Building Digital Ethnic Futures and Advancing Digital Scholarship at CSUF and Beyond
The digital humanities initiative at CSUF officially launched in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2015 with the appointment of two new faculty in the Department of History to specifically advance curriculum in digital humanities and new media in history.
Since then, the initiative has grown under the leadership of Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu to include: a long running DH Colloquium series and Keynote address; several grant funded digital public humanities projects, multiple cohorts of graduate students pursuing fully digital MA projects; two new courses in digital humanities theory and practice, and successful collaborations with CSUF’s digital literacy librarian Colleen Robledo Greene and other faculty and library staff who are invested in establishing communities of practice to support digital scholarship, digital literacy and community engaged digital ethnic studies broadly.
To formalize these collaborations and build campus leadership around supporting & sustaining digital scholarship at CSUF, Dr. Moore Pewu began applying for institutional capacity building grants, and in 2021 these efforts were rewarded with the largest single contribution to CSUF’s Digital Humanities initiative, a three-year, $3 Million capacity building grant from the Andrew A. Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Funded Digital Ethnic Futures Grant, supports the establishment of a national consortium of professionals engaged in digital humanities research, teaching, and ethnic studies at regional public colleges and universities.
As a Co-Principle Investigator, on this grant and a lead institution in the DEFCon consortium, Dr. Moore Pewu and the CSUF DEFCon team are cultivating and training the next generation of Digital Humanities practitioners from amongst CSUF’s faculty and staff, with the expectation that they will craft innovative research and pedagogical experiences that center first-generation and minority students along with the communities they call home into the broad fields of digital humanities and digital studies.
Support new curriculum development in digital ethnic studies fields
Provide mentorship and support for faculty and staff engaging in digital scholarship
Cultivate the next generation of DH scholars by providing students with mentoring and practicum experiences
Curate community engaged DH projects and conversations
Enhance the university’s infrastructure and capacity to support digital scholarship
Outreach Coordinator, Lecturer in African American Studies
Research Associate
Since 2016 the digital humanities initiative at California State University has received funding from the departments, colleges and institutions below. Thank you for your support!
With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CSUF DEFCon will disburse over $40,000 in grants and fellowships to support CSUF faculty, staff and students in developing new scholarly research, curriculum, and community engaged projects at the intersection of digital humanities and ethnic studies fields.
In addition to stipends, all CSUF DEFCon fellows benefit from…
6-month fellowship
with a $1,200 Stipend
Six-month fellowships designed to equip graduate and undergraduate students with the essential skills, professional training and mentorship needed to become the next generation of social justice and community-engaged digital scholars. Student fellows will gain valuable career experience as they work with a faculty mentor to develop project timelines and budgets, experiment with emerging technologies, collaborate in interdisciplinary settings, develop new modes of inquiry, and become vital members of a dynamic community of practice at CSUF and abroad that is working at the intersections of digital technologies and ethnic studies.
Learn More & Apply →8-month fellowship
with a $2,000 Stipend
Faculty & Staff research fellowships are designed to support researchers at emerging stages of their digital scholarly practice. Individuals selected for this award will pursue research topics that center the voices and experiences of ethnic communities, past, present and future; while also integrating digital tools, digital data creation/curation, and new media technologies in transformative, justice oriented, and socially responsible ways.
Learn More & Apply →8-month fellowship
with a $2,500 Stipend
Digital scholarship, including the digital humanities, provides opportunities to bridge academic siloes and establish collaborative models for teaching, research and community building. These fellowships support teams of two or more CSUF faculty/staff to design new courses and curricular resources that explore topics from one or more ethnic studies fields (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American studies) and the digital humanities.
Learn More & Apply →with a $xxxx Stipend
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Learn More & Apply →Fellowships FAQ
Yes. While digital scholarly practices incorporate key elements of the Digital Humanities including working in multidisciplinary and collaborative environments, digital scholars can be found across the academic setting, as digital scholarship is a methodological choice that informs how we engage new technologies to create, locate, assemble, understand and share our data.
Digital scholarship is therefore not limited to the humanities, but rather invites technologists, humanists, mathematicians, geographers, natural and social scientists and others to think, explore and create new scholarship that is both collaborative and digital.
Digital scholarship can include the use of: data visualization, network analysis, digital storytelling, gaming, text-analytic techniques, GIS/mapping, digital exhibits, and data-mining.
Yes. Collaborators for the course collaboration fellowship can come in many combinations including full-time faculty working with contingent faculty, staff working with faculty, or all contingent faculty working together etc. The only requirement is that all collaborators need to be employed at least part time at CSUF. Students, including graduate students cannot serve as course collaborators.
Yes, faculty & staff applicants can submit proposals for both funding opportunities, but the proposals must be different in scope. If you are unsure of which fellowship is right for you, please reach out and we would be happy to help talk through your ideas. Email d.h@fullerton.edu
You can certainly share the name(s) of students with whom you would like to work with during your fellowship period, but student fellows will have to complete a separate Student Fellowship application. We can’t guarantee student fellow assignments ahead of time, but will take all available information shared with us into consideration when reviewing your proposal.
“The digital ethnic studies field brings together critiques of racial capitalism, community-engaged approaches to research, and digital humanities methodologies. Complementing work in discrete fields like Black and Latinx digital humanities, digital ethnic studies draws on the affordances of ethnic studies, an interdisciplinary examination of difference that foregrounds race, ethnicity, and indigeneity through a comparative framework. Moreover, digital ethnic studies places at its forefront the community-engaged research practices that are integral to ethnic studies and its commitment to research with (not on) communities.”
—Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium
Here are a few terms used in our materials above, found in the Keywords in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities:
Yes, the second round of fellowships will be released in Fall 2023, with a fellowship period that runs from January 2023-June 2024.
Previews of each application can be viewed below, but keep in mind that all proposals must be submitted through the formal application portal.
Reach out to us! d.h@fullerton.edu
Digital humanities is collaborative, it’s participatory, it’s visual, and while it does not have to be “new” or cutting edge, it does have to be innovative. Thus, we promote an engagement with digital tools and technologies that helps us critically engage historically marginalized communities, rethink historical questions and contemporary problem spaces, and contemplate new digital futures for first-generation students.
Watch the video to learn more about why CSUF is uniquely poised to advance a community engaged digital practice.
Since 2021, we have been developing a new mapping platform to enable features for better storytelling around both artists & neighborhoods of the public art in Orange County.
Launched in 2022, this project seeks to creatively document the past, present and future of Black-Owned businesses & community organizations in Orange County, using interactive digital maps and data storytelling.
In 2022 we held DH Summer Connect to bring eight different workshops to scholars and practitioners.
Keep up with our different projects on Instagram and the web. And reach out to connect about other digital humanities projects!
d.h@fullerton.edu or jmoorepewu@fullerton.edu
