Tagged african diaspora

Issue Six / Issues

Introduction

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Issue #6 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy draws together scholarship that highlights the impact of digital technologies and tools internationally, with a special emphasis on Africa and the African diaspora. The call for this themed issue of JITP sought submissions that explore the ways in which digital methods of research, communication, and pedagogy have affected the heritage, policies, arts, histories, education, and activism of African and African diasporan communities. We teamed up with guest co-editors, Angel David Nieves (Hamilton College) and Marla Jaksch (The College of New Jersey), who served as the issue’s content experts in the field and have co-authored a conceptual introduction to the four articles on African and African diasporan themes included in this issue.

The four African/African diasporan articles cover a spectrum of work that reflects the growing use of digital technologies and practices across Africa and the African diaspora. These digital tools include the pedagogical uses in universities of online scholarly articles, the efforts of particular African indigenous peoples to use transcription and blogging software for cultural preservation and educational and political purposes, the uses of blogs and sophisticated digital humanities techniques, including data visualization, horizontal editing software, digital mapping, and big data analysis to explore African-American cultural practices historically, and the uses of various open source software to encourage transcultural digital dialogues linking U.S. and Ugandan college students. An additional fifth article included in this issue, though not specifically on Africa and the African diaspora, also employs videoconferencing, email technologies, and iPhones and iPads to encourage international dialogues and exchanges focusing on Shakespeare’s plays among North and South American, Asian, North African, and European undergraduates. All of the articles focus on projects—whether educational, cultural, or political—that digital technologies have enhanced and/or made possible. Together, they present a kaleidoscopic lens for viewing and understanding access, implementation, and use of technology from an international perspective.

Contributions to This Issue

In her piece “Runaway Quilt Project,” Deimosa Webber-Bey weaves together an intricate, two-pronged narrative that encompasses both her experience with digital exploration in the humanities and her curiosity and personal history with quilting, a cultural practice that traces its roots back to racial slavery and beyond. She draws together the concrete, tangible, and literal visualizations of story, time, and place that are represented in quilting and the two-dimensional art (if you will) of visual mapping and digital data visualization. Initiated in a digital humanities course for librarians taught by Interactive Technology and Pedagogy graduate and JITP author Chris Sula, the project grew beyond the scope of the original course assignment, encompassing a deep and broad exploration of digital tools from Google Ngrams and Digress.it to Timeline JS and Tableau Public. Simultaneously, Webber-Bey created two “infographic” quilts that indelibly display the results of research conducted for this project. She went on to display one of these quilts, “Maker Known,” at the 2013 International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas. Webber-Bey’s scholarly contribution to this journal and the field encourages further exploration of digital tools that challenge “known” histories and data collection norms.

Thomas Fisher’s “Teaching Online Journals in Tanzania: Knowledge Production and the Digital Divide” offers a case study regarding the limits and pedagogical possibilities of using online journals to teach undergraduates who do not have a strong sense of research culture. Fisher, who taught for several years at Saint Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT), one of the newly created private universities in East Africa, expands the conversation about the digital divide and access to include the skills students need to use available scholarly resources. Fisher details how the digital divide in African universities is more a question of slow (sometimes very slow) Internet access, rather than no access at all. Teaching students how to use online journals to improve their research requires a willingness to be flexible and to rely on students’ longstanding knowledge of how to work around repeated problems with Internet access. Fisher concludes that it is not enough to make online academic journals accessible and to instruct students on how to use or apply these resources. Rather, teachers also need to take into consideration specific community practices with regard to study and research approaches that at times may include the desire to do communal and collaborative work rather than rely on more familiar Western notions of individual scholarly attainment.

Philip Kreniske’s “How the San of Southern Africa Used Digital Media as Educational and Political Tools” provides a case study in the uses of technology within communities of the San, an indigenous people spread across Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana. The article focuses on the ways the San use digital technologies, in Kreniske’s words, “to document, communicate and represent their values and struggles.” Despite severely limited Internet connectivity, lack of access to computers, and low literacy rates, some of the San are employing digital technologies to generate educational texts by using digital transcription services and web publishing of traditional oral folk tales. They also use blogs to communicate their own perspectives on critical political and educational debates across Southern Africa. Employing narrative analysis to assess the work of two well-educated San bloggers and editors from different areas in the San diaspora—Magdelena Lucas and Job Morris—Kreniske argues that the two bloggers used their online presences to consider challenging issues and formulate “critical positions on controversial topics such as the value of and access to an education, the pros and cons of cultural tourism, and the large-scale displacement of San peoples in Botswana.”

