Full Panel
Panel Participants:
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, John Mugane, Carla Martin, Harvard University and Patrick Vinck, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Biographies
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. She is an award winning author, whose writings span diverse fields–African American women’s history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history.
John Mugane is the Director of the African Language Program and the Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is a linguist with research interests in Linguistics, Bantu languages, African Language documentation and preservation, language learning and acquisition, and web-based language instruction.
Carla Martin is a Harvard College Fellow in the Department of African and African American Studies. A social anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests that include history, ethnomusicology, and linguistics, she received her Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University in 2012. Please visit her professional website to learn more: http://carladmartin.com
Patrick Vinck, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and Associate Faculty with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). Before joining HHI in 2011, he directed and co-founded the Initiative for Vulnerable Populations at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, where he focused on managing and implementing empirical studies on the process of social reconstruction in countries affected by mass violence.
Panel Description
Scholars have considered the role of race and ethnicity in relation to digital technology since the late 1990s, yet the recent proliferation of digital tools has significantly altered the landscape of research possibilities in the humanities and social sciences. This panel identifies such tools as promoting an environment of innovation through educational applications supportive of progressive social change. In fall 2006, the African and African American Studies Department (AAAS) at Harvard University launched the Social Engagement Initiative in order to encourage academically informed civic responsibility in the current generation of undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom want to help solve such social problems as poverty, educational disparities, disease, and other manifestations of inequality. This pedagogical initiative combines rigorous academic study with practical experience, such that students come to understand how and why academic study and ideas are challenged, often remade or even refuted, by the lived experiences and cultural proscriptions of communities whose culture and values differ in significant ways from those of the larger American mainstream. Social Engagement courses create opportunities for students to learn in this way, while the Social Engagement senior thesis and doctoral dissertation encourage social entrepreneurship through creative leadership and collaborative projects designed by the students themselves. Such projects require problem-solving on many levels and thus span a range of distinct, yet interlocking fields of knowledge.
This panel explores the use of digital research tools as an important dimension of socially engaged scholarship–as a hybrid pedagogy that puts critical and digital pedagogy together in conversation and from standpoints inside and outside the classroom. We will also reveal how students and faculty work toward digital fluency in research design by engaging with presentation and storytelling tools, GIS mapping tools, and an array of internet and library research tools.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the panel organizer and facilitator, will discuss “Portraits in Multimedia,” which she conceived of as an instructional project for students in building an electronic archive of video interviews with several hundred leaders and residents in local communities in Africa and the African diaspora. The local focus includes black communities in the US, such as immigrant groups from Africa and the Caribbean (e.g. Cape Verdeans, Dominicans, Ethiopians, Haitians, and Senegalese). The portraits serve as the basis for a number of goals: interactive teaching and learning with students and faculty in universities in the US and in Africa; on-the-ground experience in documenting and analyzing the work of community leaders and social/cultural institutions (faith-based; health and human rights groups; restaurants, educational institutions); multimedia training and analysis; and post-production editing. This e- archive will be extremely useful for language learning, as well as for preserving knowledge of activities, personalities, and organizations. The project has been adopted in courses in African languages and cultures, and will be utilized in courses on film, health, music and art, religion, and education.
John Mugane created the Africa’s Sources of Knowledge Digital Library (ASK-DL) in order to save endangered African languages. These languages are largely unwritten and have thus gone unrecorded. Indeed, all the knowledge that they have produced will be soon lost to history. Contrary to Western depictions, African communities have always had a way of preserving a record of their past—through oral histories and sometimes written traditions. Today the ability to preserve history through languages, stories, cultures, and memory is greater than at any time before. This is because of digital technology. Building the online library transforms knowledge in its full expression, i.e., written, aural, spoken, and visual aspects, thus reaching the literate and the illiterate, the affluent and the poor. Mugane’s paper argues that the online library ASK-DL provides a model to be replicated across a number of countries through its digitization of rare and out-of-print documents written in Africa’s languages. The primary documents in the library include audio-visual resources relating to public and private correspondences, oral histories, unpublished booklets, poetry, essays, treatises, travelogues, and inventories and records of a variety of topics. The project’s current target is 5000 documents with an expected annual growth of 1000 documents per script. The greater part of digital archiving will take place in Africa with the full participation of Africans using the different writing systems. The ASK-DL document management system will be freely accessible online.
Carla Martin will discuss funana.org,which she created as the social engagement dimension of her doctoral dissertation. This online clearinghouse and directory for Cape Verdean studies makes it possible for visitors to the site to buy books from the National Library of Cape Verde, to study Cape Verdean language, music, literature, and art, and to find institutes of higher learning, scholars, and websites that support research on Cape Verde. For Martin, the site reflects her larger goals of promoting the Cape Verdean language to equal status with the colonial language of Portuguese and of collaborating with Cape Verdean scholars to represent Cape Verdean culture. The paper will also address the use of digital tools to promote social engagement in undergraduate classrooms, bridging the research-teaching divide. Using case studies from two classes taught in Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies, Martin will demonstrate how students can become active agents in socially engaged projects of applied anthropology, online curation, and public scholarship.”
Patrick Vinck, a co-founder of KoBo, will discuss the role of digital data research in the advancement of human rights.