Thread by @adelinekoh

I ugly cried when I first read this email from my book publisher @EileenAJoy about Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, upon learning that my book with @dorothyk98 won the @AmerStudiesAssn #digitalhumanities book award: a thread 🧵

The recognition with the prize has been really healing. The toxicity of my field caused me a lot of mental health stress and started a debilitating depression.

Because I called out the racism of the digital humanities, senior white members of the field blackballed me and said I was toxic, warned junior colleagues no one would ever publish again if they worked with me. This was part of the reason why I left.

I never thought I would see recognition as most of my fields have written me out of the work since I’ve left academia. This includes my work on Chinese privilege in Singapore, for which keyboard warriors called my dean and emailed my department to get me fired.

The existence of this book is a gift of love from my academic BFF @dorothyk98, who took over the project and published it, @punctum_books for believing in the work and publishing it, and all the amazing contributors who stuck with the book despite my leaving academia

This book was my FU to the digital humanities by telling the senior members of the field that they could not control how the field was, because the field was composed of BIPOC bodies and intellect who also had their own histories and relationship to the humanities and technology.

I sought to do that by making sure people could see different paradigms for understanding this field outside of the singular origin story that its the leaders espoused.

Read the pdf of the book for free here because we published with an open access press so folks from the Global South can read it too. Support @punctum_books and their amazing mission by buying a copy. punctumbooks.com/titles/alterna…

#openaccess #leavingacademia #quittingacademia