Antiracist tactics for Digitally Engaged Teaching and Learning

Panel

The participants in this roundtable offer examples of collaborative, art and design-based research with racialized minorities in the urban United States (San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles), Mexico City, and rural Haiti. Focusing on strategies each of us has developed for leveraging art and design in this range of contexts, we privilege the necessity of understanding the digital and its deployment within a complex web of power relations that continue to define racialized others as deficient and lacking. Challenging the ways in which the digital is introduced, used, maintained, we argue that it is necessary to move away from the formulaics of "human centered design," drawing instead from funds of cultural knowledge and practice that exist beyond the EuroAmerican value set that continues to dominate this sphere, particularly when it comes to pedagogy and learning spaces. Specifically using tactics and strategies from organizing traditions, Afro- and Ethno- futurism, and liberatory pedagogy, we explore ways that working through the digital is and always must be profoundly social, self-questioning, and open to transformation.

Timetable

Presenters will each speak for 5-7 minutes, leaving plenty of time for discussion. The goal will be to present some clear jumping off points for the larger discussion.

Takeaway

The panel will present specific pedagogies, most of which have arisen out of community-based projects. Takeaways will include basic how-to ideas for conducting similar projects. Some are technology based, others emphasize the social and relational. Theoretical frameworks for applying afro- and ethno-futurism in community-based projects.

Abstract

The participants in this roundtable offer examples of collaborative, art and design-based research with racialized minorities in the urban United States (San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles), and rural Haiti. Focusing on strategies each of us has developed for leveraging art and design in this range of contexts, we privilege the necessity of understanding the digital and its deployment within a complex web of power relations that continue to define racialized others as deficient and lacking. Challenging the ways in which the digital is introduced, used, maintained, we argue that it is necessary to move away from the formulaics of "human centered design," drawing instead from funds of cultural knowledge and practice that exist beyond the EuroAmerican value set that continues to dominate this sphere, particularly when it comes to pedagogy and learning spaces. Specifically using tactics and strategies from organizing traditions, Afro- and Ethno- futurism, and liberatory pedagogy, we explore ways that working through the digital is and always must be profoundly social, self-questioning, and open to transformation.