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Who will read my academic book? Telling public stories about Africa and Africans

As a graduate student 90+% of the way through writing my dissertation, I often have ask myself this question: how many people will ever read anything I write? My dissertation will be read by my committee members, maybe a couple of historian friends, grad students or professors in the countries I study, maybe future grad students researching these areas, and perhaps less likely, family members or people in the communities I study. This problem is even more of an issue when you get to the production of actual physical books, which often cost absurd amounts of money that makes them impractical for the vast majority of people.

This unfortunate fact makes me think about how to get across some of the individual and collective stories of my dissertation. I spent about eight months speaking with over 350 people in rural West African borderlands, and have about 150 hours of interviews from more than 100 different communities. How can I share these stories in a way that allows “the public” to engage with them? People in the communities I study in Senegal may not be able to read an academic book I write due to accessibility, but they could access publicly available stories posted on the Internet. My friends and family here in the U.S. will likely not read my dissertation, because the locations where it takes place seem foreign and confusing, but they could browse an online exhibit highlighting some of the most important themes of the migration stories people told me.

The CHI Fellowship has of course taught me digital skills, but it has also forced me to reckon more with ideas of public engagement. I may not read academic books most days, but I find myself often reading websites like Africa is a Country to find accessible looks at some of the most pressing issues facing Africa today, as well as reflections on African history, culture, etc. Probably a few times a month, I listen to podcasts like MSU’s Africa Past and Present, New Books in African Studies, or Ufahamu Africa, which provide perspectives on different topics that I may not seek out on my own. There are also less academic podcasts like the BBC’s Africa Today or VOA’s Africa News Tonight.

This is a roundabout way of saying that there are a wide variety of ways to engage publicly (my guess is some podcasts gets more listens than the academic book gets reads, especially among people outside of the subject area). This is particularly true of podcasts associated with news producers like the BBC. The same is often true in classroom settings. In a class I co-taught online last summer, my students listened to multiple podcasts on American sports history, which allowed them to engage with a different form of media, one they are more likely to consume on a daily basis.

Digital projects like the University of Kansas’ Migration Stories, which looks at African immigrants to the “Midwest,” publicly share stories that might otherwise go unrecognized by the general public. This sort of engagement can be a teaching tool, not just in the classroom, but oriented to the public at large. My own research focuses on rural cross-border migration in four different West African countries, but also tells stories of individual, family, and communal migration. Through the CHI Fellowship, I am developing a project that brings the stories of these rural West Africans to a larger audience, and that recognizes the importance of their stories without making people sit down to read a 350-page book or dissertation.

Digitizing the History of Archaeology: Ethical responsibilities

Recently I have had the opportunity to scan over 1000 slides of excavations that occurred along the southern coast of Peru throughout the 90’s and early 00’s. While the task itself was mundane and took many more hours than I was expecting, the images that I discovered through this digitization process were absolutely breathtaking. I was witnessing the slow evolution of one of South America’s oldest archaeological sites in terms of excavation and landscape modification. Not every slide itself is valuable but together every slide represents a small portion of a story that was largely only known to the excavators until now. This slide scanning process made me think of the history of archaeology and how the later generations of archaeologists have an ethical responsibility to digitize the old records so they are more freely available. This includes old site forms, journal entries from the PI or the excavators, any pictures of the excavations or tools, and any other documents that could be useful for future archaeologists. Digitizing these documents can also be used as outreach for the public in which archaeologists of the past had worked. This can help to further include communities in the process of archaeological investigation and possibly garner interest from outside the field.

With the discipline becoming more mature and getting older by the year, the history of archaeology is becoming much deeper and is starting to reach a point where some of that history can be lost if it is not moved into a new format. It is no surprise that as technology advances thing become obsolete and eventually become nontransferable onto the newer formats. I fear that if we do not start digitizing old archaeological records soon, we will not be able to transfer them onto a format that is widely and equally available to everyone. Digital records are much easier to gain access to than physical paper copies for obvious reasons but the overall control of information is vastly different between the two mediums. If information is purely stored in a physical format, the paper copies can be easily forgotten through purposeful or unintentional endeavors where as digital information can be sought out on the internet and stumbled upon. My point here is that it is our ethical responsibility as archaeologists to make what we do as widely available as possible to the public and future archaeologists. It is also our responsibility to maintain our own history otherwise we may lose precious information in the miasma of archaeological research. The large and publicly known sites may persist in public and written memory but the supporting sites that build and perpetuate theory have the potential to be lost unless we make a concerted effort to conserve all archaeological data.

Who Writes Our Stories?: Critical Digital Literacies & Youth Activism

My research interests are transdisciplinary and primarily focus on race, storytelling, and s/place. Working alongside communities of Color, I also consider education and schooling sites to make meaning. There is a lot of amazing work being done that considers Black Studies and digital scholarship, and so below I focus primarily on digital tools in education.

There is conversation concerning “the digital world” in education. Much concerns social media in the classroom or tools such as SMART boards and Google Drive. Even then, terms such as “digital natives”, which I find extremely problematic, evoke a lack of agency because despite youth (broadly with little context) being categorized as knowledge-holders in digital spaces, they’re still spoken of in deficit ways.

Critical conversations around digital tools and technology look not only at how it’s being used, but how technology is used as a tool of power and by whom. Critical theorists also push us to go beyond a surface level integration of digital tools in classrooms and look at digital space and it’s relationship with out s/places, such as schools (Gitlin & Ingerski, 2018). Garcia, Stamatis, and Kelly (2018) consider the ways that “technology mediates student identities” (p. 404) and others (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell,  Martinez, & Scorza, 2015; Mirra, Morrell, & Filipiak, 2018) look more broadly at youth identities, the possibilities in critical digital literacies and youth activism.

I first came to meaningfully think about the possibilities of digital tools, youth, and communities when I came across Youth Radio’s website. I was in a course about Youth Literacies and simultaneously working with youth to understand their literacy practices through Instagram and Snapchat.

“West Side Stories: Gentrification in West Oakland” (Youth Radio Interactive) uses storytelling, art, and interactive mapping to speak to the tensions, layers, and competing interests of gentrification and displacement in West Oakland. Specifically, the mapping features West Oakland’s people, places, and histories.

Not only does this involve transformative work, but it’s work that is authored by whole communities, and features youth participatory action research (YPAR). It challenges preconceptions of who can research the tensions and possibilities of a community and whose voices matter. It offers public access to community members, but also to others so that we may learn.

It pushes me to think of the ways I can work alongside members of my communities to render our cultural artifacts, literacy practices, and the s/places we care about as intentional narratives that reject damage-centeredness (Tuck, 2009).