Black Digital Humanities: Black Technocultures

What difference does Blackness make to the study of technology? This course relies on this question to foreground two important elements within the Black Digital Humanities (Black DH). First, Black scholarly approaches to the impact of technology on and in Black life and vice versa. Second, Black scholarly explorations of Black digital life and expertise. We will take a broad approach to Black DH, thinking generally about the transformative interplay between Blackness and digital technology, the extent to which digital projects can “recover” Black histories within the archive, and methodological approaches to the study of tech and digital life within Black Studies. Drawing on Black epistemologies, students will analyze digital technologies to propose new and different questions about how Blackness both (re)shapes technology and the “human” in the humanities.