Chapter 14 Resisting BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces

Twine Narrative

Our Twine narrative is available online as a downloadable Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file for playing the story (and also as the Twine source-code file).3 We also transcribe the fictional emails in it as plain text here, though of course sacrificing the nonlinear form of the Twine narrative.

Commentary

As this creative narrative illustrates, we are living in a society, structure, and period rife with—indeed, driven by—responsibilization, “the process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another—usually a state agency—or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all” (O’Malley, 276). The process and practice of responsibilization constitute a legacy and aspect of capitalist colonialism. Historically and in an ongoing fashion, colonization has sought to destroy collective ways of being by forcing people into nuclear families and other isolated and individualized structures of being, actively separating colonized communities into fractured units as a means of attempting to prevent anticolonial resistance. As Indigenous queer studies scholar Chris Finley (Colville Confederated Tribes) asserts, individualized structures of being such as “the nuclear family need [. . .] to be thought of as [. . .] colonial system[s] of violence,” given how such a structuring has been used as “both an ideological and a physical tool of [. . .] colonialism” (32).

The pandemic made the pervasiveness and harms of responsibilization ever clearer—pervasiveness and harms that seep into, interweave with, and can be both confronted and exacerbated by digital spaces and “infrastructural subjectivation.”4 As our lives shifted online in the early stages of the pandemic, digital infrastructural responsibilization accelerated, when educational institutions demanded that individuals provide and pay for their own digital infrastructures. Subsequently, and ironically, the capitalist push to pre-Covid “normal” undermined online options and infrastructural possibilities for teaching, learning, and working: responsibilization was rhetorically framed by colonial institutions as the freedom to individually choose how to negotiate health risks in unsafe and unjust physical conditions.

The vision of freedom forwarded by Black and Queer of color feminists provides a useful lens to interpret these issues, collective at its root and positioned against the individualistic and fallacious conceptualization of freedom at the core of responsibilization—a supposed freedom that strips others of their agency and safety. As Black feminist scholar-organizer Robyn Maynard writes, “There are two different visions of freedom at play here. One is the freedom to evade, to deny one’s responsibilities to a collective social body; the other forwards a freedom that is relational, holds up freedom as collective safety” (76). It is this second freedom, this understanding that freedom is relational and collective, that will help to move our infrastructural approaches away from perpetuating colonial harms, and that must guide our actions and approaches to digital infrastructures in the here and now and for the future. Such a vision of freedom offers the possibility and foundation for building and fostering digital infrastructures of collective care and community freedom, grounded in disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s conceptualizations of care work as “collective responsibility” (33) and “collective access” (32), and as “a deep possibility model, not a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone who needs care” (46).

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues in its effects, even as the emergency has been declared officially over by the World Health Organization (2023), scholars and practitioners across virtually all domains are thinking critically about how to continue their work via digital and virtual means. What does a robust and useful technological response, aware and attentive to the biases and messages of digital media, look like in the context of a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic? As Barbie Zelizer (890) asks, is “a crisis that ensues following long periods of neglect as sudden as we make it out to be? Why is disruption more deserving of attention than what precedes it?”

This creative narrative centers on “crisortunity,” a neologism coined by The Simpsons5 and since expanded on by critical media scholars such as Tanner Mirrlees. Crisortunity, or a crisis situation that also presents the opportunity for someone to gain something, unifies our narratives. Our creative responses are linked by an attentiveness to the uneven precarities and vulnerabilities so often symptomatic of institutional responses to crises, as well as the production, circulation, and management of information. Techno-fixes often fail to fix; instead, they reinstate unequal and inequitable relations in the name of repair. In contrast, when communities organize to respond to crises on their own, tensions arise between attempts for self-organization and anticapitalist modes of creating community and the infrastructure required to adequately support their labor. Our narrative thus explores the implications of qualifying something as a “crisis,” with a discrete beginning and end, and what it might mean to offer fixes to something that is broken, rather than curating, managing, repairing, or caring for something that is not yet irreparable (Gàl). As our creative provocations lay themselves bare, “crisortunity” is a generative concept for highlighting what institutions see as the bugs, and what are the features; in other words, when a crisis becomes critical enough to justify intervention, and for whom. Is the platform crashing,6 or is it only glitching for those few who are accustomed to a seamless interface and the social defaults of an inclusive classroom (Barnett et al.)? What additional challenges are introduced when the response to a crisis is primarily technological?

