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Post DPLI Reflection

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I wrote this on the plane ride home on Friday, but am just posting now:

I’m on a plane looking out the window over the gridded patterns of farms and the vein-like roads that connect them, feeling shaken from the past week at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Shaken is not what I expected to feel. Really, I didn’t expect for this workshop to make me feel anything– and certainly not to make me feel anything viscerally. When I hear the word “digital,” it usually strikes me as such a bland term, as a matter-of-fact notion, as a word akin to “notebook,” a word that suggests techniques and tools. But so many of those tools have been used to craft a digital world that is shaped by politics, identity and inequality every bit as much as the physical world that the digital sets out to reflect and rise above. In the rush of the digital age, in the yearning to look and act proficient or savvy or brilliant, what does it mean to slow down for long enough to connect with others, and to remember that the unresolved conflicts of our world are at the core of its digital counterpart?

I did not learn exactly what I expected to going into this workshop, but I learned much more than I ever thought I would. I am grateful to Adeline for teaching me through this workshop that I need to take time out from my own frenzied rush of attempting to be competent at digital techniques to reflect on how we cannot separate the physical world and its attendant politics from the digital world. I have learned a great deal from her about how to continue to be present and to be open to change even in a deeply challenging environment. I have learned so much, too, from my peers who articulated their concerns, advocated for themselves, and worked to either cope with the situation or to make a better situation for themselves. I learned an exceptionally large amount from Wendy, Fatma, Asako, Faron and Lisa, with whom I had the pleasure of being in a small group. The process by which our group slowed down together to think, work collaboratively, and learn from each other modeled feminist practices in the most satisfying and exhilarating way.  It was delightful to spend 2 days in their company. Each and every one of you in this track as a whole taught me things that I did not anticipate learning, but for which I leave this workshop grateful. I know others had very different experiences than I did, but this is true to mine.

I don’t have a way to tie things up, but I want to say that this experience helped me understand my own privilege anew, and to think much more about how it is incumbent upon me to leverage my privilege to try to actively redistribute power to others who are in more marginalized positions.

I fully believe that another digital and physical world is possible. You all have given me great hope that in our own ways, even if one person’s way conflicts with another person’s way, there is a cadre of incredible folks doing their best where they are to bring about a little sliver of that other, better world.

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