Richard Mutagejja Kabiito, Christine Liao, Jennifer L. Motter, and Karen Treat Keifer-Boyd’s piece, “Transcultural Dialogue Mashup,” grew from an action research project that, in each of its iterations, fostered a community of partnership and learning between geographically disparate universities located in Kampala, Uganda; University Park, Pennsylvania; and Helsinki, Finland. Drawing on theories of constructivist learning and culturally relevant pedagogy, participants structured their project to “make visible to self and others their cultural beliefs, practices, and values.” The project participants largely sought to utilize open source and no-fee technologies in their quest to communicate digitally. They encountered various speed bumps along the way while attempting to make use of digital tools that foster online collaboration, resulting from varying bandwidth and other access issues; however, they ultimately succeeded in creating a transcultural dialogue between students in the United States and Uganda, thus motivating participants to foster future collaborations and partnerships — both in person and via digital technologies.

Sheila Cavanagh’s “‘All Corners of the World’: The Possibilities and Challenges of International Electronic Education” describes the World Shakespeare Project (WSP), an international effort that originated at Emory University in Atlanta, that uses Shakespeare plays to create ongoing educational and cultural dialogues and exchanges among undergraduate students. Students in Argentina, India, and Morocco connect with students at Emory University in Atlanta, with students at Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in Michigan, and with incarcerated students at Monroe Correctional Facility in Washington State. Employing a mix of teleconferencing platforms like Vidyo as well as Skype and email, the students exchange ideas and responses to universal themes revealed in various Shakespeare plays and put on their own performances of the plays for fellow students. Cavanagh rightly concludes that “this approach to cooperative, international electronic education holds great promise” and that “the intersection of Shakespeare and videoconferencing portends a dynamic pedagogical future.”

Collaboration Through Digital Tools: Communication, Partnership, and Exploration

In an age when digital technology undeniably transforms the way we consume, produce, and share knowledge, scholarship that draws on the growing possibilities for digital collaboration helps us both theoretically and practically reimagine the reciprocal relationship between culture and technology. The spectrum of technologies explored by the authors in JITP Issue #6—from cell phones and screenshots to web-based apps and visual mapping—encourage readers to consider the power and purpose of these readily accessible technologies in fostering collaboration, communication, partnership, and exploration in instructional pedagogy and digital scholarship. Each of the articles offers ways to imagine “exploring and embracing new possibilities rather than reinforcing existing structures” (Waltzer 2010) in an effort to proactively draw together communities, histories, and voices that often find themselves outside of culturally and geographically “mainstream” settings. Such creative uses of everyday technologies encourage participants and readers to reimagine what it means to “collaborate meaningfully…to develop more empowering and accessible environments” in ever-changing times (Donovan 2013, 17).

We are excited to broaden JITP’s reach to consider the international intersections of digital technologies and digital pedagogies, with a special focus on Africa and the African diaspora. We are hopeful that the expanded focus in this issue will yield many more international and transnational contributions in the future.

Kiersten Greene and Steve Brier, Issue Co-Editors

Bibliography

Donovan, Gregory. 2013. “MyDigitalFootprint.org: Young People and the Proprietary Ecology of Everyday Data.” PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center. Accessed October 31, 2014. http://mydigitalfootprint.org/files/2013/05/MyDigitalFootprint_GTD.pdf.

Waltzer, Lucas. 2010. “The Path to Blogs@Baruch.” Bloviate the periodic musings of sometimes know-it-all blog, July 13. http://lukewaltzer.com/the-path-to-blogsbaruch/.

 

 

About the Authors

Kiersten Greene is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Elementary Education Department of the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her research interests lie at the intersection of policy, teacher voice, and literacy instruction in public schooling, and she is particularly interested in how technology both informs and is informed by communication and pedagogy in classrooms. She received her PhD in the Urban Education Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has been a teacher and teacher educator for the last 15 years. When she is not teaching, researching, or writing, you can find her knitting or blogging. Kiersten can be found online at kierstengreene.net or @kag823 and reached via greenek@newpaltz.edu.

