Austin Anderson (he/him)
PhD Candidate/Instructor, Howard University
Austin Anderson is a PhD candidate in English at Howard. His dissertation, “Racial Recursivity: Play, Blackness, and History in Contemporary Video Games,” explores global racial ideology in contemporary video games. He received his MA in English from New York University, where his thesis explored the consumption of global minorized literature. Austin is also the current co-chair for the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities. His work has been published in academic journals including Popular Culture Review, The Comparatist, and ASAP/J as well as academic edited collections like Bodies of Water and Routledge’s Victorians and Video Games.
“Black Geographies and Spatiality in African American Literature and Culture” is a pedagogical project organized around different themes of Black Geographies. Our class will collectively create an open-access project to investigate the intersection between race and place while exploring how this intersection is reflected across Black literature. The project will include 20 “tracks” exploring different themes within Black Geographies such as “gentrification” or “underwater.” Each track will include an excerpt from a work of Black literature, a musical or performance clip, an excerpt of criticism, and a short collaboratively written essay about the topic.
Dawson Barrett (he/him)
Associate Professor of History, Del Mar College
Dr. Dawson Barrett is associate professor of US History at Del Mar College in South Texas. He is the author of The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America (New York University Press, 2018) and Teenage Rebels: Successful High School Activists from the Little Rock Nine to the Class of Tomorrow (Microcosm Publishing, 2015). He is the co-author, with Jonathan Wright, of the award-winning Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland (University of Illinois Press, 2021). His writing on protest, punk rock, and youth has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Washington Post, and Bandcamp Daily.
From the Lowell Mill girls and the Uprising of 20,000, to the Little Rock Nine and the events that inspired Footloose, teenagers have changed the course of US history. Rooted in primary source documents and intended especially for use in dual credit (concurrent enrollment) courses, this project aims to connect young people to US history through the experiences of youth in the past. As a starting point, the project will focus on the many Chicano student walkouts that re-shaped public education in South Texas in the 1960s and ’70s, and the student-led campaign that desegregated my students’ college in 1952.
Project: South Texas Rabble Rousers
Dr. Kay Coghill (they/them)
Adjunct Instructor Virginia Commonwealth University and Digital Director, me too. International
Dr. Kay Coghill, an acclaimed interdisciplinary scholar and award-winning activist, practitioner, and educator based in Richmond, Virginia, has made a significant impact in the field of online gender-based violence. Their research delves into the innovative harm reduction tactics used by Black women and non-binary femmes in digital spaces as it pertains to digital misogynoir. Their public scholarship has been featured in Essence magazine, highlighting their commitment to raising awareness and fostering change. They work full-time as my Digital Director me too. International and as an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, creating classes rooted in digital, hip-hop feminism, and Black popular culture.
The project “Reframing Misogynoir: Unveiling Intersectional Experiences through Digital Storytelling” addresses the intersection of racism and sexism faced by Black women. It will be implemented in the Fall 2024 course “Misogynoir in Digital Spaces” at Virginia Commonwealth University; this initiative empowers students to examine and challenge misogynoir critically. Students will act as co-creators of knowledge, producing open, public-facing resources. The project promotes active learning, place-based scholarship, and new digital publication forms, emphasizing the inclusion of historically marginalized perspectives and fostering a comprehensive understanding of misogynoir in digital contexts.
Project: Misogynoir in Digital Spaces
Caroline Dadas (she/her)
Associate Professor of Writing Studies, Montclair State University
Caroline Dadas is Associate Professor of Writing Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She regularly teaches LGBTQ Studies courses in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program. Her current research explores the literacy practices of lesbian and queer-identifying individuals. Her 2019 book, Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects won the Lavender Rhetorics award from the Conference of College Composition and Communication.
The Queer Abundance project centers storytelling as a way for the queer community to share their struggles, communicate their joy, and find solidarity with one another. Amplifying the experiences of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies students at Montclair State University, this archive will serve as a space for queer students to house their multimodal explorations of queerness, including oral histories. The Queer Abundance project offers a space where students can, across cohorts, years, and classes, use digital affordances to explore queer identities, aesthetics, and histories.
Juan Garcia Oyervides (him/el)
Assistant Professor and Director of Chicana/o & Latinx Studies, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Juan García Oyervides (he/él) is the Director of the Chicana/o & Latinx Studies program at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His research explores the intersection of print and visual cultures, intellectual histories, and transnational representations of indigeneity along the US/Mexico border in the first half of the 20th century. Dr. García Oyervides is also a Community-Engaged Research Fellow at the Whitburn Center for Governance and Policy Research, working with community partners to expand quality of health care for non-native English speakers in rural Wisconsin.
Escuela Popular de Mariachi in Wisconsin: The website serves as a repository for over recent interviews conducted with over 20 mariachi performers from Texas and Wisconsin. This basic repository will allow students and the public to connect with the stories of individual mariachi performers, from Mariachi Paredes de Tejastitlán, and Mariachi Monarcas de Milwaukee. The materials will be available in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, as these are the languages used within the interviews themselves. In these videos, all members of the ensembles describe their understanding of mariachi culture, the basic configuration of their instruments, and their role in the larger composition of the musical ensemble.
