Speculative Digital Pedagogies

I gave a talk with Seanna Viechweg on “Speculative Digital Pedagogies” at the 2024 ACH conference online. Texts and rough slides follow.

Seanna - Hello, I’m Seanna Viechweg, a 5th-year PhD English candidate at the University of Virginia.

Brandon - And I’m Brandon Walsh. I’m the Head of Students in the Scholars’ Lab, a digital research center in the University of Virginia Library.

Brandon - Before we get started - a few links for you. You can find the rough text and slides for our presentation at the link here. And if you are interested in the resources we are discussing today you can find them in a zotero library. So if you need access to those materials for any reason please do take a moment to open them in the browser as we’ll be moving away from this slide. But they’ll also persist after the conference is over, so you can rest assured that you’ll have access to them into the future.

This is a talk not about where we are but, instead, where we could be. Practitioners aiming to bring digital humanities (DH) into the classroom often run up against painful realities: what servers we have, what is possible in a semester, what tools are supported on campus. Reality, so often, restrains our pedagogy. This comes through in the writing on digital humanities teaching and learning. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross has pages upon pages of expert advice on how to deal with the practical logistics of teaching DH—hosting, webstacks, resources to look for on campus, and more. The text is, of course, absolutely essential for these reasons. But we want to push back against this focus on the here and now, on how we situate our digital pedagogies in the contexts in which we live and, instead, take inspiration from André Carrington’s editorial headnote to the “futures” keyword in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: “Rather than preparing students to experience progress on terms that are not of their own making, educational strategies that employ technology to interrogate the unmet needs of the present enable students to reinvent the means and ends of learning in accordance with the futures they want to create.” Our goal in this talk is to further explore what it might mean to bind a teaching practice to the future, to the imagination, to create and practice a speculative digital pedagogy. In doing so, we situate our work in relation to DH projects like Stanford 2025, The DH RPG, and Ivanhoe, which explore the power for teachers and learners to imagine new institutions, new relationships, and new forms of educational praxis. We don’t have much time, but we’ll offer a theory of this work and then some notes towards practice.

This talk is, itself, an exercise in speculative practice. It emerges from our realization that we were each using speculation to mean something quite distinct from the other that might, nonetheless, could be powerful when brought together. My speculative pedagogies draw heavily on the field of critical digital pedagogy, on bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, and many others to create a space where digital humanities students can imagine into being the kinds of professional futures they want to see, a space where they can work beyond the realities of the academic job market through speculative practices in professional development. That is to say, my work tends to operate at the level of the individual who is seeking to imagine their own future within a broader present that tries to constrain this development. These forces, of course, are systems of power that consistently work in unequal ways on our students as they try to navigate them. Our work as practitioners of speculative digital pedagogy is to recognize how individual imagined futures are tied up with larger systems of power and oppression in the present.

Seanna - Our conception of a speculative digital pedagogy is in part shaped by my research background in Caribbean studies, specifically Caribbean SF (with SF being an umbrella term for several subgenres of speculative fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror, to name a few). We rely upon definitions of speculative fiction that are entangled with objectives of transformation, namely Caribbeanist, Nicola Hunte’s definition of SF as “concerned with anti-hegemonic practices and marked by its preoccupation with social and political injustice” and as a “progression to a more hopeful treatment of the other”—particularly as they are experienced by persons of the diaspora, transitory, marginalized, and migratory communities (Hunte 17). In the context of digital pedagogy, we want instructors and students’ engagement with speculation and digital methods to be marked by an ethic of solidarity and sensitivity to what others have experienced, are experiencing, and where they are headed.

