Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium

The Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) is a national consortium of digital ethnic studies practitioners led by Roopika Risam (Dartmouth College), with Jamila Moore Pewu (California State University, Fullerton), Toniesha Taylor (Texas Southern University), Keja Valens (Salem State University), Jennifer Musial (New Jersey City University), Caroline Wilkinson (New Jersey City University), and Sonya Donaldson (New Jersey City University).

From 2021-2025, DEFCon is funded by a $3,000,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Through events, professional development, networking opportunities, and a regranting program, we support the work of faculty, librarians, and students who are undertaking research and teaching at the intersections of digital humanities and ethnic studies fields.

DEFCon aims to:

• Develop and seed a network of social justice-engaged digital humanities practitioners in ethnic studies fields;
• Increase national capacity for digital humanities curriculum engaged with minoritized communities;
• Emphasize the importance of reciprocal and redistributive relationships with communities through digital humanities praxis (recognizing that “community” may be local, national, or international and includes communities within universities);
• Resist mono-directional power dynamics of knowledge production where the university is the arbiter of expertise and facilitate authentic community collaboration; and
• Build the next generation of scholars in social justice-engaged digital humanities by offering undergraduate students opportunities to better understand the field and begin developing their own expertise, drawing on their cultural wealth.