Feminist Digital Humanities (hint: it’s not just for feminists)

Feminist DH: Intersections in Practice was published in April 2025 by The University of Illinois Press. It was published open access thanks to generous grants from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The City University of New York, and Maastricht University Library.

This edited collection consists of twelve chapters divided into three sections. Two colleagues from FAOS contributed to the volume. Professor Susan Schreibman (L&K) was the co-editor and co-author of one of the chapters with Dr Monika Barket (History): ‘Feminist DH: A Historical Perspective: Excavating the Lives of Women of the Past’ based on their joint research for the Letters 1916-1923 project. 

Chapters reflect a wide spectrum of how feminist theory, principles, and practices inform digital humanities research, as well as how their DH research contributes to feminist scholarship. What energizes and animates each chapter is the authors’ engagement with sites and situations in which DH and feminism might be productively enmeshed. 

Contributors elucidate how they put feminism(s) into digital practice, with varied and innovative results. Chapters explore how to create spaces for the production of minoritarian knowledge, for resisting dominant narratives, and finding new forms of representation and distribution. Intersectional Feminism is one of the underpinnings of the volume, with many of the chapters indicating how they adopt a Data Feminist approach. 

Chapters are divided into three sections

• Readings: How feminist thought informs digital praxis, analytical approaches, methodologies, and interpretation
• Infrastructures: suggest new knowledge structures and creation, publication, access and sharing that disrupt binaries and challenge dominant matrixes
• Pedagogy: how feminist practice engages students in research and in preparing future generations to improve upon the work we have begun 

Taken together, the collection demonstrates a commitment to change and embracing an activist agenda (not only in research but in the classroom), in exposing inequitable practices while exploring and implementing solutions. Another theme is a call to be conscious, within our own research practices, of structural imbalances and how we can choose to find ways to mitigate them, choose to ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, or tell ourselves that our research could not benefit from taking a feminist approach. 

What the volume makes visible is that taking a feminist approach means creating space for embodied and affective forms of interpretation and meaning making. It means being alert to unspoken assumptions -- not just our own, but those within the historical record --  about dominant narratives, about expertise (and who has it), about value: the value of work, or scholarship, and who gets to have a voice, today, and in the past, and consequently, what voices have been silenced or disappeared and what we as researchers need to do to reset  or rebalance the historical record 

And lastly, how do we, as researchers, have the ability, through the methodologies we employ, the theories that underpin our research, and the work practices we adopt, have the ability to not use our scholarship as an escape from the world, but as an intervention in it as a social good.