Drawing from several other scholars in Caribbean and Black DH studies—such as Kaiama L. Glover, Kelly Baker Josephs, Marlene L. Daut, Asha Maharaj, and Patricia Mohammed—we advocate for a speculative pedagogy in the digital sphere that centers consciousness-raising, coalition-building, and alternative epistemologies. Hunte similarly draws attention to the virtual Caribbean cultural community that is created on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook, underlining key strategies of Caribbean cultural expression and resistance such as the use of Caribbean language, idiom, and iconography. Josephs, Maharaj, and Mohammed’s respective attention to alternative Caribbean storytellers (i.e. photographer Ruddy Roye, comedians Seth ‘Xcel’ Bovell and Senior Gum Boy) and movements such as #LifeinLeggings (a social media campaign highlighting gender-based violence in the Caribbean), emphasize the ways in which global communities can deeply connect with the personal experiences of communities in the Global South; fostering an empathy and awareness to the lived realities of communities they would otherwise lack exposure to. This approach provides students and instructors with innovative frameworks for their speculative practices, especially by encouraging them to draw on diverse perspectives as they might question common or established narratives.

My advocacy for speculative pedagogy arises from my own experiences in graduate school where I attempted to integrate speculative practices into my reading of canonical texts. In analyzing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, my background in Caribbean studies led me to speculate on the connection prefigured by Bronte’s novel as put in conversation with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea—both a ‘prequel’ and Caribbeanist text that reimagines the colonial backstory of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Bronte’s novel. Not only did my professor disagree with my reading but she also publicly reprimanded me for not reading Jane Eyre on ‘its own terms.’ While her stance may seem to simply mirror early literary theory, primarily in New Criticism, my professor failed to realize that my use of speculation between the two novels was one that could have opened up discussions of empire, silencing, and the Caribbean in our (virtual) classroom. Speculation, for me in this case, was about creating a dialogue across time and space; emphasizing the underrepresented experiences of Caribbean women that underpin Bronte’s (canonical) novel. Though initially disheartened by this incident, this experience shaped my teaching objectives as a culturally-relevant and socially-engaged instructor. I now view speculative practices as essential tools to reexamine histories, our present, as well as the canons that persist in many classrooms.

Brandon - Speculation, then, can be a pathway for practitioners of digital pedagogy to re-imagine a more equitable and just future for their communities of teachers and learners, to work beyond a limiting present even as it aims to change it. In the time we have remaining, we wanted to offer a few rapid-fire examples, exercises, and prompts for how you might, today and tomorrow, implement a speculative digital pedagogy in your own practice. They will necessarily be incomplete but will hopefully spark a sense of wonder.

We’ll start broadly, where many begin when thinking of their teaching. When we plan courses we quickly turn to the calendar, the course requirements, the texts to be read, the goals for the course. This is, of course, due to circumstance: we frequently teach to the moment, to the registrar, to the material needs around us. DH syllabi can often feel overloaded and weighted down, in particular, by the pressure to appear DH enough. What if, instead, we resisted the institutional pull to fix things in place? What if, instead, we allowed our syllabi to dwell in possibility?

One way to do so is to draw upon minimal and iterative design practices, a process by which rapid prototyping leads to more refined ideas. What if we applied this to syllabus design? Take a course title and rename it. Rename it again ten times. Twenty. Take the list of assigned authors and redo that list ten times. Twenty. Take your final digital project assignment and iterate through a list of fifty options. While the idea might sound absurd, we would wager that, if you push through, something transformative might happen to your idea of the course, of your students, and the role of your teaching. Allow the iterative pressure to blow the lid of your conception of the classroom. What happens to your sense of the canonical works you must teach? To your sense of what DH is? And what might happen if you kept this feeling alive and invited students into this course as a thing-in-process? As an imaginative, porous space of instability? How can you navigate this together and learn to critique educational practices that purport towards a false sense of fixity?

