the instructions that guided the in-class tutorial time:

1. As a group discuss the questions and your answers:
   1. How do we measure individual success through this tutorial?
   2. How do we measure group success through this tutorial?
   3. If I'm struggling, I prefer___
2. Visualize a “world” in which you move through this tutorial together. Include how you measure success in this visualization.
   1. You can draw measures of individual and group success (using the words or visual representations of them).
   2. During the tutorial time, use this world to record obstacles, accomplishments, and topics that are interesting. This is a visualization sketch of your collective and individual technical journey.
3. Group share out
   1. What is challenging?
   2. What is exciting?

Experiment 3: Critique-creation framework in digital humanities

I teach between information studies and digital humanities graduate and undergraduate courses focused on problematizing data through a framework I call “critique-creation.” Critical data studies and digital humanities often operate in two different spheres, where certain types of classes focus more on critique and others focus on making digital applications. Instead, my courses continue to bring together critique and creation as interwoven processes of data social justice and integrated throughout the research design, experimentation, and public communication process of digital humanities as an evolving critical field. I have designed and continue to dream up courses that bring together theory and practice by working through specific colonial datasets grounded in a historically and culturally attuned understanding of the specificity of colonialism and its ongoingness within each context. Informed by decolonial/anticolonial/postcolonial studies, each week undertakes the task of critique together with creation, to experiment with hybrid digital humanities visualization methods that can contribute towards platforming decolonial, alternative narratives and liberatory futures.

Creation centers critical fabulation, imagination, and worldbuilding towards a pluriverse of humanistic understanding centering and caring for silenced actors from colonial documentation regimes. This interwoven framework builds off of the fundamental work in Black feminist studies from Saidiya Hartman and bell hooks, postcolonial/decolonial methodologies from Roopika Risam and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, to move towards a pluriverse of understanding through experimental data analysis and digital narrative. In the words of Walter Mignolo, “The pluriverse consists of seeing beyond [the West’s] claim to superiority, and sensing the world as pluriversally constituted (2018, x).” Through my digital humanities courses, I guide students to rethink how to center indigenous actors and vernacular culture through subverting normative data visualizations informed by colonial frameworks of time (linear), space (cartographic nation-states), and categorization (namely race and gender).

Critique-creation was at the foundation of my class design for my undergraduate capstone class in spring 2024. This course enrolled twenty-seven students from all over campus with different majors who were completing this as a required course for the digital humanities minor. It was expected that the students would build on their years of learning from different digital humanities classes into a final digital humanities project, yet we were operating under the constrained structure of an overenrolled class size, ten weeks of class under the quarter system, and two to three class sessions which had been interrupted by campus closures. After teaching through pandemic, instructors seem to always be teaching under some emergency preparedness and expected to pivot to remote. It is not sustainable to plan 100% of a class with these conditions, and my aim now is to prepare 80% for the class in terms of content, goals, meetings, and leave room for the flexibility of the unpredictable whether it be due to personal conditions or my students’ needs and context (political, campus, another pandemic?). Here is the description of our undergraduate class and the final group projects:

This advanced undergraduate course explores critical design approaches to colonial data and will culminate in collaborative, playful digital storytelling experiments to platform alternative *decolonial narratives (we critique and reflect on the specificity of decolonial work in this class). We will focus on critical data studies, research design and experimentation, and multilingual and multimodal digital humanities analysis using a sandbox of French colonial-era Vietnamese data (drawings, comics, library circulation records, ethnography, demography). Class assignments include self-guided tutorials, collaborative work, short writing assignments, and a final project. No background knowledge is required, although interest in languages (Vietnamese, French, translation), data visualization, and commitment to collaborative learning and critical data will be key to this course.

The structure of critique-creation offered a structure of flexibility and space for students to build on existing skills and over the course of the term learn creation through critique and vice versa. Frontloaded to the first three weeks involved teaching on “critique” and how to deconstruct digital projects, the class content-focused work, and community building. I created a “data sandbox” of a subset of colonial-era Vietnamese multimodal, multilingual data from my ongoing research project so that students could have a shared experience of working through similar datasets and could immediately jump into the context, critique, data study, and analysis. The final six weeks were designated for “creation” through in-class activities, group work, check-ins, demos, and feedback. I emphasized that the final week was not a final presentation of a shiny product, as part of reframing feedback and assessment. Instead, our last week is a class celebration and group show of the project that is ongoing so that students are responsible for giving feedback and implementing some of that feedback into the final submission during finals week.

In class sessions for other digital humanities courses that I have taught, such as Introduction to Digital Humanities and Project Management, I also implement a format breakdown of our class meeting with the interwoven practice of critique-creation: the first half or third of the class session is focused on “critique” through introduction to a topic or analysis of an approach and “creation,” hands-on practice-based group work. For example, our class session focused on the topic of data visualization where students first facilitated a discussion based on the readings and project study completed prior to class, and then in the second half we jumped into practices.

Digital Humanities as Worldbuilding and Reimagining Social Worlds

I bring my students into my ongoing research and thinking process, specifically my attempt to answer the question of how digital humanities can interrogate and intervene in the historical and cultural record. My attempt at an answer is that digital humanities opens up the possibility to critique the cultural record and to worldbuild and ambitiously reimagine alternative social worlds through digital interfaces and computational modeling. In digital humanities courses I have taught, I invite my students into an ongoing digital humanities, public-facing, experimental close and computational project that I have been grappling with for over a decade, loosely named “Vietnamese Visual Texts.” Through collaborative work using mixed methods we investigate a French colonial visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies as a multivalent and plural-authored text. From historical findings on book culture and Vietnamese life to feminist interventions into labor and social reproduction, this project reimagines historical social worlds that center historically marginalized agency, invisible authorship, and non-linear narrative forms (Nguyen 2024). I also have shared this project with a K–12 curriculum initiative with the learning aim of developing nuanced understandings of modernity, interactions with the west, and the diversity and dynamism of Vietnamese culture and social practices. With hands on-activities around this historical primary source, we rethink how to build connection to history and practice visual analysis, close reading, and creative exploration.

This past academic year, I brought students into the processes of class design, ongoing research, and digital public communication as an invitation into worldbuilding just, dreamy, substantive futures that nourish and affirm. Teaching digital humanities courses around methodologies of project management, decolonial libraries, and critical historical fabulations created the opportunity to take a slower, mindful, critical approach to labor—who we are, why and how we do what we do, and what type of relationships we nurture in the process. In my digital humanities scholarship and teaching, I center play and creation as a pedagogical commitment so that the classroom, too, can be a reimagined social world of justice, care, and flourishing.