Faculty Fellows Seminar

Faculty Fellows Seminar 2022-24: Digital Futures and Social Justice

In September 2022, the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin launched a two-year inquiry centered on digital futures and social justice in and through the humanities, with “digital,” “humanities,” and “futures” understood broadly.

This theme coincides with the 2022 launch of the Initiative for Digital Humanities (IDH), a new project at the Humanities Institute that will facilitate scholarship on the intersection of humanities disciplines and digital technologies. Our interdisciplinary Faculty Fellows will pursue projects that apply digital technologies and computational methods to solve questions in the humanities as well as projects that subject digital technologies and infrastructures to humanistic analysis, critique, and contextualization. IDH’s role as an inaugural institutional partner with the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium will serve as a catalyst for exploring racial and ethnic entanglements with technology in the past, present, and future.

Fellows might propose projects that consider, for example, social justice-engaged digital humanities projects in ethnic studies fields; how to increase university and national capacity for engaging minoritized communities with digital humanities curricula; possibilities for reciprocal and redistributive relationships with communities through digital humanities praxis (recognizing that “community” may be local, national, or international and includes communities within universities); and how to facilitate authentic community collaboration with digital humanities scholarship at UT. Projects that do not directly address racial and ethnic issues will also be considered, including projects on gender, disability, age, and generational issues as well as a broad range of projects on the history, literature, anthropology, and ethics of digital futures. Above all, applicants should focus on a humanities topic and demonstrate an ability to engage a theme of interdisciplinary interest; qualitative and quantitative approaches are both welcome.

The Humanities Institute Faculty Seminar meets weekly one semester of each academic year to explore a biennially selected issue or theme that lends itself to inquiry across a broad disciplinary spectrum. Designed to promote intellectual collaboration and collegiality across college and departmental lines, the seminar is open to faculty by application. Successful faculty applicants are appointed as Humanities Institute Fellows and receive a one-course teaching load reduction for the semester of their appointment in the Institute. Each faculty fellow typically leads one session of the seminar on work or interests related to the theme. Many Faculty Fellows take the opportunity to work on a large project or book during the semester of the seminar.

Each group of Fellows invites four or five distinguished visitors whose work has been formative for the issues under discussion to guest-lead sessions of the seminar and deliver public lectures in the Institute's Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series. The lecturers for 2022-24 will be announced in the Humanities Institute newsletter, on this web site, and through social media.

Past annual themes have included: "Narrative Across the Disciplines," "Health, Well Being, and Healing," "Imagined Futures," "Ethical Life in a Global Society," "The Future of Disciplinary Knowledge," "Texas in Global Contexts," "Modernity," "The Work of Religion: Past, Present, and Future," "Remembering and Forgetting, Collecting and Discarding," and "The Human and its Others."

Read about the 2022-2024 class of Faculty Fellows and their projects HERE. 

For more information, please contact the Institute at information@humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu.