Landscapes of U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Digital Humanities

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, Public and Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Kansas
May 28, 2021
12:00-2:00pm CST

This presentation explores the emerging subfield of Borderlands digital humanities and highlights digital practices and projects that center intersectional epistemologies and transnational-transborder perspectives in DH research. Through the experiences of building United Frontera, a collective initiative that started in 2019, Fernandez will discuss the creation of the first transborder digital cultural record of the U.S.-Mexico border and the importance to analyze, document and look for strategies to preserve the digital memory of active, inactive and in-development digital material/projects that present various perspectives of the region. Similarly, this presentation will touch on the model this project has been built in and is following based on the articulation of local practices and directional politics of knowledge that avoid flows from the top-down.

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla is the Public and Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Researcher in the Hall Center for the Humanities, Institute of Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH) and The Commons at the University of Kansas. She collaborates with faculty, students and library professionals leveraging digital technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production. Fernández earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies (Literature) with certifications in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies and Spanish as a Heritage Language from the University of Houston. Her research, teaching and community work is situated at the intersections of Latinx-Mexican Border Literature, Archives, Languages and Cultures, Intersectional and Transnational Feminisms, Immigration and Border Studies, and Digital Humanities. She is among the creators and principal coordinator of warmly received public and digital bilingual initiatives: Borderlands Archives Cartography, United Fronteras, GeoTestimonios Transfronterizxs, and collaborates as part of the core team of remarkable projects such as Torn Apart / Separados, Huellas Incómodas and others. Currently, she is working on a hybrid monograph based on her dissertation titled, “Genealogía Transfronteriza: (Re)interpretaciones literarias de identidades femeninas en Cd. Juárez-El Paso”.