Just in Time: Under Executive Orders: Digital Humanities amid Austerity and Surveillance

Lozano, Jennifer; Lozano, Jennifer

This session brings together DH scholars and practitioners from a variety of institutions and backgrounds who will reflect on their experience planning, funding, maintaining, and/or executing critical DH projects under recently heightened conditions of federal and state austerity and surveillance. Following Isabel Martinez et al. (2024), we understand “critical DH” as a liberatory practice that recognizes the ways in which cultural and educational institutions can appropriate and claim digital technologies that often exclude marginalized voices. This includes DH research and pedagogy that is driven by feminist, anti-racist, decolonial and/or community-engaged theory and practice. We recognize that many scholars working in these areas have already been subject to erasure and underfunding--an unwanted family “inheritance” of sorts from longstanding white supremacy in the US--but now face a doubly or triply restrictive landscape in which to do their work. A number of changes in this field took place from mid-to-late March and continue to change regularly as the summer unfolds. On March 12, 2025, the existing Chair for the National Endowment for Humanities, Shelly C Lowe, was removed from her position and replaced by acting chair Michael McDonald. The forced change in NEH leadership reflects the current US federal government’s explicit attack on higher education and its interest in re-shaping the American cultural landscape to reflect a white supremacist ideology. On March 27, President Trump signed an executive order against the “rewrit[ing] of our Nation’s history” and specifically targeted the Smithsonian Institution for “come[ing] under the influence of a divisive race-centered ideology.” These, of course, are only some of the most visible attacks on historians and cultural heritage researchers. In fact, conditions are constantly changing as we saw on June 25th when a message was posted on the University of Maryland’s National Archives website announcing “restricted access” to the “general public” beginning on July 7. While this notice has since been removed (with no explanation), researchers’ concern regarding access to archives, funding, and support remains high.

Given the constant onslaught of new orders and restrictions, it is crucial for scholars to form, uplift, and maintain their own affinity networks that enable them to strategize and learn from each other. This panel will provide just such an opportunity as presenters will discuss their unique set of obstacles and their responses to navigating them and developing intentional and sustainable DH methods that center marginalized groups. The first presenter, Elena Foulis (Texas A&M San Antonio), will discuss her work on the digital archive ¡DALE! Digital Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences amidst Texas’s SB17 that passed into law in 2023 and continues to be interpreted and implemented differently. DALE centers on oral histories and serves as a counter-archive of Latina/o/e experiences that are often left out of mainstream narratives and are under attack by the current administration. The second presenter/organizer, Jennifer Lozano (University of North Carolina Wilmington) will discuss the challenges and opportunities they face in developing a digital archive that centers on the interconnected life and work of David Bryant Fulton, a largely overlooked Black journalist and chronicler of the 1898 Wilmington Coup and Massacre, at a North Carolina PWI. She will particularly focus on the power of community involvement and leveraging existing digital tools toward the goals of the archive. Our third presenter, Alex Gil (Yale University), will offer remarks on the history of rapid response DH work, its intersections with minimal computing, and how that history leads into current efforts to work in adverse and adversary conditions against the rise of fascist kakocracy. Gil will argue that this work relies on a post-apocalyptic playfulness with roots in the Global South, and more specifically in the Caribbean. The final presenter, Bergis Jules will report on the ongoing work of the Archiving Black Web (ATBW) project. Through a combination of training, scholarship, and program offerings, Archiving the Black Web seeks to address the various knowledge and resource gaps that impact the collection of web based content about Black people that can be used to build archives, conduct research, or amplify causes. Archiving the Black Web is a call to action because these gaps can hinder our collective understanding of Black life, history, and culture.

The panelists represent a wide range of institutions (e.g., private and state universities, Hispanic-serving institution and primarily white institutions, and a non-profit organization), as well as personal and academic backgrounds. In order to accommodate four panelists (and this diverse group), Jennifer will present for 10 minutes instead of 15, leaving 15 minutes for discussion.

Just in Time: Under Executive Orders: Digital Humanities amid Austerity and Surveillance: Calls for Papers