A Feminist Digital Humanities Pedagogy beyond the Classroom

This article examines the set of concerns occupying feminist educators and scholars in the 1990s to imagine what a feminist digital humanities (DH) pedagogy should look like in the twenty-first century. The article draws examples from The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, a project involving intensive collaborations between students and faculty at a regional university. The article summarizes research that indicates one reason for the lack of women and people of color in the computer sciences is a pedagogy that does not emphasize social, historical, and global problem-solving. The digital humanities could be a site wherein a successful, equal partnership between the computer sciences and the humanities might address diverse approaches to global issues and, in this manner, successfully attract underrep-resented students. The institutionalization of the digital humanities, however, has limited the field’s range of concerns and topics. A feminist DH pedagogy must include students as equal researchers, operate with an infrastructure that makes the labor accessible to students with a variety of abilities, include the constant evaluation of underlying technological structures in a social context, consider content as well as technology, and create a community beyond the classroom. While projects that engage women and people of color in these ways are still occurring, the project argues that greater funding support and infrastructure would make opportunities like these more available to students and, as a result, ensure more diverse scholars and scholarship in coming the years.