Roopika Risam: "Transnational Digital Humanities in the Digital Black Atlantic"

About this talk: How do we reconcile transnationalism in the context of digital humanities? In what ways does transnationality risk perpetuating inequalities in digital knowledge production? In this talk, Roopika Risam will discuss her work co-editing The Digital Black Atlantic with Kelly Baker Josephs, as well as her work on the Pan-Africanism Data Project, to explore the fraught nature of transnational discourses and practices in digital humanities. 

About the speaker: Roopika Risam is Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities. Risam’s first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is the co-editor of Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Arc Humanities/Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations Across Technology’s Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020). Risam’s latest co-edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 2021. Her current book project, “Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities,” which traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.