Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte have put out a call for proposals for contributions to Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays that will be part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series. I look forward to the published collection, but until then, the CFP itself makes for an interesting and informative read that suggests the geographical decentering that is necessary for decolonizing the digital humanities. From the CFP:
Where does Digital Humanities take place? DH has been described through various metaphors – “big tent”, “trading zone”, “expanded field”, etc. – lacking perhaps one further step: the idea of digital pluralism linked to new geographical and geopolitical dimension. Our aim in this project is therefore to build a different representation of DH based on cultural, political and ultimately epistemological diversity. We are convinced that an extended debate on the application of digital technology to the study of cultural artifacts is taking place in contexts, countries, cultures and languages beyond the dominant centers of DH in the West. We also believe that these debates reflect different visions of DH, including conversations in which the digital humanities are not a dominant concept in the development of technological approaches to the humanities. Quoting Claude Alvares’ Decolonizing History, “The idea that there may be alternative technologies in itself implies the idea of technological pluralism in place of the until now almost universally accepted technological monism. In this case each social system and each political ideology, indeed each culture would be free to develop its own particular line.”
Following this line, we invite proposals for contributions to a collection of essays entitled Global Debates in the Digital Humanities: a collection on the issues and challenges of practicing Digital Humanities (DH) in diverse geographical contexts, countries, and cultures – especially from, but not limited to, the Global South. The aim of the collection is to highlight the critically engaged work of scholars outside the Anglosphere who have contributed to the advancement of DH but whose work has not received due attention for linguistic, cultural, or political reasons.
Read the full CFP here.
