Creating Intentional Constellations of Community, Care, and Knowledge

Abstract

This presentation brings together graduate students from the 2020-2021 graduate residency program at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship—an interdisciplinary, and currently remote, a community of emerging DH scholars at McMaster University. Our community practice is one of intentionally building and centering constellations of community, care, and knowledge, which involves working amidst and against default, disciplinary definitions of mentorship, method, pedagogy, practice, access, and public scholarship. Tracing these redefinitions from different disciplinary, geographic, and intersectional perspectives, we follow Tara McPherson’s (2012) call for “new practices and modes of collaboration” (154) in DH by taking seriously our community’s role in co-producing and reproducing care and knowledge networks – within and beyond (digital) scholarship. Therefore, we question: How does shifting our focus away from expertise or measurable outcomes and toward practice and method encourage us to foster interdisciplinary community-oriented connections against a backdrop of discipline-specific graduate training? How might an emphasis on community-oriented DH mentorship resist “traditional” academic hierarchies of knowledge production and, in turn, transmit knowledge between scholarly and public communities? We also question the kinds of opportunities and challenges that a community organized around “digital scholarship” offers in terms of access. Whose voices are in/excluded as participants, co-conspirators, and members of the public when we gloss “public scholarship” or “public outreach”? By engaging with these questions across the cluster of lightning talks, we articulate a praxis toward intentional communities of practice in DH while also offering structures and strategies to the wider conference community.