Christy Garrison-Harrison, PhD (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor, Southern University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
Dr. Christy Garrison-Harrison’s primary research foci are transdisciplinary explorations of the American South (with a concentration on Black women’s political leadership and influence upon economically developing Black communities within the region,) Black women in 19th century Europe and the Americas, Black Feminist Geographies, and the cultural dynamics of White American matriarchy.
She is completing a monograph on southern Black women’s community activism during the modern Civil Rights Movement era, a chapter on southern Black femininities for a musicology study, developing a manuscript on antebellum matriarchal culture, and working on producing a documentary short about three southern Black women activists.
Hallowed Grounds and Southern Intimacies: Africana Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Project: This digital humanities project will enlist student co-creators in identifying potential narrators and producing oral histories for inclusion in a digital “Intro to Africana Women’s Studies” (AWS) core course. Launching in Spring 2025 at Southern University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, the course will be replete with open primary documents, Black women’s oral histories, digital texts, recordings, podcasts, digitally restored films, and accessible lectures (that are closed- captioned or use alt text) for use on the Manifold platform .
Andrea Johnson (she/her)
Critic, Rhode Island School of Design
Andrea Johnson is a researcher, designer, and educator who explores the intersection of landscape infrastructure, climate resiliency, and community-based food and energy networks. She has developed design methodologies to support activists’ demands to phase out peaker power plants, coordinated Terreform’s Home Gown publication that re-envisioned NYC’s food system, and collaborated with the Renewable Rikers Coalition to produce visions for the island free of jail use. She is currently developing an Atlas of Public Power that explores the possibilities of a publicly owned and controlled renewable energy transition in NY state. She teaches at The Rhode Island School of Design and Barnard College.
Students in RISD’s Landscape Architecture History seminar will investigate and reflect on the evolution of downtown Providence in the context of ongoing calls for social, racial, and environmental justice. The proposed OER will center marginalized histories and stories of resistance emerging from communities that thrived in and around the Great Salt Cove, a tidal marsh that once covered much of the city center and connected the Providence and Moshassuck rivers. Integrating archival materials, maps, drawings, oral histories, and field dispatches, students will seek to activate public memory of the city’s overlooked histories and provoke thought about their relevance today.
Project: The Great Salt Cove Atlas
Lisa Linn Kanae (she/her)
Professor, English, Kapi‘olani Community College
Lisa Linn Kanae is an English professor at Kapi‘olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She received her masterʻs degree in English from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Kanae is the chair of the Languages, Linguistics, and Literature Department and the Wae of ‘Aha Kalāualani. Kanaeʻs interests are ‘āina-based teaching and learning. Aside from her work at Kap‘iolani, Kanae is a creative writer. She is the author of SISTA TONGUE (Tinfish, 2004), which explores the sociohistory of Hawai‘i Creole English, and the short story collection ISLANDS LINKED BY OCEAN (Bamboo Ridge, 2009).
Relying on the Ka‘ao Framework, developed by Dr. Taupōuri Tangarō, Professor of Hawaiian Studies at Hawaiʻi Community College, my project is an online resource that will hold Native Hawaiian legendary, historical, and contemporary stories born from the landscape surrounding Kapi‘olani Community College, as well as a space for student voice and teaching and learning resources. The Ka‘ao Framework is based on the structure of Native Hawaiian mo‘olelo and ka‘ao – legendary stories/ traditional myths – with transformation as a core theme. I hope to help students synthesize indigenous knowledge with present-day perspectives so they may determine how those interconnections guide their future.
Amy Lee (she/hers)
Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Amy Lee teaches at the UC Berkeley Fall Program for First Semester. She’s taught a wide spectrum of courses across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin Prison. As a community-engaged scholar, she developed curricula in partnership with community groups to address challenges faced by communities of color. She has created political education materials for youth organizers in Chinatown and civil rights training for Asian immigrant women workers in the Bay Area.
Chinatown USA: Ways of Reading Race, Space, and Culture: At OEPI, she will create a digital textbook for her reading and composition courses, which will incorporate student-generated materials that foreground ways of reading and writing about race, marginalization, power, and history. The textbook will also include a collection of digitized community newspapers curated by students.
Erica Morawski (she/her)
Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute
Erica Morawski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design History at Pratt Institute in New York. Her research and writing center on the history of design in the Americas, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Latin America. She is dedicated to investigating how design mediates relationships between state and populace through approaches that seek to privilege underrepresented histories. Focusing primarily on the Hispanic Caribbean within a global context, her work traverses the nature of these relationships across different scales, from a designed object to larger national or international frameworks of trade, manufacture, and knowledge systems.
Latin American and Caribbean Design History is a student-produced online resource. Developed and grown with each iteration of the courses taught on these subjects, the project centers students as knowledge producers to create learning modules to be used in class or by the public. Confronting the challenges of working on a marginalized area in academia and with attention to the politics of knowledge production, students will work in creative ways to write design histories from a position of social justice. Students will learn from and contribute to the online resource and it will be made open to the larger Pratt community and beyond.