Steve Brier is the founder and coordinator of the ITP certificate program, the Senior Academic Technology Officer, and co-director of the New Media Lab at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a professor of Urban Education and co-director of the Digital Humanities track in the M.A. in Liberal Studies program at the Graduate Center. He is a social and labor historian who has written extensively on digital technology and pedagogy and the history of public education. Steve can be reached at sbrier@gc.cuny.edu and @stevebrier on Twitter.

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Issue Six / Issues

Africa is a Country? Digital Diasporas, ICTs, and Heritage Development Strategies for Social Justice

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Guest Co-Editors:
Marla L. Jaksch, The College of New Jersey
Angel David Nieves, Hamilton College

We originally proposed this special section of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy because of the continued disconnect regarding knowledge and understanding of Africa and the rapid changes across sub-Saharan Africa with regard to digital technology. In discussions of digital change in Africa at professional conferences and presentations, we have been questioned repeatedly if pressing issues such as water and sanitation should be examined first instead of encouraging Western scholars to promote research on digital technology and the continent. According to some recent studies, by 2015 sub-Saharan Africa will have more persons with access to mobile phone networks compared to electricity access at home (Ali 2011; Buskens and Webb 2009, 71), so we find this sort of interrogation to be astonishingly naïve. However, only a few sectors, including healthcare, banking, and agriculture, can as yet demonstrate a correlation between emerging digital technologies and macroeconomic impact (Bowman, Mensah, and Urama 2014, 45).

nieves-1

“Remember Marikana,” Maboneng, Johannesburg, South Africa (Nieves 2014).

In light of the overwhelming lack of awareness in the West about information communication technologies (ICTs) in Africa, not to mention ignorance of cutting-edge digital projects, entrepreneurs and hacktivists, theorists and practitioners in Africa performing innovative scholarship in partnership with and about marginalized communities (Castells 1996; Mansell and Wehn 1998), we proposed a special issue that brought these topics together. At the same time we also wanted to engage with the many pedagogical and social justice issues related to this work. In the digital humanities, critical discussions about race, power, and privilege remain somewhat at the margins, or as #DHPoco scholar Adeline Koh has recently argued,

historicization of the digital humanities that situates it in a discursive field larger than humanities computing … [that] can be achieved by creating multiple genealogies for the digital humanities and by demonstrating that the field also encompasses new media studies, postcolonial science and technology studies, and digital research on race, gender, class, and disability and their impact on cultures around the world. (Koh 2014, 93-106)

Similarly, we would argue that by re-inscribing a more global digital humanities (O’Donnell 2012) we might begin to see the value in turning our attention to the geopolitical borders of the African continent. For example, Kenyan blogger, cyber-activist, and lawyer Ory Okolloh started the website Mzalendo to monitor that country’s once highly secretive parliament. Okolloh also helped to create Ushahidi, a crowd sourcing, web/mobile-based utility enabling citizen journalists and eyewitnesses all over the world to report violence and human rights atrocities through crisis mapping (Okolloh 2009, 65). Ushahidi is just one example of the many innovations transforming our understanding of digital advocacy projects that make space for critical voices in countries across Africa. Similarly, historian Keith Breckenridge’s Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (2014) examines South Africa’s role in promoting transnational biometric measurement and technological experimentation. In light of the technology transfer and information networks that originated in South Africa during the nineteenth-century (as outlined by Breckenridge), a very different present-day understanding of the “digital divide” is suggested.

Too often a sole focus on the “digital divide” fails to demonstrate how digital technologies are being used to advance humanistic inquiry into the dynamic work ongoing by individuals and communities either in Africa or across the African diaspora (Fuchs and Horak 2008, 100). By redirecting our focus beyond the established canons of where and how innovation takes place (and by whom), what may now be explored is a much more complicated constellation of important work that may have been previously overlooked, silenced, or diminished. Michele Pickover, Curator of Manuscripts of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers, has raised important questions as to what is prioritized and, ultimately, digitized in African archives and how a “monolithic nostalgic legacy” is assigned greater value. Rather, the question that should be posed is who has agency to recover narratives of the past? The constant re-editing, depending on who controls the current nationalist discourse, also suggests different paths for historical legacy or historiography (Pickover 2014, 7). How do we trace the genealogy of this work? No one starting point or single path is indicated. Instead it will be a constellation of paths that will trace the radical and sometimes diverse transformations with regards to education, society, economy, and political liberation and self-determination in Africa over the last 50 years.

