carving new spaces

Last week, I started an internship at the Scholars’ Lab made possible by the PhD+ Program at UVA. This means that, during the Fall semester, I get to support the student programs, Lab initiatives, and labor of the folks that over the past four years have modeled for me how scholarship can be a liberating personal and professional practice, a genuine exercise at human connection.

The position involves a series of tasks with varying levels of depth that touch on curriculum development, pedagogical practice, documentation development, consultations, and institutional regulations. These topics speak directly to my professional goals to hone in skills and gain experience working in positions that support and develop scholarship within the realm of digital humanities, going beyond the space of academic departments. It is a tailored internship that was collaboratively conceived between my internship supervisor, Brandon Walsh, and me. Brandon is the Head of Student Programs at the Scholars’ Lab, and working closely with him in an official capacity has been a dream for a long time now. I could not ask for a better boss, mentor, and friend to guide and support my professionalization journey as I take steps to position myself as a young working professional about to enter the job market, rather than as a student.¹

Brandon’s ongoing commitment to critical digital pedagogy, as a philosophy and active practice, has profoundly changed my own relationship to learning and teaching. Through mentorship meetings, article discussions, workshop practices, and collaborative writing exercises, our collaborations were a catalyst I desperately needed to begin imagining and theorizing what I want in my personal relationship to pedagogy as well as the shape of the pedagogical spaces I envision fostering.

While this inaugural blog post highlights why this internship is meaningful to me, as a 6th-year PhD candidate, Brandon’s latest blog post reflects on the role of a supervisor and shares details about the main tasks I will tackle over the semester.

My main goals are to strengthen my ties to this community and make new friends, though I also anticipate making plenty of mistakes as I make my way to small wins and achievements. Grappling with failure and process are, after all, essential parts of digital humanities scholarship and labor due to their historical connection to coding, as Quinn Dombrowski has pointed out. I welcome the attention in DH to individual working experiences, especially when it addresses navigating failure and reflecting on labor processes, as a methodological sandbox to practice patience with myself. Within the internship, I plan to exercise this knowledge to continue unlearning the culture surrounding academic hierarchy that is based on degree, tenure, rank, or institutional influence. I want commitment, accountability, labor, skills, and consistent kindness, instead, to guide who I come to respect and whose respect I earn, regardless of ranks. Moreover, I want these to be the values I use to assign my own labor value.

At a time of uncertainty, fear, and massive funding cuts, I envision my PhD+ internship at the Scholars’ Lab to be a nurturing space of experimentation where I can shape the kind of laborer I want to become, post-PhD, in a crumbling social environment that desperately cries for sustainable practices of care.