During this year’s Day of Digital Humanities, ACH volunteer Matthew Hannah @tinkeringhuman will be organizing a Twitter conversation about labor within and around digital humanities/digital scholarship. After two years of COVID and now increasing inflation amid economic stagnation, questions of academic labor are more significant and precarious than ever before. Please join us on Day of DH 2022 to discuss the future of academic labor in digital scholarship, share your own labor experiences, generate ideas for more involvement from professional organizations, and share resources for supporting colleagues and comrades in their own labor. We will be tweeting using the following hashtags: #DayofDH2022 and #ACHLaborCaucus. Folks who are interested in continuing the conversation beyond the Day of DH can join the public forum on Humanities Commons, where I will be sharing any resources or materials we may generate.
About me: Matthew Hannah began his working career as a grocery worker and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers labor union. During graduate school, he served as shop steward for the English Department and served as Vice President of Organizing for the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation local 3544. His current research focuses on a political economy of the digital humanities, forthcoming in Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Discussion topics to be raised throughout the day:
- Tell us about your work as a laborer.
- Has your sense of your labor changed over the years?
- What are some ways you think DH as a discipline could better support labor?
- How might the ACH mentorship committee support your labor? Are there workshops/resources/organizing we could do?
- Tell us about any labor issues you’ve experienced.
- How can ACH engage labor issues more directly?
- What are some intersections between labor and forms of oppression or marginalization within the academy?
- What support have you found, professional or otherwise?
- What kinds of support do you think academic laborers need today?
- What resources are available to support labor?
- How can we build solidarity among various ranks/positions/forms of labor in the academy?
- Who is currently doing the work of building labor consciousness? Shout outs!