Mark Orrs
Teaching Associate Professor, Department of Engineering, Design, & Society, Colorado School of Mines
Mark Orrs is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines, where he teaches in both the Design Engineering and Humanitarian Engineering Programs. He also oversees the Sustainable Engineering Design Studio as part of the Mines Senior Capstone Design Program. Mark earned his PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University and served as the Founding Director of the Sustainable Development Program at Lehigh University prior to joining Mines. “Title: Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge Systems into Ethical Frameworks for Engineering Education”
The proposed OER platform will serve as a dynamic and interactive resource for integrating various Indigenous knowledge systems into existing courses at the Colorado School of Mines. It will provide educators and students with access to curated content, multimedia resources, case studies, and interactive tools that highlight Indigenous perspectives on ethics, sustainability, and community well-being, focusing on Indigenous communities present in Colorado. The platform will foster collaboration, critical inquiry, and cross disciplinary dialogue, enabling learners to engage with diverse voices and perspectives in their studies.”
Beth Robinson (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Beth Robinson is an assistant professor of History at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. Her research focuses on women’s labor activism and cross-class solidarity in American labor and social movements of the twentieth century. She is currently revising her manuscript, Sweatshop Capital: Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long 20th Century, for publication.
Changemakers at the Border: Women’s Activism in South Texas will create a digital database documenting women’s activism in South Texas. Consisting of an interactive online platform featuring archival materials, essays, oral histories, timelines, and interactive maps, this project will uncover and amplify the often-overlooked contributions of women in shaping social and political movements in the region.
Manifold Project: Womens’ Activism in South Texas
David Squires
Associate Professor of English at University of Louisiana at Lafayette
David Squires is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He teaches American literature and writes about the cultural legacy shared by information science and modern media. He coedited Porn Archives (Duke University Press 2014) and has published on artificial intelligence, pulp fiction, library science, and racial violence.
This project aims to create an accessible, media-rich research guide that features archival materials to aid undergraduates as they learn about Ernest J. Gaines’s second novel, Of Love and Dust (1967). Gaines’s novel represents a minority perspective in Louisiana. Celebrations of Cajun and Creole culture recognize communities associated with European diasporas. The culture and history associated with African diasporas end up doubly marginal, both minoritized by French and Spanish traditions as well as racialized by histories of slavery and Jim Crow. This research guide aims to facilitate engagement with Gaines’s literary record as one way of understanding the ongoing social dynamics dramatized by Of Love and Dust.
Lucía M. Suárez (She/Her/Ella)
Associate Professor of Spanish and Latinx Studies, Iowa State University
Lucía M. Suárez examines the dynamics of social mobility through the arts, literature, literacy, dance and performance, and is committed to inclusive pedagogy through oral history, community engaged learning, memoir, and digital humanities.
She is the author of The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora; co-editor of Dancing Bahia: Essays on Afro-Bahian Dance, Education and Memory, (Special citation for the 2019 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno© Award); guest editor for Diálogo Journal, Building Latina/o/x Studies: Case Samples from the Midwest; she is currently working on a book manuscript, BELONGING: Latina Life Stories in Global Context. Dr. Suárez’s most recent publication, “Latina/o/x Autobiographical Narratives of Exile: Examples from Cuba and Chile”” is in the Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing
We, too, are America: Staking Our Place in the Heartland through Latinas/os/x Iowa Memoirs: In partnership with Marshalltown High School, a Hispanic serving institution, we connect our students in high school and at Iowa State University through mentoring, reading, and writing of Latinx Life Narratives to underscore the importance of accessing knowledge in different classroom communities. Through memoirs, we encourage cross-cultural conversations about identity, social justice, and belonging to rural Iowa, and reject Latina/o/x stereotyping. Featuring the many voices, experiences, and social/political contexts our students and their families embody as Latinx Americans, our final project is an open access-collaborative, student-led ebook, We, too, are America: Staking Our Place in the Heartland through Latinas/os/x Iowa Memoirs.
Luis Trujillo (he/him)
Lecturer, California State University San Bernardino
Luis Trujillo obtained his PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation focused on the anti-displacement genealogies informing contemporary activism against gentrification in Los Angeles. His current work continues this focus, examining the intimacies of overlapping geographies of being/ belonging within the city and the coalition struggles against ecological and community destruction in Northeast Los Angeles specifically.
The Franklin Mural Project is a hybrid public/digital humanities endeavor to cultivate critical place-making with an emphasis in arts and education at the high school level. It is centered around a nearly 20-year-old mural project (the Franklin Mural Project), a student-teacher collaboration to create an illustrated timeline of the area (Northeast Los Angeles). The teachers employed a methodology based in deep relationality. Their students researched and learned from Tongva peoples directly (the original stewards of Los Angeles). The current project seeks to continue where the mural project left off. We will do so by creating an online pedagogical tool to be used in collaboration with the physical mural. It will tell in greater detail the history the mural is trying to represent as well as the history of the murals creation.
Project: The Franklin Mural Project
