Research Talk by Photini Vrikki

(Re)Shaping Digital Humanities through Environmental Justice

The talk was delivered on 29 November 2023 by Dr. Photini Vrikki, member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

As a field in constant transformation and expansion, Digital Humanities takes a broad shape to accommodate interdisciplinarity yet be grounded in the Humanities. This interdisciplinarity allows us the space to question some of the practices and processes we often consider fixed in academia. In this talk I will refer to a dual shift in DH as a call to shape and reshape the field vis-à-vis environmental justice. First, shaping includes building common, sustainable, intentional, and collective connections and speaking up for how things could be different, and how uncommon and complex tasks such as demanding for more resources and institutional changes can benefit the field. Second, I point towards the need for action in the face of parts of Digital Humanities that need to be reshaped, such as innovation and global education, to discuss the entanglement of the field with the ecological crisis. Ultimately, the paper promotes environmentally aware DH practices that bring environmental justice into play.