Okin & Bowman | Data Feminism and Protest Literacy: The Student-Faculty led “March With Us!” Project
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2023-05-15

Mary Okin and Olivia Bowman | San Jose State University/University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

San Jose State is known as the public university where the Olympic Project for Human Rights was founded by Harry Edwards and for its student athlete-activists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists in an antiracism protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics winner’s podium in Mexico City. While these three leaders are well known, they represent a vibrant 1960s community of young student-activists demanding socio-economic and political change, including women and many other allied groups left in the margins of national history. The March With Us! project began in an undergraduate class at San Jose State University and uses data preservation as a form of teaching resistance and protest literacy at the intersections of antiracism and digital storytelling. Students working on the project, search for their networked stories through data collection using archives. They also preserve history by conducting interviews with alumni and emeritus faculty. In this paper, we demonstrate how student researchers casting a wide net for protest history data learn the hidden and intersectional labor of protest. We also highlight the powerful women activists breaking gender boundaries as leaders of the anti-war, Chicano, Black, and Asian American protest groups whose voices were silenced in the real time and subsequent documentation of San Jose State campus history. Their stories inspired the March With Us! project’s feminist approach to exploring antiracism as a historical phenemenon. Describing the methods and findings of this project from both the perspectives of an instructor and student, we show how digital humanities collaboration is allied to organizational techniques that create effective campaigns for change. Finally, we reflect on the role digital humanities projects can play in promoting protest literacy and critiquing institutional powers that continue to rehearse systemic injustice, including public universities that corporatize or suppress student protest history.

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