So the blog portion of my site has been inactive for a while. Sorry about that.
Since that last relaunch post about a year and a half ago, I spent a year as a postdoctoral lecturer at UTK, survived another job market season, and moved to Tampa for a three-year visiting instructor position at USF. The VI program here will play a central role in my post today, as I think about how non-tenure track faculty can do work in Digital Humanities and critical digital pedagogy.
The VI position at USF works like a number of other lecturer or instructor positions that post vacancies on the MLA list each year. Teaching, especially in entry-level or service courses, is the focus. My schedule has been made up of Introduction to Literature and Professional Writing on a 4/4 schedule. My postdoc at UTK also involved a 4/4 teaching load (with a course release for spending 10 hours/week in the writing center), but there were a few other options available–I taught History of the English Language, an upper-division course in my field, last Spring, for example.
What lingers in my mind about this position is the compressed timeline. As this isn’t a continuing instructor or lecturer line, there is a (mostly) firm endpoint to my contract(s) after three years. This means that everything I do while I’m here, from planning my classes to pursuing research, I have to do it with an eye towards prepping for the academic job market next year. I don’t imagine that it is very different for a number of scholars who take lecturer, instructor, or (especially) adjunct positions elsewhere, but the fall market season is always looming.
What interested me about this position was an ad-hoc group of VIs at USF called the Digital Teaching Fellows. We met biweekly last semester as a sort of professional reading group on digital pedagogy, and we continue to meet to plan teaching workshops, collaborate on scholarship in pedagogy, and (of course) prepare for the job market. One of our goals is to take what is, by necessity, a limited range of teaching opportunities and curricula, and transform it into a teaching portfolio backed by scholarship in critical digital pedagogy. Here’s the catch–the Digital Teaching Fellows program is entirely volunteer, offers no additional funding, and takes up a lot of time.
And yet, I would not have thought my move to Tampa and USF was successful without it. And my participation in this group is why I’ve also chosen to take a few more graduate classes to earn a grad certificate in Digital Humanities. Why is that?
Matthew Kirschenbaum,writing in the 2012 Debates in the Digital Humanities points at an answer:
…younger (or not so young) graduate students, faculty members (both tenure line and contingent), and other academic professionals who now wield the label “digital humanities” instrumentally amid an increasingly monstrous institutional terrain defined by declining public support for higher education, rising tuitions, shrinking endowments, the proliferation of distance education and the for-profit university, and underlying it all the conversion of full-time, tenure-track academic labor to a part-time adjunct workforce.
Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” 2012
DH work by graduate students and contingent faculty is a response to the stifling hierarchies of academia they find themselves in. It’s an opportunity to develop and share meaningful work across multiple platforms that becomes necessary when the exclusionary nature of traditional platforms can feel overwhelming. Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel offer a provocative reading of why DH matters in today’s academy in their introduction to Disrupting DH:
Much of this introduction was written before the world went to shit. The chapters here, no matter how recently written, can’t keep at bay a world being actively undone. We find ourselves wondering why and how this work even matters. What has the digital humanities community done collectively for #BlackLivesMatter? What place is there for pedagogy in a world where education has been so systematically devalued, where students worry that even their classroom isn’t safe from an ICE raid? How do we rally when so many are complicit? Scholarship can only vaguely hope to keep up. And so these are not really the questions of this volume. But they should be. As a field like digital humanities squabbles, the world around it is laid to waste. Academic turf wars have no place in a world of mass-shootings, fear-mongering, xenophobia, and white supremacy. Demanding fellow scholars do a literature review before speaking their mind has no place in a world of AR-15 assault rifles and weaponized algorithms. When something as basic as going to the bathroom lacks dignity for so many, we have no use for double-blind peer review.
All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion.
Kim and Stommel, Disrupting DH, 2018
As they say on Twitter, this is straight fire.
The very messy question of what DH or digital pedagogy is offers scholars left unmoored by the institutional realities of their positions a chance to do work that matters in whatever way best suits their research agendas and methodologies.
Despite their despair and anger at the state of the world, I read Kim and Stommel’s introduction as an optimistic take on DH and DH practitioners. And despite my own worries about academia, the job market, and all of the insecurity associated with being non-tenure track faculty, I remain as optimistic about DH work today as I was when I introduced blog and webforum assignments to my high school students in 2006. And yet I’m not really sure where that optimism comes from.
More on this in the days and weeks to come.