Roopika Risam

Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth

“Indigenizing Decolonial Feminist Media Theory: The Case of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” Feminist Media Histories, forthcoming.

This article examines how issues of Indigenous dispossession and genocide in settler colonial states like the U.S. are subordinated to analyses of the Global South in decolonial feminist media theory. Taking up this problem, it argues that decolonial feminist media theory must necessarily foreground Indigenity and models what such an intervention might look like through a case study analyzing the mobilization of media to address the phenomenon of missing and murdered Indigenous women and demand accountability for them.

Co-directed with Quinn Dombrowski, Katia Bowers, Maria Cecire, Anouk Lang, and Lee Skallerup Bessette, the Data-Sitters Club is assembling a comprehensive, colloquial guide to computational textual analysis, using a corpus of Ann M. Martin’s iconic teen girl series The Baby-Sitters Club. From creating a corpus to experimenting with methods and tools to answer critical questions about children’s literature, genre fiction, and digital humanities itself, The Data-Sitters Club’s friendly, feminist collaborative walks readers through computational textual analysis from A to Z. The Data-Sitters Club received a Digital Humanities Award in 2019.

Co-written with Quinn Dombrowski, Katia Bowers, Maria Cecire, Anouk Lang, and Lee Skallerup Bessette, this chapter explores the nature of feminist collaboration in The Data-Sitters Club project. It discusses the origin story of the Data-Sitters, as well as the complex questions of gender, race, children’s literature, and culture that we are addressing with computational textual analysis research methods.

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research. “Intersectionality” is a collection of digital humanities projects and digital pedagogy assignments that encourage students to think beyond narrow binaries that overdetermine contemporary discourses of identity and power. The artifacts in the collection facilitate a range of approaches to digital pedagogy that take into account the compounded harm of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and other axes of oppression.

Co-edited with Carolyn Elerding and Radhika Gajjala, this special issue of First Monday focuses on the gendered dimensions of digital labor. Topics covered include feminist perspectives on digital labor, feminist critiques of the social factory, the role of women in U.S. national computing infrastructure, gendered dimensions of content moderation, bodily labor in technoecologies, and queering feminist Web TV.

This chapter examines the ways that digital humanities projects reproduce normative, white, male, European subjectivity inherited from the Enlightenment. It considers how an exclusionary universal subject is encoded in the technologies that subtend digital humanities scholarship and is, in turn, represented, legitimated, and sanctioned by digital humanities.

This article examines the relationship between intersectionality and the digital humanities. It argues that intersectionality offers a critical approach to the field’s debates between theory and method and proposes ways of looking forward towards the deeper intersectional analysis needed to expand intellectual diversity in the field and move difference beyond the margins of digital humanities.

This article examines constructions of toxic femininity within fourth-wave feminism. Taking hashtag feminism as its focus, it contends that charges of “toxicity” lobbed online reproduce divisive dynamics that have shaped earlier trends within feminist movements in the U.S. The essay further suggests that Twitter, as a platform, amplifies deep discomfort with theories of intersectional feminism while shaping how normative gender is reproduced online.

This special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology focuses on the relationships between gender, globalization, and digital humanities. Topics covered include feminist rhetoric in the digital sphere; digital writing on intimate partner violence among immigrants; gendered dissent in mediated literary works; feminist databases; gender, ethnicity, and social media influencers; and queer visibility facilitated by internet video.