From a Crisis Response to Feminist Talking Circles: Reconsidering Collaborative Feedback Practices in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Digital humanities (DH) scholars have examined how feminist methodologies promote inclusive practices to value all stages of the development process. DH scholars can learn from feminist educators, however, about how to extend ‘cultures of care’ in DH learning spaces around feedback processes. Centring these feminist tenets, the Technology and Digital Humanities Lab at Newcomb Institute models strategies for how mentors in DH labs and classrooms can use digital tools to adapt during and beyond crises to intentionally build cultures of care and set up supportive spaces for giving and receiving feedback. During the COVID-19 pandemic interns use Zoom to conduct their weekly meetings. While others had a negative connotation with Zoom meetings, we found that the intentional use of the platform’s sharing features created opportunities to unify our community, permitting more discussion across peers when showing their work. Over time we tailored our Zoom use to create a hybrid feminist solidarity circle to meet DH students’ learning needs. We argue through adapting our use of digital tools like Zoom, primarily introduced as a crisis response, we better entrenched our feminist tenets of equitable collaboration by creating a process that encouraged students to seek feedback more openly and on their terms.