Latinx Digital Humanities: Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo, Public and Applied Humanities & HSI Artist-in-Residence

Latinx Digital Humanities, with Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

Hispanic Serving Institute (HSI)-Public and Applied Humanities Artist-in-Residence, in collaboration with "El Pueblo Urban Humanities Studio," a Spring 2023 Public and Applied Humanities Course

About the Talk:

In this lecture, Dr. Hidalgo presents her groundbreaking work, Casos De Justicia, and the engaged digital humanities research methodology of augmented fotonovelas. Drawing from critical anthropology, Chicanx/Latinx visual cultural studies and the emerging field of urban humanities, Hidalgo provides students and guests with a case study that charts the ways research and co-creative practices shape activism and communities, and vice versa.

About Our Speaker:

Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale. She received her PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose scholarship integrates ethnographic methods, digital humanities, and Latinx geographies in analyzing contemporary urban labor struggles and resistance. Her forthcoming book, Abolitionist Marketplaces (under contract with Duke University Press), is based on a seven-year visual ethnography with the leaders of the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This book puts forward a new theoretical framework for analyzing how informal workers living under legal forms of violence center radical consciousness, self-care, and community-care to collectively organize and transform the urban spaces and city policies where they live and work. In addition, Hidalgo has an ongoing digital humanities project with the LASVC that draws on a visual research method she developed called augmented fotonovelas (photo-based comics) that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to merge ethnographic data with photography, audio, and video imagery so that multiple publics can “see” and “hear” aggrieved communities. Articles from these projects have recently been published in the Journal of Latino Studies and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Born in Los Angeles, to a Salvadoran father and U.S. mother, she spent her childhood living between Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s and 90s. Currently she resides in CT with her husband and two children

About the Course:

PAH 200: Introduction to Public and Applied Humanities the “El Pueblo Urban Humanities Studio” is a Spring 2023 GE course that introduces students across disciplines to public humanities methodologies and case studies through an experiential urban humanities field studio in partnership with the Sunnyside Foundation, whose mission centers on service to Tucson’s Southside. Students will produce photo-based projects about the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, a site established within the historical context of the Chicano movement of Tucson in the 60s/70s, that continues to this day to serve as a hub for social and metropolitan services and cultural empowerment in the predominantly Latinx Southside community. 

The course is also a collaboration with campus partners (the Center for Creative Photography, the Experiential Learning Design Accelerator Program and HSI Initiatives Faculty Seed Grant Program) which sponsored resources for the redesign of PAH 200 with such resources as visual literacy and research modules, materials and exhibition support; our very own HSI-PAH artist-in-residence (Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo); peer mentors and community members time during site-visits and pin-ups.  The students will start with visual literacy modules led by the CCP team (inspired by their own exhibition on Linda McCartney and her teacher —Hazel Larsen Archer’s groundbreaking approach to photo education), then begin a semester-long investigation of El Pueblo, examining case studies, conducting site visits, participating in group-interviews and designing photo-shoots with community storytellers, all to culminate in a public-facing event of an exhibition at El Pueblo and the CCP in May of 2023.