If the experiences of our students and faculty colleagues across both geographical and infrastructural difference highlight shared concerns of institutional apathy, how might these experiences also help us to critique more materially what feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed calls our “relationship to institutional worlds” (12) and what the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”7 Audre Lorde describes as “the master’s tools” (120)? If the correspondence between academic and administrative staff translates historically unequal and inequitable digital pedagogy engagements, making it easier for only certain populations to access and enter “the online classroom,” what alternative worlds might we conceive of that would be capable of building community infrastructures enabling of more equitable learning and teaching goals? How, where, and with whom might we build such classrooms? And what critical relationships to digital pedagogy infrastructural work might these classrooms embody?

Thinking of Black feminist author-activist bell hooks’s call to “work for justice” (xiii), and alongside Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “stranger” (3) to explain the urgency of constructing new worlds that structurally uproot the experiences of academic and digital “unbelonging,” Black Latina scholar and academic Lorgia García Peña discusses “freedom spaces,” including the Freedom University, which she cofounded in the state of Georgia with human rights activists, undocumented students, and allies.8 At their core, both freedom spaces and the Freedom University constitute a “third space” (Peña, 61) of academic freedom, where the justice-oriented work of teaching, learning, healing, and community-building may be facilitated, and where no student is left to learn and survive on their own (either materially or infrastructurally), even during pandemic emergencies. “To not ask the university,” García Peña writes, “to ‘love us back,’ to not demand the university—a neoliberal, colonizing, racializing institution—provide that which is against its own nature, but rather to take its resources and structures and repurpose them to create freedom spaces, freedom schools, and liberation movements within and through its violent exclusion” (19–20). How might our infrastructural reimaginings make possible and sustain the construction of freedom schools around digital community infrastructures along the campus-community spectrum?

Within our own digital pedagogical experiences, we have witnessed a range of community movements and initiatives that begin to help address this question. The Detroit Community Technology Project9 on “digital stewardship,” for example, asks what it means to install, advocate for, and build local capacities for accessible and affordable internet networks in a city where around 40 percent of homes do not have an internet connection.10 While colonial nation-states continue to stifle Indigenous community access to internet infrastructures throughout so-called North America—even as these nation-states dig up and extract from Indigenous lands to create digital infrastructures for settlers—Indigenous nations have been building internet and digital network connections (Duarte) and crafting robust online and social media presences (Caranto Morford and Ansloos). Their goal is to support network and cultural sovereignty and to help foster Indigenous learning spaces rooted in Indigenous worldviews. In India, the two-decades-long work of Janastu11 around “software commons” demonstrates their success in developing Wi-Fi mesh networks with communities across rural Karnataka and “building,” in their words, “technological solutions for indigenous communities and nomadic tribes in the region.” While functioning as information and communications technology (ICT), each of these initiatives also serves as an infrastructure for technology coownership and exploration, enabling community-centered and community-led survival and flourishing outside corporate machineries. How might we bridge these worlds of collective liberation and infrastructure re-building? How might we proceed from BYOI: Bring Your Own Infrastructure to BYOI: Build Your Otherwise Infrastructure in digital humanities (DH) learning spaces?

In an interview with Peter James Hudson on “The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness,” Katherine McKittrick, a Black anticolonial feminist critical geographer, offers a radical critique of discourse and assumptions related to safe classrooms, wondering whether we can or should ever achieve safe classrooms, given that many of the participants—students, faculty, and nonacademic community members—experience unsafe and precarious lives.12 Being accountable to these everyday and structural contexts in which learning comes into being is central to our project of otherwise infrastructures; a project where we see students, faculty, and nonacademic community members as partners in coconstructing the freedom spaces that we desire.

Filipino queer studies scholar Robert Diaz and Black studies scholar Rinaldo Walcott root the ongoing emergence of otherwise spaces and infrastructures in the lived, intergenerational, and embodied experiences of marginalized communities. The lived experiences and community-based knowledges of Black, Indigenous, people of color, immigrant and refugee, 2SLGBTQIA+, disabled and neurodivergent, and class- and caste-oppressed communities, and the dreams, expressions, and actions that emerge from these experiences, provide “the necessary fuel for imagining better futures that do not rely on the finite grammars of the present” (Diaz, xix). Those perspectives provide the fuel to imagine into being infrastructural otherwises that exist across and traverse digital and analog spaces, places, and experiences. Working and dialoguing with the writings of Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz (1), Filipino queer studies scholar JP Catungal posits that “imagining the future otherwise is a queer refusal of the unacceptable present” (34). Overtly positioning the otherwise as a refusal of the colonial present, Black and Indigenous scholars and community organizers on the Black-Indigenous solidarities podcast The Henceforward recognize the otherwise, or the elsewhere, as the “places we yearn for” and also recognize that these are places and infrastructures that marginalized communities work to bring into being every single day in small- and large-scale ways (Habtom).

Against the responsibilization-driven, crisortunity-centered, and structurally estranged worlds of conventional digital pedagogy environments, we expect the otherwise infrastructure of digital learning to be simultaneously occupying higher educational spaces; building new worlds from those very resources (labs, centers, and pedagogical initiatives); and also extending beyond the limits and confines of academic spaces to collaborate with and ultimately emerge from and be deeply rooted within community spaces. We return, too, to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work in disability justice to emphasize that digital infrastructural otherwises must reflect and embrace “a deep possibility model, not a one-size-fits-all solution for” digital access (46). Rather, thinking with design scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock’s writings on design justice, we assert the need to think collectively and produce infrastructural designs that use community knowledge. Success should not be linked to profit generation, and technical prowess should not be antithetical to humanistic and community-based ethics and values. We remain cognizant of the complexities and contradictions in working through these relationships, diverse needs, and possibilities, but it is to the messy, ongoing, mutually accountable, widely citing, and always consensual practices of unlearning, relearning, and colearning in the context of critical digital pedagogy and otherwise infrastructure building that we remain committed. Our combined creative and academic narrative highlights infrastructure as a technoefficient and technodeterministic conduit distinct from any social makings of infrastructure—and particularly educational infrastructure in a DH classroom—in embodied, material, and situated terms.

Emergency online instruction, we argue, initiated an epistemic shift in how postsecondary education operates. The Covid-19 pandemic set the stage for a rewiring of society and a reordering of things. While this transformation could have been oriented toward building and sustaining digital infrastructural otherwises, the crisis instead added catalysts to the epistemic rupture that was already happening in the education sector. Catastrophe capitalists and technosolutionists are pushing ethically compromised products and services, and those in positions of power and privilege are using the moment—this crisortunity—to push existing policy positions. For example, remote proctoring policies, which surveil students through cameras, microphones, and various other data harvesting and tracking techniques, were instituted at the height of the pandemic and have now become normative practices (Camara, 2020). We emphasize that online education is not the issue. Indeed, online learning spaces can and do provide enhanced access and are necessary for helping to keep ourselves and one another safe while learning together. However, how institutions have created and facilitated online education during crises has perpetuated, recongealed, reconfigured, and exacerbated the colonial-capitalist affinities, allegiances, and alliances that have been embedded in mainstream education for far too long.

As instructors, when we necessarily shifted to online learning to protect our communities, we were committed to providing students with a nourishing, supportive, accessible, and meaningful learning environment, especially as all of us struggled to navigate and survive the stress, uncertainties, and grief of the unfolding pandemic. However, as we worked to offer this type of learning environment, we were far too often left on our own, without the proper infrastructural support from our institutions to ensure that we could develop a holistically accessible and caring online learning space for us and our students. Whereas emergency online instruction initiated an epistemic shift in how postsecondary education is being imparted, we were responsibilized to maintain normative standards of academic excellence by doubling as a virtual help desk to aid students with navigating instructional software issues, as well as moonlighting as instructional designers to ensure that course designs met an institution’s expectations of effective delivery during the pandemic’s height. That is, as an online instructor, one does not merely perform the necessary pedagogical tasks, being a content matter expert, mentor, coach, and so on. Here, one takes on the added responsibilities of being a commercial content moderator when using chat rooms, discussion boards, or video conferencing software; a podcaster and/or vlogger, if one produces asynchronous teaching and learning material using audio-video technologies; a virtual help desk to help students address instructional software issues and on occasion deal with student hardware and software issues; and even an instructional designer to ensure that the course design meets universal design for learning principles. By entering the job with the expectation of having all these competencies, fluencies, and literacies, an online instructor is also reified into the infrastructures of subjectivation and responsibilization.

