Generosity and baking it in…

A post in progress…I can’t write this all now, but I tonight I’m putting in some markers and will return to these fragments in order to help me think about what I mean by a “more generous method” by thinking about who is there in that generosity and as a way of grappling with my own recent feminist “baking”
Three moments
Clair Potter’s “Putting the Humanities in Action: Why We Are All Digital Humanists, and Why That Needs to Be a Feminist Project”
“our commitments as historians to the truth and our commitment as feminists to a truth that promotes social justice depend on understanding what media representations do to people”

Miriam Posner’s “What’s Next, The Radical, Unrealized, Potential of Digital Humanities
“I think, though, that part of the reason the conversation has been a bit frustrating is that those of us who are interested in seeing more robust cultural critique need to be more specific about where the intervention might most productively take place. It’s not only about shifting the focus of projects so that they feature marginalized communities more prominently; it’s about ripping apart and rebuilding the machinery of the archive and database so that it doesn’t reproduce the logic that got us here in the first place.”

Deb Verhoeven’s “Be More Than Binary”
Practical tips to Leave DH better than you found it:
1. Get quantitative and number your days. Preferably publicly.
2. Find someone who doesn’t look and sound like you and mentor them,
encourage them and invite them into your role.
3. Have a clear, purposeful succession plan and enact it.
4. And above all – be more than binary – do this because you embrace
diversity in all its complexity. Not because you have checklists or policies.
But because you recognise that the real story of DH is more heterogenous
and complex and vibrant than you have allowed it to be to date.
An echo of myself in 2013: “It is great to hear that various feminisms are cooked into everything these women do; but it is also a little terrifying. A cooked in feminism is visible in the way that nutmeg is in a cookie — if you’re looking, you’ll find it. If you’re not looking or, as is the case for many students, you don’t know how to look for it, you’re eating just another delicious (or perhaps just palatable) cookie. A hidden feminism may leave us in a contemporary context where it seems plausible that our tools and methods are all operating out of just a general liberatory ethics, rather than being a set of practices and tools fundamentally linked to the work of women and feminist scholars.”
other echoes –
David Scott Kastan (paraphrase) what does your work do – create or destroy?
Robert Scholes (paraphrase) be a generous reader first
other terms –
generosity, hospitality, care, ethics, justice, hurt and harm, dissensus, vibrant, squished

One Reply to “Generosity and baking it in…”

  1. […] while ago I collected a few items on my blog in preparation to write about openly feminist scholarship and thinking through what I […]

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