Seanna - We might also consider the impact our individual assignments and digital projects have on the stories we share with our students, as well as encourage them to tell. My investment in speculation, in what Saidiya Hartman calls “Critical Fabulation,” has been deeply shaped by digital projects that uncover and ethically reimagine diasporic and indigenous histories—such as the “Barbados Runaways Project,” “In the Same Boats,” and the “Dark Laboratory,” to name a few. “In The Same Boats” traces the migratory journeys of significant cultural actors from the Caribbean, wider Americas, Africa, and Europe in the 20th century; both presenting and speculating on spaces in which these actors met, were in conversation, and where they might have influenced each other’s work. The Dark Laboratory challenges conventional narratives about Black and Indigenous history, using digital tools, interactive archives, and storytelling to reimagine hidden histories and alternative futures while the Barbados Runaways Project allows users to interact with digitized and colonial newspapers in Barbados with information about enslaved individuals who escaped slavery. I was fortunate enough to become involved with the Barbados Runaways Project when doing a Fulbright in Barbados as the ads were being digitized. I was invited to lead a workshop that encouraged participants to engage with the question, “How can we use these ads to speculate on their lives with the forms that are given?” One woman used the advertisement of a young woman, with limited description, to work on a screenplay that speculated on acts of resistance that the young woman exhibited under the conditions of enslavement. As an aspiring professor in Black and Caribbean studies, I aim to use speculative digital pedagogy to push students to engage with alternative archives in similar ways—drawing on Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation, by not imposing one narrative on the archive but instead remaining open to one of its many possible realities and histories.

Brandon- And, finally, we might consider the roles we play as educators outside the classroom, as we work with students to plot out their professional futures against the constraining realities of the job market. This is imaginative work, especially when it comes to humanities students learning about digital methods—and careers—for the first time. Our job is so often to help them imagine new ways of being. In contrast, professional CV’s typically read as a record of past accomplishments sanctioned by the academy. For students just starting out, it can be easy to look at one’s own document and struggle to see your own way past the gatekeepers. Instead, we can design activities for our students that help to imagine their professional future into being and then create tools for them to manifest them. Ask your students to sketch the CV of the person they want to be in five years. Ten years. To write a biographical sketch for that person. What do they see in that person that you can help with them right now? In our Lab, this means a focus on blogged public writing as a means to write that future into existence without waiting on a publisher to OK it (though the work often leads to that!). Another example - we have students design and deliver DH workshops on an unfamiliar topic or method with the goal that they will begin to see their own developing relationship to technical expertise as one of possibility. And these workshops are intentionally meant to be creative and low-tech (think network analysis by way of string and rope, or data visualization by way of drawing what you had for breakfast this week) as a means of making professional development into a space of play as opposed to pain. The hope is that these activities bring a student’s provisional future one CV line closer to existence. And they also offer a way for students to find their ways into professional communities without waiting for institutional permission to do so. Because a more just and equitable future will never arrive if we allow institutions to control whose voices they allow to speak within their walls. To quote Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Our pedagogies can be a space to demand better futures for our students.

Seanna - Our examples have attempted to show how speculation can be used to challenge the present, to offer students a space to develop their own futures. But, as the anecdote about my own negative experiences in the classroom shows, imagination can also be a weapon of power. My experience underscores the ethical dimensions of the imagination that have been practiced in academic spaces—begging the question of who has the right to imagine and reinterpret texts, as well as whose perspectives are allowed into academic discourse. It is important to note that when my professor denounced my comment, I was in my first semester of graduate school during the pandemic. I left our Zoom classroom feeling dispirited and questioning my place in academia as an aspiring scholar in Caribbean studies—had I let this experience overcome me, then I would not have been able to begin practicing the speculative pedagogy that we are advocating for in the digital sphere. When speculative practices are dismissed or outright rejected, there is a policing of the imagination that limits new and diverse interpretations and ultimately, reinforces dominant narratives that have excluded marginalized communities, as well as communities outside of academia. To practice speculative digital pedagogy, we must rely on an ethical imagination that acknowledges and values the contributions of those whose knowledges, histories, and day-to-day lives look quite differently than our own. Advocating for a speculative digital pedagogy is about cultivating spaces online and in person where students, instructors, and scholars can freely explore new interpretations, push beyond traditional forms of analysis and discourse, and imagine new lives for themselves in the present. New stories to tell. New futures.