Engagement for Life\u27s Sake: Reflections on Partnering and Partnership with Rural Tribal Nations\u3csup\u3e☆\u3c/sup\u3e

In this paper, we reflect on our collective experiences engaging with Anishinaabe Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes region to support Tribal sovereignty in decision-making for food, energy, and water (FEW) systems. In these diverse experiences, we find common lessons. The first set of lessons contributes new empirical knowledge regarding the challenges and opportunities that rural Great Lakes Tribal Nations navigate for enacting sovereignty in decision-making. Our experiences illustrate that while Tribal Nations benefit from a broad and deep commitment to sovereignty and many cultural strengths, they are often challenged by shortages in administrative capacity; technical support; and embeddedness in economic, socio-cultural, and institutional dynamics that must be further negotiated for Tribes to enact the sovereignty to which they are inherently (and legally) entitled. Productive partnerships struggle when university partners fail to acknowledge these realities. The second set of lessons addresses the potential for, and challenges of, effective engagement processes. We find that engagement with university professionals is often mismatched with the priorities and needs of Tribal Nations. Effective engagement with Tribal Nations requires practical knowledge, applied assistance, and grounded, genuine relationships; these requirements often run counter to the institutional structures and priorities imposed by universities, federal funding agencies, and student recruitment. These findings, associated with both empirical knowledge and lessons on process, highlight shared insights on formidable barriers to effective engagement. Based on our firsthand experience working with rural Tribal Nations on FEW decision-making, we share these reflections with particular focus on lessons learned for professionals who engage, or hope to engage, with Tribal Nations in rural settings and offer opportunities to transform engagement processes to better support the immediate, practical needs of rural Tribal Nations

Infographic Assignment

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Infographics are visual representations of information or data and provide an interesting way of considering how design affects the ways information is understood. The decision to represent wealth inequality through a line graph as opposed to icons of people drawn to scale to represent average salary speaks to issues of purpose and audience and is an engaging way to help students see the rhetorical role of design. In this assignment, Bill Wolff asks his students to engage with Edward Tufte’s and Ellen Lupton’s theories of design, typography, and evidence presentation through creating infographics with Piktochart (a free online infographic creator). Along with producing an infographic, students write a reflection in which they describe their objective, rhetorical strategies, and the ways in which they engaged with Tufte and Lupton’s theories of information design. While we have categorized this assignment under “Producing Design,” it includes a nice balance of both producing and reflecting, thus encouraging critical self-reflection

Visual Communication Audit

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Focused on the professional writing classroom, this assignment asks students to identify an organization or company and to perform a visual audit. Students gather external communication (posters, flyers, handouts, reports, media releases, etc.) from the company or organization and analyze the work the visual aspects of these texts perform. The assignment allows students to explore how design choices help shape the message of a business or organization

Analyzing Visual and Multimodal Rhetorics in Monuments and Memorials

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This multistep assignment asks students to select and analyze a monument or memorial of their choice. After completing several readings on visual, spatial, and performative rhetoric, student teams visit their chosen artifact (or review it online if it is not local) and complete a systematic analysis of its physical, contextual, and commemorative elements and present their findings to the rest of the class. As material objects, the design of monuments and memorials call viewers’ attention to not only visual symbols but also issues of location, kairos, absence, and audience interaction. That is, this analysis asks students to evaluate the multitude of ways the designer(s) created meaning and encouraged viewer participation in commemorative acts

Remix a Story

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Assignments focused on redesigning texts ask students to consider how the design of a text encourages a certain understanding of that text. In this assignment, Traci Gardner asks her students to take an existing story told through the written word and translate it into a multimodal version. By asking students to think creatively about how to redesign and represent text in a new format, students must consider how the design choices they make have rhetorical effects. This assignment can be used in literature courses as a way of interrogating how a story is told, shaped, read, and understood through the modal choices used

Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: While the first two artifacts in this list look more specifically at design, this assignment folds design into a multimodal rhetorical analysis assignment. It also asks students to specifically consider how the analysis work they are doing can lead to a list of best practices for their own productions. Encouraging students to dig deeply within design analyses while also considering how those analyses can contribute to their own design practices is key in fostering a discursive understanding of design within digital pedagogy. Similar to how we ask students to analyze writing in the hopes they become more critical about reading and writing, this assignment asks students to analyze a multimodal text so as to become more critical about the multimodal texts they produce. More specifically, it asks them to take stock of the most effective strategies they encounter and produce a list of best practices for their own designs. This assignment helps make a bridge from analysis to production

Understanding socio-technological systems change through an indigenous community-based participatory framework

Moving toward a sustainable global society requires substantial change in both social and technological systems. This sustainability is dependent not only on addressing the environmental impacts of current social and technological systems, but also on addressing the social, economic and political harms that continue to be perpetuated through systematic forms of oppression and the exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. To adequately identify and address these harms, we argue that scientists, practitioners, and communities need a transdis-ciplinary framework that integrates multiple types of knowledge, in particular, Indigenous and experiential knowledge. Indigenous knowledge systems embrace relationality and reciprocity rather than extraction and oppression, and experiential knowledge grounds transition priorities in lived experiences rather than expert assessments. Here, we demonstrate how an Indigenous, experiential, and community-based participatory framework for understanding and advancing socio-technolog-ical system transitions can facilitate the co-design and co-development of community-owned energy systems

Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists

Defining digital humanities is a unique academic challenge. In this volume, Julian Chambliss, Professor of English at Michigan State University, explores the meaning, practice, and implication of digital humanities by talking to scholars deeply engaged with digital methods and the promise they hold for the humanities

Informational Campaign

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In this assignment, Kristin Arola has her students work in groups to design an informational campaign that includes a clearly defined graphic identity, a short video, and a Web site. Students begin by analyzing other campaigns and composing a list of best practices, after which they work through a series of steps in order to complete the final product. While this assignment usually takes five to seven weeks of a semester, pieces of it can be used to suit a variety of pedagogical goals. Design plays a large role since students must consider how to best share information with an audience through the use of still and moving images. Students also engage in self-reflections throughout, giving a pitch presentation and also presenting the final project. While categorized within production, this assignment brings together analysis, production, and self-reflection, thus enacting all of our design pedagogy commitments