Information Communication Technologies & Digital Diasporas

One interesting aspect of ICTs includes the trajectories of digital projects beyond corporate banking and communications to include archives and data curating, independent film and video, art-making and music production, pedagogical practices, and community-based digital activism. The individual use of ICTs that re-mix their intended use include public participation graphical information systems (GIS), cell-phone delivered prenatal education, and feminist projects that address the stubborn gender digital divide. The ways that such practices use ICTs to facilitate their own empowerment bring attention to the ways that gender impacts ICT development and demonstrate how ICTs are impacted by such use and are in fact gendered (Antonio and Tuffley 2014).

Over the past decade, scholars have witnessed rapid changes in both legacy-industrial and emerging technology infrastructures across the African continent (Wilson and Wong 2006, 30, 120, 147). The tired and long-held post-colonial narratives of disease, war, and famine across Africa are now being re-written in the face of rapid redevelopment. This process goes hand-in-hand with multinational corporations’ continued desire to tap into the emerging markets there. Remarkably, Internet educational technologies coupled with the staggering number of mobile phone subscriptions—including innovations such as feature-rich smartphones, dual-SIM card phones, and cash flow back to the continent through e-remittances—have had a significant impact on all levels of African society.

Some have argued that an ICT revolution is already taking hold in countries such as Kenya and South Africa, where the international community has made political and economic investments in reform and infrastructure (Kelly and Rosotto 2012, 107). The growing influence of Asian investment across eastern Africa—particularly Chinese investment—should not be categorized simply as an opening-up of new market investments in natural resource extraction. Rather, we would argue that while ICTs might have an enormous positive impact on rural and urban populations, it might also usher in a kind of second or third wave of colonial rule over emerging knowledge systems—a rule that may be naively perceived as benign global transnationalism by many Western outsiders (Buskens and Webb 2009, 77). Significantly, according to the latest published figures 84.9 percent of the population in North America uses the Internet versus 21.3 percent penetration in Africa (MMG 2014), so further overseas investment—and influence—may be taken as a given.

African states, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some indigenous community-based organizations are working collaboratively to push for universal access to the Internet and the quickly growing cell phone market in southern and eastern Africa. Many of these changes have been made possible, because in the 1990s and early 2000s transnational organizations such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations (UN), and the World Bank advocated for new policies and practices to expand ICT development across Africa. The growing African telecommunications market encouraged reforms that helped to bolster ICT infrastructure. Notable infrastructure developments across the African continent include the SAT-3/WASC or South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable; SEACOM connecting most of Eastern Africa through a submarine cable operator; EASSy (East African Submarine Cable System); and the National ICT Broadband Backbone. This infrastructure has been accompanied by a corresponding digital migration process freeing up broadband/bandwidth space, resulting in a reduction of prices throughout the region (Koutroumpis 2009, 471).

Our interest in these issues is not to perpetuate Western scholarly preoccupations with the “digital divide”—something that clearly persists in Africa. Instead, we are proposing that a kind of flattening out of this divide in southern and eastern Africa now exists and is worthy of further investigation. As such, Africa should no longer be viewed through a monolithic continent-wide paternalistic lens—a lens that is unable to focus on country-specific research and analysis involving digital technologies. Specifically, African-based institutions including NGOs, universities, and entrepreneurs are increasingly leading efforts to solve African problems by assuming greater control over heritage and development issues using information technologies. Development studies and recent scholarship in ICTs in Africa have highlighted the importance of new digital technologies as tools for furthering social justice while at the same time underlining pervasive educational, economic, and political inequalities in their application (Bablola 2014). How are ICTs and digital tools being used, challenged, implemented, and incorporated in grassroots and institutional development in Africa and in the Diaspora?

As guest co-editors of this special section of JITP, we hope this effort can be the start of more critical engagements with issues of race, gender, power, imperialism, and neoliberalization that help to expand conversations across scholarly communities, especially those communities in the digital humanities that remain exclusively white, homogenous, or largely centralized in the West. Changes in the field here in the United States are rapidly taking place because of the work of scholars such as Lisa Nakamura, Alondra Nelson, Tara McPherson, Mary Corbin Sies, and Siobhan Senier (to name but a very few) — scholars who actively disrupt mainstream trends in the digital humanities and digital studies by providing new sources for archive-making, publication, and preservation through feminist and intersectional analysis.[1] These inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary frameworks and forms of analysis give us important models to use in other contexts and knowledge communities outside the US. Most recently the collaborative work of scholars and activists in #DHPoco including Adeline Koh, Roopika Risam, and Dorothy Kim (http://dhpoco.org/); and FemTechNet (http://femtechnet.org) have brought attention to a host of these and other complex issues.

In November 2014 ICT University in Yaounde, Cameroon, was the site for the sixth annual ICTs for Africa (ICT4Africa) International Conference. This year alone three major research universities in the Global North are coordinating workshops and lecture series including Princeton University’s “Black Studies in the Digital Age”; York University’s “African Diaspora 2.0: Oral Sources and Digital Humanities”; and the University of Michigan’s “African Studies in the Digital Age.” The University of Michigan’s week-long workshop, in collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand, is the second installment of a program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation entitled “Joining Theory and Empiricism in the Remaking of the African Humanities: A Transcontinental Collaboration,” a five-year interdisciplinary research and teaching partnership between the African Studies Center at Michigan and the Institute for Social and Economic Research at WITS. Similarly, several important volumes have also appeared, including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Nakamura 2007); Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace (Everett 2009); Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Banks 2010); and African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? (Barringer and Wallace 2014). Few of these works focus entirely on the many digitization projects, digital platforms, and community-engaged partnerships that have emerged over the past two decades on the African continent. Unfortunately, a focus only on completed works fails to look critically at the many realities facing so many of these digital projects, particularly financial and human resources in both the Global North and South. Proposed projects or proof-of-concepts are also significant interventions because they help to raise awareness of issues impacting national libraries, local historical societies, and diasporic communities across the Global South.

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy has made clear that they see this special issue as the start of an ongoing discussion concerning Africa and the African Diaspora and the use of digital technologies for research, teaching and learning. Some projects and digital initiatives worth further exploration include:

  • The Ulwazi Programme (http://www.ulwazi.org/) collects and shares local knowledge and histories in the form of a wiki enabling contributions and modifications from multiple users in English and isiZulu.
  • Map Kibera (http://mapkibera.org/about/) was launched in 2009 as a project dedicated to help create essential maps for the residents of the city’s slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Map Kibera also deploys other on-line tools including software for information collection, visualization, and interactivity provided by Ushahidi (http://www.ushahidi.com/).
  • Annie Bunting of York University (http://tubman.info.yorku.ca/research/diaspora2/abstracts/) and her multidisciplinary team of scholars and community organizers work with victims of forced marriages in post-conflict societies, including Sierra Leone and Rwanda, to gather new video testimony of these crimes.
  • Jaksch and Nieves began work on the Virtual Freedom Trail Project in 2010 with the intention of creating an open-source, community archive and web-based virtual, living museum centering on the marginalized voices and experiences in the struggle for liberation in Tanzania (see, http://www.virtualfreedomtrailproject.org/).
  • The Soweto Historical GIS Project (SHGIS) seeks to build a multi-layered historical geographic information system database and geospatially accurate 3D environment that explores the social, economic, and political dimensions of urban development under South African apartheid regimes (1904-1994) in Johannesburg’s all-black township of Soweto.
  • The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) (http://askmama.mobi/) is a global movement that seeks to use mobile technologies to improve the health and lives of mothers in developing nations.

We hope the work in this special section will lead to further investigation and a robust integration of Africa-related work into the emerging canon of scholarship.

 

Bibliography

Ali, Laila. 2011. “The digital revolution in sub-saharan Africa.” Al Jazeera Online, 12 October. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/10/201110108635691462.html.

Antonio, Amy, and David Tuffley. 2014. “The Gender Digital Divide in Developing Countries.” Future Internet 6 (4). http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/6/4/673/htm.

Bablola, Titlola. 2014. “The Digital Humanities and Digital Literacy: Understanding the Digital Culture in Nigeria.” Digital Studies/Le champ numerique 4. http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/276/314

Banks, Adam J. 2010. Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press. OCLC 633139665.

