With more than 30,000 California State University (CSU) faculty and librarians serving 477,000 CSU students across 23 campuses in California, finding collaborators who shared an affinity for Digital Humanities projects and methods meant discovering each other outside our own limited campus networks. Many practitioners formulated their DH methods through “bloom and fade” methods that didn’t require digital skills of their students, bootstrapping IT equipment or server space, and altogether eschewing this idea of Digital Humanities (DH) research and scholarship in favor of Digital Humanities pedagogy. With so many different fields that encompass DH, DHers at any CSU were not unified by a singular definition – that is, until the field of Ethnic Studies and the subsequent baccalaureate graduation requirement legislated by California AB 1460 addressed the harmful erasure for four ethnic groups named in California’s statewide Ethnic Studies graduation requirement (2020): Black/African American; Chicano/a Latinx; Asian American and Pacific Islander; and Native American/American Indian. The surfacing and proliferation of counter-storytelling projects that evolved under the aegis of Digital Ethnic Studies created a moment for Digital Humanities to flourish with the advent of a DH@CSU Consortium. Combined with the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium’s modest funding specifically for non-R1 institutions, DH@CSU was borne from a series of DEFCon Teaching Fellows and a 2023-2024 DEFCon Capacity Building Grant with ongoing capacity building thanks to a second DEFCon Capacity Building Grant for 2024-2025. In this flipped presentation, audience members will hear from a variety of DH@CSU members.
A September 18, 2023, San Francisco Chronicle article confirmed that CSUs were the most-attended schools among Black and Hispanic College Students and the most economically disadvantaged students in CA in 2021. Yet, when it comes to training non-STEM students to work with digital tools and technologies, only 3 CSUs currently have established Digital Humanities centers (CSU Northridge, CSU Sacramento, and CSU Fullerton). Many CSU campuses lack the infrastructure required to support resource-intensive Digital Research Projects. On top of this, a study by DEFCon National Director Dr. Roopika Risam found that only 22% of regional public universities nationwide offered digital humanities training to students. By integrating ethnic studies fields with digital tools and methodologies, DH@CSU’s goal is to create more dynamic and inclusive learning experiences that benefit students and communities across the university system.
The California State University is the nation’s largest four-year public university system , with 23 campuses and seven off-campus centers. The combined campuses educate the most ethnically, economically, and academically diverse student body in the nation with approximately 477,000 students and nearly 56,000 faculty and staff. Of the 23 campuses, 21 are designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and 14 are designated Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI). With its $8 billion USD state funds and tuition fees budget, the CSU draws its students from the top third of the state’s high school graduates and is California’s primary undergraduate teaching institution.
According to Pewu and Shrout in the recent People, Practice, Power collection, CSU centers the students’ voices and builds on student needs and expertise (295) to create a connection “with nonwhite DH in classrooms . . . by looking at themselves or their communities by using digital storytelling or personal mapping modules” (297). By focusing on an asset-based pedagogy that acknowledges CSU students’ existing abilities for collaborative experimentation, the very mainstays of Digital Humanities pedagogy paired with Ethnic Studies, DH@CSU offers opportunities to share resources among campuses that creates a majority of the California workforce and serves CSU communities of students and their families.
The success in capacity building for DH@CSU offers a model for regional public institutions to understand how to create a network of interest specifically by embracing the core values of Ethnic Studies paired with Digital Humanities. Though the CSU system is complex, unique on a national scale, and individual on each campus, the Consortium’s fundamental ideas rest on this idea that we are stronger together, especially in:
For this presentation, as the Project Investigator on the DEFCon Capacity Building grant and co-leader of the DH@CSU Consortium, Dr. Harris and various members of the Consortium will demonstrate in a flipped presentation video the successes and challenges of developing an infrastructure for DH@CSU that involves 18 campuses and more than 40 Steering Committee members. CSU DHers have been limping along for decades in an attempt to discover each other primarily because the Digital Humanities field is still not defined capaciously enough for the CSU pedagogy and research needs. Taking a cue from recently published anthologies, including Digital Black Atlantic and People, Practice, Power, DH@CSU specifically defines Digital Humanities through the lens of Ethnic Studies with a regional comprehensive system-wide perspective – one that serves the needs of first generation students specifically.
Combined with the efforts of Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu (CSU Fullerton and Co-PI on the national DEFCon initiative), DH@CSU was able to adapt exercises provided by the HumetricsHSS initiative during a day-long convening (Aug 2023) to construct a values-based mission statement that embraces both the shared values as well as the points of tension inherent to not only Digital Humanities, but also to Ethnic Studies. With the modest infusion of grant awards, DH@CSU was able to accomplish the following with representation from 18 of the 23 CSU campuses:
This presentation offers an opportunity to articulate the methods for moving forward in building DH@CSU from such disparate campuses and constituencies and to leverage the recent ground-breaking legislation for an Ethnic Studies graduation requirement. In addition to considering the diverging levels of resources (e.g., server space, library staff, faculty development, student assistants), the Consortium also takes into consideration that the 477,000 CSU students are still taught by a 30% pool of lecturer or part-time faculty employed across the CSU with many of them teaching the newly-required Ethnic Studies courses as departments and programs ramp up their tenure-line faculty hires. As we continue work on building this Consortium, we take into consideration the itinerant work of those lecturer faculty and how best to support their efforts to join the DH@CSU. More than forty participants on the Consortium’s Steering Committee from various campuses that host different levels of resources means hosting intentional discussions that embrace an unconventional approach to governance. DH@CSU provided us with the opportunity to perform a different kind of ethical Digital Humanities.