The Commons is pleased to announce the panelists for our CORE Deposit Party, Online Communities and Transformative Justice, on March 30th from 12 to 1:30pm EDT. The event will be an opportunity to discuss the potential for online communities to engage in anti-racist praxis, transformative justice, and ethical community engagement.
The event will start with three 5-7 minute lightning talks:
“Virtual & Digital Speaker Series: Life Saving Knowledges and Critical Frameworks to Disrupt Heteronormativity,” Ruby Mendoza (they/them)
This presentation explores the initiative within the MSU Writing Center, through the efforts of their Liaison to the LGBT Resource Center, to develop a digital/virtual speaker series titled “Life Saving Knowledges: Critical Frameworks to Disrupt Heteronormativity.” This speaker series utilized and centered graduate students’ intellectual knowledges and experiences to convey complex theoretical frameworks into a simplified manner for LGBTQ+ youth. In many ways, this speaker series worked in a multitude of ways, including providing students with life-saving knowledge to utilize in both academia and activism, and within their own communities outside of an educational institution. Therefore, this presentation addresses the need to understand digital community engagement as a method to empower and support emerging intersectional adults, as well as providing life saving discourses and frameworks to navigate their lives in and outside of the academy.
“Re/Building and Recovering Comics Communities Through Wikidata @ Michigan State University,” Justin Wigard (he/him)
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Comics@MSU community sought ways to not only support existing connections within the greater comics community, but build new ones virtually by making transformative use of the MSU Libraries Comics Collection. To this end, in Fall 2020 the MSU Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop hosted a two-day virtual Wikidata Edit-a-thon, using bibliographic metadata to add missing comics publishers and authors from 1929-1956 to Wikidata. This lightning talk will discuss the planning that went into the events, along with a reporting-out of both our first event in Fall 2020 and our follow-up event to be held in Spring 2021. The event brought together 50-55 participants from MSU and across the US (even some folks from Canada & the UK) into an online community. During the event, participants worked against WikiData and Wikipedia bias, the latter being historically implicated in racial and gendered erasure other forms of bias. This lightning talk will demonstrate how, participants worked to a) connect MSU’s comics metadata to Wikidata, b) recover PoC and women comics creators’ narratives that may have been absent from Wikidata, and c) reflect their contributions in Wikidata or correcting misattributed entries therein, thereby contributing to the Digital Humanities@MSU community.
“Introspective Videos as Antiracist Praxis,” Nick Sanders (he/him)
Guided by critical antiracist (Baker-Bell; Johnson) and feminist pedagogies (Omolade; Friere), anti-deficit frameworks (Mejia et al.), and multimodal writing pedagogies (Shipka; Arola), this talk describes a reflective video assignment sequence that can support critical un/learning around whiteness and white supremacy. These video sequences story students’ identities and values and name the social forces which shape them at different points in the course. Consistent with critical race theory tenets of story and critique, these videos allow students to position themselves as embodied learners and use story as a tool of knowledge-making. This talk will also offer an assignment that invites students to draw on these reflective videos toward a larger end to track their learning goals throughout a course and to map new goals for un/learning. Ultimately, this talk will demonstrate the ways in which introspective video sequencing might support deep critical introspection consistent with antiracist and critical whiteness pedagogies, challenges performativity in written assignments, and provides maps for students to understand their learning and development in the context of a course.
Following the panel discussions there will be a keynote, “Harnessing Good Intentions: Online Communities and Sustained Commitment to Racial Equity & Diversity,” delivered by Dr. Jan Miyake, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College. After the program the panel will be available to answer questions and meeting attendees will be encouraged to deposit work of their own into CORE. Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, is a library-quality, noncommercial repository that provides members with a permanent, open access storage facility for sharing, discovering, retrieving, and archiving scholarly output. A short video on CORE can be found on the Commons YouTube channel. Syllabi, learning materials, handouts, articles, and other works on this topic or others are welcome to be deposited.
To register visit https://forms.gle/3HdZHp8YFTeBi53W6.
