#staywoke: Digital Engagement and Literacies in Antiracist Pedagogy

Abstract

In this essay I explore how the hashtag injunction #staywoke associated with Black Lives Matter challenges digital engagement and literacies in American studies antiracist pedagogy. This phrase calls for an awakening into a sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness through social media: I discuss my pedagogical experiments in teaching a course on Black American and Asian American comparative racialization, where #staywoke was the guiding principle for fostering a democratizing antiracist critical consciousness for students and myself as an educator. Following Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor's dispersal model for digital humanities projects, I offer pedagogical strategies and models in the project of training critical thinking and unsettling the boundaries between the classroom and the world toward a potentially transformative politics despite the pressures of neoliberal higher education. Against the tendency for digital humanities pedagogy to revolve around centralized, major projects, my methodology focuses on the development of a holistic series of assignments building digital literacies and "minor" student-led and personalized digital humanities projects. In closing, I gesture toward the implications for the limits of digital humanities pedagogy as a practice in the university and profession vulnerable to problems identified by existing critiques of public scholarship and the digital humanities.