Event Title
From Global Contexts to Local Stories: Dismantling Ethnocentric Monoculturalism through the Digital Lens
Location
NSC-148
Start Date
3-11-2017 11:15 AM
End Date
3-11-2017 12:15 PM
Description
This proposed roundtable session of 5 speakers tackles the question of how digital humanities can pave the way toward a more inclusive and interdisciplinary future of research, learning, and teaching. By challenging ethnocentric monoculturalism – understood as the unconscious or conscious "valuing of one's ethnic/cultural group over others" and the "belief in one 'right' culture," this panel explores various entry points to support and develop intercultural competence.[1] Each speaker proposes specific strategies to dismantle ethnocentric monoculturalism in respective disciplines, classroom settings, and curricula.
Digital humanities plays a crucial role in overcoming monoculturalism through the promise of access to communities, archives, software or apps that represent and collect historically marginalized voices, materials, and information. In particular, we pose and seek to answer the question: how can digital humanities and their tools shape the ways we create, narrate, and understand inclusivity, diversity, or multiculturalism? This panel unpacks this question from different angles by drawing attention to challenges, promises, and the future of dismantling monoculturalism in global but also local contexts.
What does it mean to teach not only inclusively, but to also to teach students in such a way that develops their intercultural competence and broadens their habits of mind, heart, and hands in multiple disciplinary contexts? Finch establishes a pedagogical framework for how to consider challenging monoculturalism in the classroom on both global and local levels.
Given that students from all over the US (and often the world) meet in various institutions of Higher Education, Bangor challenges the ethnocentric boundaries of what it means to be "German". By collectively creating imaginary cities in the digital realm, fluency and monolingualism are deconstructed as these practices help to replace the native-speaker model and produce student centered knowledge in the foreign language classroom. Yet, can the limits of Imagined Community Simulation be pushed to also deconstruct ethnocentric monoculturalism?
Koellner explores ways in which digital mapping can support cross-cultural competencies in the intermediate German language classroom. By analyzing selected texts presented at the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize in Austria, she demonstrates how cultural exchange, diversity, and growth of the "European Idea" unravel through the visualization of loose European borders, travel narratives, and depictions of individual life stories, which ultimately challenge the idea of monoculturalism on literature presented at the Festival of German-Language Literature.
In her presentation, Balint focuses on recent narratives of migration and the ways in which these often challenging texts can be visually represented in Story Maps by ArcGIS. Using collaborative student projects as examples, she demonstrates how Story Maps as a digital tool helps create links between diverse fields of knowledge such as history, geography, and aesthetics.
Finally, Korsnack explores how digital archives, such as "Who Speaks for the Negro," might be incorporated into course design and classroom pedagogy. Such a course would use primary documents to bring alternative voices and diverse perspectives into the classroom through collaborative projects, while also challenging students to think critically about the preservation process itself.
[1] Taylor, Jennifer. "Ethnocentric Monoculturalism." In. Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology. Sage Publications, 2006: 203.
From Global Contexts to Local Stories: Dismantling Ethnocentric Monoculturalism through the Digital Lens
NSC-148
This proposed roundtable session of 5 speakers tackles the question of how digital humanities can pave the way toward a more inclusive and interdisciplinary future of research, learning, and teaching. By challenging ethnocentric monoculturalism – understood as the unconscious or conscious "valuing of one's ethnic/cultural group over others" and the "belief in one 'right' culture," this panel explores various entry points to support and develop intercultural competence.