Bowman, Warigia, Marianne Mensah, and Kevin Urama. 2014. “Information and telecommunication technologies in Africa: a potential Revolution.” Innovation for Sustainable Development. Edited by Jean-Yves Grosclaude, Rajendra K. Pachauri, and Laurence Tubiana. New Delhi: TERI. OCLC 883178928.

Breckenridge, Keith. 2014. Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 881387739.

Buskens, Ineke and Anne Webb. 2009. African Women and ICTs: Investigating technology, gender and empowerment. London: Zed Books. OCLC 321068837.

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. OCLC 43092627

Everett, Anna. 2009. Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. Albany: SUNY. OCLC 833290225.

FemTechNet. http://femtechnet.org/.

Fuchs, Christian, and Eva Horak. 2008. “Africa and the digital divide.” Telematics and Informatics 25. OCLC 4662516406.

Kelly, Tim, and Carlo Maria Rosotto, eds. 2012. Broadband Strategies Handbook. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications. OCLC 784885717.

Koh, Adeline, and Roopika Risam. Postcolonial Digital Humanities: Global explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability within cultures of technology. http://dhpoco.org/.

Koh, Adeline. 2014. “Niceness, Building, and Opening the Genealogy of the Digital Humanities: Beyond the Social Contract of Humanities Computing,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25 (1). OCLC 5582686267.

Koutroumpis, Pantelis. 2009. “The Economic Impact of Broadband on Growth: A Simultaneous Approach.” Telecommunications Policy 33 (9). OCLC 450806382.

LCHP (Lakeland Community Heritage Project). 2014. Lakeland Community Heritage Project: Preserving the history of African Americans in College Park, Maryland. http://lakelandchp.com/.

Mansell, Robin, and Uta Wehn de Montalvo. 1998. Knowledge societies: Information technology for sustainable development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 473804582.

MMG (Miniwatts Marketing Group). 2014. “World Internet Users and Statistics and 2014 World Population Stats.” http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://www.SLQ.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=334221. OCLC 781375257.

O’Donnell, Daniel. 2012. “In a Rich Man’s World: Global DH?” dpod blog (blog), November 2. http://dpod.kakelbont.ca/2012/11/02/in-a-rich-mans-world-global-dh/

Okolloh, Ory. 2009. “Ushahidi, or ‘testimony’: Web 2.0 tools for crowd sourcing crisis information.” Participatory Learning and Action 59 (1).

Pickover, Michele. 2014. “Patrimony, Power and Politics: Selecting, Constructing and Preserving Digital Heritage Content in South Africa and Africa.” Paper presented at International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress (WLIC), Libraries, Citizens, Societies: Confluence for Knowledge, Lyon, France, 16-22 August. http://library.ifla.org/1023/1/138-pickover-en.pdf.

Senier, Siobhan. 2014. Writing of Indigenous New England: a review blog by Siobhan Senier. http://ssenier.indigenousnewengland.com/.

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. http://www.vectorsjournal.org/.

Wilson, Ernest J. and Kelvin R. Wong. 2006. Negotiating the Net in Africa: The Politics of Internet Diffusion. Ann Arbor: Lynne Rienner Publishers. OCLC 226255963.

 

[1] Siobhan Senier’s (University of New Hampshire) work with indigenous communities in New England is a significant model for collaboration with long marginalized and silenced voices, http://ssenier.indigenousnewengland.com/; Mary Corbin Sies (University of Maryland) has been working to recast the relationship between African American communities that border many American universities and campuses across the United States, http://lakelandchp.com/ (LCHP 2014); Tara McPherson (University of Southern California) has developed an online journal and publishing platform that have both radically changed digital publishing in the American academy, http://www.vectorsjournal.org/ (Vectors).

 

 

About the Authors

Dr. Marla Jaksch is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and affiliate faculty of African American Studies at the College of New Jersey. In 2009-2010 Jaksch was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania where she conducted research and taught . Her current teaching and research interests include the gendered and racialized dimensions of ICTs and STEM and their implications for women and girls.

Dr. Angel David Nieves is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the American Studies Program at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y. He received his interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the History of Urban Development and Africana Studies from Cornell University. Nieves is currently Co-Directing Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), a $1.75 million Mellon Foundation Grant funded project (http://www.dhinitiative.org). Nieves’ scholarly work and community-based activism engages critically with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South.

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