Online instruction is not only about delivering content over a new medium: there is a technodeterminist undercurrent to the move, an ideological temperament that the instructors themselves must espouse both within and across geographical specificities. Therefore, when a course development cycle begins to look like a software development cycle, or when course development involves coming up with software solutions for the various pedagogical activities that are performed in the platformed virtual teaching and learning spaces, we pay more attention to software instead of putting care and focus into holistically developing the course, as well as its content and community. Since the pandemic started, we are seeing how instrumental reasoning and the techno-logics of the software developer are taking hold in mainstream academia. The purveyors of technologies and media infrastructures (i.e., the enterprise resource management platform, the learning management systems, the knowledge discovery systems) are exerting their power and authority in this reordering of things and reorganization of the institution.

To foster digital infrastructural otherwises, we must resist BYOI, which involves capitalist-colonial priorities and induction into the effective and efficient neoliberal machinery of the higher education system. Communities are building their own internets and virtual teaching, learning, and organizing spaces; students and academics are cocreating antioppression reading lists within historically white and upper-caste academia; and campus-community connections are coming together to facilitate virtual teach-ins and digitally circulated mutual aid campaigns to provide ongoing support to students, contingent staff, faculty peers, and community members who experienced precarity amid the pandemic and afterward.

This community- and collectivist-centered otherwise work reminds us of and embodies Black organizer-educator Mariame Kaba’s assertion that hope is more than a mere emotion; rather, it is “a discipline,” an ongoing and grounded philosophy or practice that is “practiced everyday, that people actually practice [. . .] all the time” (26–28). As we engage in the creation of more just digital teaching, learning, and organizing spaces, and as we work with digital infrastructures to develop more just teaching, learning, and organizing practices, we must learn from this radical community and collectivist work and embrace grounded practices of hope. Indeed, we might see hope as a discipline that we embody as we enter and engage with digital infrastructures. And we might also see hope as an infrastructure itself, cobuilt with and within communities, and emergent, functional, and developed across and in connection with lands, waters, and cyberspace, moving us from BYOI: as Bring Your Own Infrastructure to BYOI: as Build Your Otherwise Infrastructure.

Notes

1. 1. We use the term “so-called” to problematize and challenge the legitimacy and supremacy of settler colonial nation-states. The phrase is deployed in the context of decolonizing theory presented in works such as Mignolo and Walsh, and this is a practice that we have witnessed and learned from certain Indigenous studies and community-organizing spaces we have been part of in North America.

2. 2. Wetware refers to the human labor that keeps platforms and infrastructures operational. See Winthrop-Young.

3. 3. The HTML file for playing the Twine narrative in a web browser and the .twee file containing the source code for the Twine may be downloaded from https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resources?tag=chapter%2014.

4. 4. Langlois and Elmer (238) explain how the new political economy of subjectivation relies on distributed impersonal infrastructures made of impersonal subjects homing in on the idea of “infrastructural subjectivation,” wherein a set of relationships are established within the media platform to aggregate the human user and nonuser machinic traits as ascertained from the hardware and software are concatenated into one informationalized unit—the data point.

5. 5. This portmanteau, created by one of the characters on the popular American animated series The Simpsons, season 6, episode 11, “Fear of Flying,” conveys this idea (that every crisis provides an opportunity) well. See Benjamin Zimmer.

6. 6. Plantin and Punathambekar (165) point out how we are living through the infrastructuralization of digital platforms, as well as how a critical infrastructural lens enables us to think through/about digital platforms vis-a-vis questions of scale, labor, cultural practices, policies and regulations, and other issues.

7. 7. This positioning of the self is one that Lorde would offer continuously during public talks and appearances.

8. 8. See Garcia Peña (2022). The goal of Freedom University was to serve the needs of undocumented students who had been excluded from established public universities in Georgia. García Peña’s work builds on the 1960s work of education, belonging, and empowerment in connection with the civil rights movement in the United States, but also with the teaching and justice work of bell hooks, Arthur Schomburg, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.

9. 9. See https://detroitcommunitytech.org/.

10. 10. See the Teaching Community Technology Handbook (2017) at https://detroitcommunitytech.org/teachcommtech, which brings together all the projects that the members of this collective have used and built in practicing community technology in Detroit from 2008–2015.

11. 11. See https://open.janastu.org/.

12. 12. See McKittrick (238). See also our engagement with McKittrick’s provocation in Friend, Caranto Morford, Patel, Jacob et al.; Patel, Caranto Morford, Jacob; and Patel, Jament, and Mathew.

Bibliography