Digital Humanities, Pandemic Futures

The changes wrought by Covid-19 upon conditions of digitally mediated critical scholarship have been at once unprecedented and predictable. Covid-19 exposes our ineluctable dependencies on sociality across different scales of geographical and embodied interaction, while amplifying persistent refrains around political unrest and inequality. Academic community members also face increasing demands for critical reassessment of the habitual privileging of tacit knowledge and interpersonal communication in classrooms, as the conventional premise for researching, teaching, and learning rapidly unfurls in crumbling university structures under these global crises. Instead of understanding the current situation as an exceptional circumstance, we must reckon with questions that interrogate the very conditions in which these changes are produced: How do we begin to practice, let alone theorise, our commitment to critical humanities at this juncture of crises both mundane and historical? What deeper theoretical and comparative lineaments would be useful as we simultaneously conduct and reimagine our fundamental tasks of pedagogy, theory, and engagement into our shared pandemic futures?

Digital Humanities, Pandemic Futures is the third iteration of the collaborative research training workshop series between the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. It aims to continue the trajectory of reflections generated from previous workshops on techno-cultures and the political subjectivities of the voice, re-engaging them to contend with the horizon of the pandemic present/future.

Website: https://culturalresearch.center/Digital-Humanities-Pandemic-Futures