Project Director: Alix Johnson, International Studies
Part of our 2023/2024 DLA Faculty Fellows Cohort

This coming Spring as I teach my course Infrastructure and Inequality (INTL 294) for a second time, my aim is to grow my own DLA skills while supporting my students in creating engaging and accessible representations of their research. The first iteration of the course (taught Spring 2023) asked students to produce a piece of activist media related to a contemporary infrastructural conflict, and I posted the results of their work on a simple Google site (https://sites.google.com/macalester.edu/infra2023/home). While this project was successful in helping students practice research communication, and useful for our community partners in the Tamarack Water Alliance, next year I would like to produce a more ambitious and cohesive digital product in the form of a “Field Guide”: a visually engaging and ideally interactive analysis of an infrastructural system that is both local to the Twin Cities and revealing of broader international relationships. My goals for the project are threefold: first, I want my students to explore contemporary DLA work, getting a sense for the possibilities and potentials of scholarly communication that go beyond traditional academic outputs. Second, by attempting to produce an engaging, public-facing analysis, I want students to actively grapple with questions of translation, accessibility, and the politics of representation. Third, I want to expand my own understanding of available DLA tools, and skills in using them in teaching as well as my own research.