The “digital native” is a young adult reared with laptops, internet access and video games in hand. The concept is a troubling one, as Ester Hargittai argues, complicated by inequalities in access, education, and training that reflect socioeconomic class, geography, and racialized and gendered experiences with technologhy.

(…) Digital humanities pedagogy is not an attempt to teach students particular technical skills, applications, or platforms but a pedagogical approach that enables them to envision a relationship between themselves and knowledge production. As Tanzt Clement has argued: Like pedagogy intended to teach students to read more critical, project-based learning in digital humanities demonstrates that when students learn how to study digital media, they are learning how to study knowledge production as it is represented in symbolic constructs that circulate within information systems that are themselves a form of knowledge production. She further proposes that digital humanities offers students new approaches to multiculturalism, multi modalities, and multimedia. Drawing on this characteristic of digital humanities pedagogy, postcolonial digital pedagogy helps students develop emancipatory digital cultural literacy-an awareness of how digital production is imbricated in the politics, powered neocolonial practices that privilege the epistemologies of the Global North.

Source: Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy; November 2018