Finding our way home: A theory and pedagogy of anti-colonial Q-mapping

Abstract

Abstract This brief-report details my experiences teaching critical theory at the intersection of race/ class/ gender/ sexuality/ nationality through analogue mapping exercises from my tutorial room at Murdoch University in Western Australia to a group mapping project at the 2018 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria, Canada (UVic). Given the proximity of both countries to the history of the British Empire and current affiliation of both with the Commonwealth, my report details teaching efforts to mediate against a “pedagogy of the digitally oppressed.” In drawing on the formative concept offered by Brazilian educator-theorist Paulo Freire, I juxtapose the analogue mapping exercises through interposed lens of postcolonial, race, and queer theory. Recognizing the dominant ideologies encoded within technology, I narrate the process in which team members and I from the QDH: Queer Digital Humanities seminar produced participatory, de-centralized maps as counter sites of identity to the colonialist spaces and insignias on the UVic campus. I conclude with collective queer of colour principles which undergird the DHSI exercise, which is a modality of what might best be described as “anti-colonial Q-mapping.”