This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Writing Spaces
Following Cushman’s call to decolonize digital archives through the contextual spheres of time and place, I will discuss the potential decolonial role of context in composing digital scholarship. In particular, I will focus on the affordances of Scalar, an online publishing platform primarily created for the academy.Decolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include. To be understood, such media need to be contextualized within the social practices that lend them these meanings. (116)
My argument centers on scholars’ ethical responsibility to contextualize our work, including non-archival work. I suggest that for context to be meaningful, it should be deeply embedded into compositions, not added on or pushed the side. Ultimately my goal is to identify the ways to make scholarship reflect Michel de Certeau’s “city,” creating a textual geography that allows for reader detours -- and ultimately acts of resistance.
