The promise of digital humanities pedagogy: Decolonizing a diverse classroom in Ghana

Abstract

Higher education operates in a quickly changing, progressively more globalized, cosmopolitan, and interconnected world (Bauman, 2000, Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press; Appiah, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co; Zuckerman, 2013, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company). At the same time, substantive inequalities between people and places mean that this connectivity and knowledge is unevenly spread (Hallberg Adu, 2014, What is the opposite of a knowledge society? A critical reflection from Ghana. In Amoah, L. (ed.), Impacts of the Knowledge Society on Economic and Social Growth in Africa. IGI Global). For our students, the future leaders of this unequal world, critical reasoning becomes a key skill, and perhaps especially so for students in the Global South. This paper argues that digital humanities (DH) can provide both a theoretical framework for decolonizing the academy and technological solutions to hurdles in this process. The paper argues that assignments, their theoretical underpinnings, and implementation are key to decolonizing higher education. It describes three accessible technology-driven assignments with DH pedagogy created for diverse classrooms at Ashesi University in Ghana and discusses their outcomes.