Copyright

Brandon Walsh

Published On

2026-09-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

34 pages

THEMA

  • JNM
  • JBCT1
  • JNF
  • JP

BISAC

  • EDU015000
  • EDU001030
  • EDU040000
  • SOC052000
  • LAN009000

Keywords

  • Digital Humanities
  • Digital Pedagogy
  • Education
  • Social Justice

3. Intellectual

Chapter of: Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change

Universities aspire to be intellectual, but this framing devalues educational labor and ignores the pedagogical impacts that material conditions have on teachers and learners. In this chapter, I advocate for a pedagogy that refuses narratives about the life of the mind and, instead, centers bodies and laborers. By slowing down, embodying our teaching, and working with students rather than against them, we can develop the conditions for transformative learning. In order to do so, I argue for two intertwined approaches to the classroom. First, I argue for a pedagogy of solidarity, wherein teaching administrators work toward better understanding and advocacy for student living conditions through labor organizing. Second, I link this approach to a digital humanities pedagogy that slows the classroom down and resists capitalist grind cultures. When implemented together, these two approaches can re-center and recover the body by recognizing the centrality of living and working conditions to the work of teaching. By embracing the role of the body in the classroom—rather than denying it— we can create the conditions by which our students and teachers can flourish.

Contributors

Brandon Walsh

(author)
Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at University of Virginia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2785-3519
https://walshbr.com/

Brandon Walsh is Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, a digital humanities and experimental research center in the University of Virginia libraries. He has published numerous pieces that build toward the ideas in this book concerning how digital humanities pedagogy can reflect and enact infrastructural change in higher education. With over two decades teaching experience in a variety of environments, he currently oversees the fellowship programs in the Scholars’ Lab. In this context, he teaches and works directly with dozens of students each year on a range of professional development, design, and digital humanities activities. His chapter in Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities entitled “The Futures of Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Times of Crisis” argues for the urgent need for educators to direct their work towards the social and political crises of the present. In addition, Walsh values working in public in order to spark conversation and share process-oriented work as evidenced by his published pieces and editorial work with The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Programming Historian, and the #DLFteach Digital Library Pedagogy Cookbook. He blogs regularly at walshbr.com.