The Racial Violence Hub
Project Overview (DH 299, Spring 2017: S. Razack)
On-going Project: racialviolencehub.com (Please see email for log-in credentials and see Program on RVH site)
Presentation: Closing Plenary with Sherene Razack, “Possibilities for the Virtual Hub” (See “Presentations” on RVH site)
Project Description: “This workshop emerged out of a desire to bring together feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist scholars whose work begins with the recognition, so profoundly underscored by the social movements Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, that the lives of Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples have not mattered for many states. If Indigenous, Black and racialized people are often declared expendable, it is important to understand how disposability is organized. Populations deemed surplus and outside of the category of the human are increasingly penned in, confined to prisons, to deathworlds and to spaces of the deepest marginality, and marked for death in those spaces. Such evictions from the modern are profoundly gendered….We explore how to imagine and create an alternative future. Working in a collaborative mode, we seek to examine how our own scholarly tools and practices can install what it sets out to challenge.” This project is funded by the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair at UCLA, Sherene Razack.
Project Role
I am the site’s creator and Content Manager. This project is the start of an annual workshop with a digital component to help “bridge” the time between physical meetings and help sustain community dialogue between participating scholars. I also created the program (hence the incorporation of data visualizations via Voyant), attended the workshop, and presented at the closing plenary.
Reflection
The site as it currently stands is truly in its infancy. The presentation of the workshop explored what it takes to maintain digital projects and communities, labor practices, and some back-end information (we have to take into consideration the Endowment’s budget). This project initially started with The Hemispheric Institute as a model. As the project progressed, I came to think of the FemTechNet community and site as model (in particular their Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Notebook through Scalar). We hope the site comes to function as a teaching repository for scholars working on issues of racial violence. We want this material primarily to take visual/video and audio form and are beginning an-going syllabus project for both undergraduate and graduate courses.
This is a project that does make me question the parameters of DH. Does this qualify as a DH project? I can see some intersections with with the authors of Digital_Humanities refer to as “The Animated Archive” and “Distributed Knowledge Production and Performative Access.” This is a set of international, interdisciplinary scholars interested in forms of collective authorship with a site that will, we hope, integrate our curated, crowd-sourced knowledge in a variety of forms as a repository. However, the RVHub is currently closed community ( limited to about 30-40 members), and its arguable that the ethics of DH advocates from publicly accessible information and projects. At the moment, participants are in favor of keeping the site closed to the public but a public-facing site might be in the future. It is important to note that our first meeting was just last month and this type of project and community will be years in the making.