Some of the examples of social processes and factors that transform and challenge the cultural authority of medicine are 1) emergence of complementary-alternative medicines, such as healing modalities based on herbal supplements or mind-body connection paradigms; 2) emergence of health-related social movements, such as disease-specific advocacy groups; and 3) development of self-monitoring technologies, or “quantified self” (p.246).
The evidence supporting the main argument are historical in that interruptions to humanity for African Americans through racialization by “oppressive systems of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and police brutality” (3). They also discuss contemporary digital tools like to which recovery operates such as social media networks and digital academic projects.
The evidence to support the main argumenta readings from Black Digital Humanities, particularly Kim Gallon, African American Studies and Digital Humanities. Topics covered include intersections, critical engagements with technology & culture, digital humanities, politics of archives, data of digital archives, curating data, visualizations, power/resistance and social media & community.
The examples used that support the main argument draw from Vidali’s fieldwork in Zambia (1986-90) and Phillips and Vidali’s radio program on original materials. The examples show that coproduction is a key factor to “interrupting the centralizing and decentralizing forces that pull on the archive” (86).
In the general context of ethnographic work beyond archiving, Vidali (in Vidali & Phillips, 2020) describes the “ambivalence and paradox” in the relationship between ethnographic material collections and their fieldwork (p. 71). Vidali describes her struggle to reconcile these paradoxes in her own work, as well as other dilemmas inherent in ethnographic research, such as “ethical dimensions of consent, respect, ownership, stewardship, legacy, and propriety” (p. 71). The author explains that ethnographers have to grapple with an “uncomfortable form of power” inherent in the process of collecting and capturing research materials, as a process of separating these materials from their context. From “a decolonizing perspective [this process] is considered a potential violation and violence” (p. 71).
During her work in Zambia between 1986 and 1990, the author collected over 150 hours of audio-recorded materials, in work on the social and cultural impact of Zambia radio broadcasting in the Bemba language. In 2014, the author had an opportunity to give back to the community that originally supported her research by creating the Bemba online project. The project included streaming audio excerpts from the author's research materials and also unique materials on Zambia’s famous and influential radio personality, David Yumba, creator and producer of Bemba-language program Kabusha Takolelwe Bowa.
Later on, Vidali & Phillips had the idea of recreating an old Zambian radio show by using recordings of David Yumba’a answers to listeners’ questions. In the recreation, recorded materials were mixed with questions from members of the Bemba Online Project, together with clips, announcements, advertisements, and Christian hymns from the original program. The digital product of the remix, called the “Kabusha Radio Remix,” was transferred to the original media of analog audio cassette tape.
The authors then developed this project into a multimedia interactive physical installation, where visitors could listen to the recreated show “in a space that recalls what it might have been like to listen to the radio program during its original run, echoing 1980s Zambia and harkening back to an analog past, thus remixing sound, time, people, and space” (p. 77).
Vidal explains that she integrated her own vision into the mixed project, just as she included questions about problems of archive workers of the Bemba Online Project into fictional letters created for the remixed version of the program. Vidal describes this process as “analogous to the way that other artists have creatively engaged with archives to reveal or create new relations with material otherwise seen as static objects in the past” (p. 77).
As the project was installed in different locations, it opened up to additional levels of engagement with viewers and listeners. In conclusion, Vidali & Phillips describe one direction for the future development of this project, in which a typical room of that period is recreated as part of their installation.
Gallon seeks to highlight how technology can further expose humanity as a racialized social construct by conceptualizing a relationship between digital humanities and Africana/African American/Black studies, which she names black digital humanities. Naming black digital humanities as such helps to put a name to the unnamed, bringing the concept into existence—though precise definitions of what it constitutes might continue to be elusive. For Gallon, black digital humanities is less of a fixed ‘thing’ than a “constructed space to consider the intersections between the digital and blackness” (2).
Expanding on the potential of this space, Gallon specifically draws attention to black digital humanities as a ‘technology of recovery’ that is “characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanities of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools” (2). This entails the recovery of lost historical and literary texts, as well as troubling foundational conceptualizations of humanity. Drawing Amy Earhart’s work on the ‘politics of recovery’, Gallon frames efforts at recovery as not just locating lost texts, but as also recovering black authors’ humanity.
For Gallon, the space of Black digital humanities also flags the significance of seriously considering the politics that have racialized literary, philosophical, and historical texts—thus digital tools and platforms ought to be “mobilized to interrogate and disclose how the humanities are developed out of systems of power” (4). This includes considering how the very tools and infrastructure applied in digital humanities were developed from a racialized foundation that privileges Western cultural traditions—and questioning if those tools would be used in the same way if they had been developed to explore texts that have been marginalized in the humanities. For Gallon, this demonstrates how the digital acts as “a mutual host for racism and resistance” (4).
EXEMPLARY QUOTES OR IMAGES?
“The black digital humanities probes and disrupts the ontological notions that would have us accept humanity as a fixed category, an assumption that unproblmatically emanates in the digital realm. The black digital humanities, then, might be defined as a digital episteme of humanity that is less tool-oriented and more invested in anatomizing the digital as both progenitor of and host to new—albeit related—forms of racialization. These forms at once attempt to abolish and to fortify a taxonomy of humanity predicated on racial hierarchies” (3)
Examples that support the main argument are drawn from how researchers have addressed the reckonings in ethnography. The authors logically connect the methods and arguments made to current issues in ethnography: transparency and verification.
Examples are drawn from a variety of community archives operating in London. Specifically the Future Histories, the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum, rukus!, and the visual archive of Moroccan heritage in the UK and Eastside Community Heritage. Although, the study was ongoing at the time of publishing the article, the authors describe using open participatory method, case studies, and participatory research.
Examples include navigating copyright with orphanages/hospices data and performance record keeping encouraging archivist researchers to make all parts of the research processes as accessible data.
The authors conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with members of SAADA Academic advisory Council (n=11). The goal of interviews was to “gain a detailed understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of subjects from their points of view using their own thoughts” (p.65).
Examples of participants’ responses to researchers’ questions are presented in the paper to support the main findings.
Absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA.
When I was growing up in Alabama...no one even knew what South Asian American meant....
I..felt a sense of displacement by not seeing themselves reflected in the American story
The personal affective impact of discovering SAADA for the first time
For me personally, the value of archives is profound. And I think that that may be true for a lot of people who suddenly are able to discover themselves, existing, being documented.
The affective impact of SAADA on responders’ South Asian American Students.
They are surprised that it was us (South Asians) who were directly part of that history.
The ability of SAADA both to reflect the diversity within the South Asian American community and to promote feelings of inclusion within the ethnic community and the larger society (p. 67).
For me knowing there is a long, rich, and diverse history of South Asians in the United States counteracts...feeling of displacement.