ASKHISTORIANS 2020 DIGITAL CONFERENCE ROUNDTABLES
In addition to the keynote, panels, and networking we will be hosting two Roundtables during the conference for the discussion of current issues that face the practice of history. These Roundtables include several historical experts who will kick off the session with insight from their own research. This will be followed by a moderated discussion exploring the issues raised, and including a small audience invited to participate with their own questions and insight. The recordings of the sessions will be released at the end of the conference for public access.
Roundtable One: Making History in 2020: Contemporary Issues in Historical Practice
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The panelists aim to explore different historiographical perspectives relating to: the current political climate in Brazil and the challenges the Bolsonaro administration poses for historians and scholars of the humanities; outlining essential considerations when designing universally accessible academic resources and archives; introducing an open-source, peer-reviewed collection of digital resources pertaining to the history of the LBGTQIA+ community; and producing an oral history collection that showcases student and faculty experiences in learning and teaching during the COVID19 pandemic.
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Historical Experts:
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Kirsteen MacKenzie - "The Importance of Universal Access Principles in Digital History"
Brian Watson - "Building an LGBTQIA+ archive"
Mário Rezende - "Writing History in a country that chases historians"
Summer Cherland - "More and More Every Day: An Oral History Collection of Teaching and Learning in the COVID19 Era"
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Moderated by Juan Sebastián Lewin
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Roundtable Two: Using Quantitative Data to Disrupt Historical Narratives and Archives
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This panel seeks to disrupt historically dominant narratives about the imperial systems of religion, settler colonialism, slavery, and the documentation of the populace. Spanning across time and regions, from colonial era Britain to the nineteenth-century United States, our panelists give voice to historical actors who disrupted systems of oppression while simultaneously utilizing digital quantitative data analysis to complicate the traditional archive itself. How can we repurpose quantitative data to re-humanize historically marginalized groups? How do we combat systemic erasure that quantitative data can produce? What do we make of historical resistance where there are scant sources available?
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Historical Experts:
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Laura Brannan - "Mobility in Slavery and Freedom: Mapping Paths of Escape, Enslavement, and Freedom in the U.S., 1830-1850"
Georgia Farrell - "Running From Cultural Genocide: Carlisle Indian Boarding School Runaways and Hidden Resistance, 1890-1900"
Caitlin Gale - "Mapping Itinerancy: George Fox's Journal"
Janine Hubai - "Revelation and Erasure: IPUMS USA Datasets and New Mexico’s Population 1850-1920"
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Moderated by Dan Howlett