Against Microcredentials: Seeding Anti-Colonial and Care-Filled Digital Pedagogical Otherwises
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2023-03-09

Ashley Caranto Morford | Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, USA
Kush Patel | Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, India
Arun Jacob | University of Toronto, Canada

In this paper, we discuss the seeds of a free, virtual, global, and ongoing digital humanities (DH) school committed to anti-colonial digital pedagogy and praxis. This school seeks to challenge and work against the institutional defaults of DH, which perpetuate colonialism and border imperialism in DH by centering elite, white, Brahmanical, and Western-centric knowledge production within resource-rich infrastructures. We wish, instead, to foster a learning environment and collective that is sustainable, nourishing, responsible, and equitable. As we will reflect on within this paper, amidst the process of creating such a space, we have been contending with the following questions: How might we build a globally accessible virtual DH school committed to anti-colonialism where socially conscious, civic minded material can be pedagogically engaged with the lived locations and material realities of those who are traditionally on the margins of DH knowledge production, especially precariously employed educators, community organizers, autodidacts, international students, disabled community members, and those residing outside of Western nation-states? What form of resistance might such a school offer to and against the increasingly global, micro-credential centered, and skillification focused approaches to open pedagogy in DH, wherein digital competencies are packaged as key instruments that will instill DH learners with the vocational skills to compete in the capitalist market? In conversation with contemporaneous initiatives seeking to build more just otherwises to digital learning practices, we will conclude this paper with a discussion on what is at stake in how microcredential approaches to DH threaten to unbundle digital pedagogies from the anti-oppressive care practices that critical educators and community organizers around the world are engaged in, committed to, and working to uphold.

The access copy of the text for this presentation is available here: http://msuglobaldh.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Access-Copy_-Against-Microcredentials-GlobalDH-2023.docx

For more information about the symposium visit: https://msuglobaldh.org