4-5 December 2025
Northeastern University
Boston, MA

Deadline for proposals: June 30, 2025
Conference website: The Caribbean Digital

Beginning in 2014, The Caribbean Digital has sought to create a generative, multidisciplinary space within which to engage critically with the digital as practice and as a historicized societal phenomenon, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that ever more intensely reconfigure the social and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. In the twelfth iteration of this gathering, we are thrilled to continue these conversations via collaboration with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, the Africana Studies Program, and the NULab for Humanities and Computational Social Science at Northeastern University.

The continued need for rigorous and ethical engagement with the digital “revolution” is especially immediate among the people of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Information technology remains a significant way people connect and frame pressing social problems and political aspirations. Moreover, the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as a dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it fundamentally challenges the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others and elsewhere in relentless relation. Yet while we celebrate these opportunities for connectedness, we must ensure that the digital realm undermines and confronts rather than re-inscribes forms of silencing and exclusion in the Caribbean.

Following conversations that animated past events, we are looking forward in this twelfth  public forum to continuing our critical engagement with presentations that might evoke any of the following topics and the ways they might intersect with each other:

• Gendered and class dimensions of the digital in the Caribbean
• The connection between digital technologies and practices of the Caribbean “folk”
• World-building – Reimagining through and as the digital
• Citizenship, mobility, migration, and the digital
• Material, audio, and visual culture connected to the digital
• 3-D imaging and the digital
• Considering the politics and ethics of AI in/and the Caribbean
• Digital pedagogies, curriculum, and/or classroom or community education activities
• Archives in and about the Caribbean
• Languages as technology and structures of the digital
• The relationship between the aesthetics of absence and the digital
• Minimal computing as a form of digital resistance
• Digital counter-publics/counter-narratives
• Digital mapping and questions of place, space, and belonging
• Collaborative/community-engaged digital projects
• Relationships between digital and physical resistance
• Digital access and the aesthetics/politics of digital ownership
• Digital possibilities and imaginaries
• Digital knowledge-making and decolonial epistemologies

Both traditional conference papers and multimedia presentations on these or related topics are welcome. We also welcome virtual synchronous participation by presenters who cannot travel to Boston to attend the event. Participants from this forum will be encouraged to submit their work to archipelagos, an interactive, born-digital, print-possible, peer-reviewed publication.

The 2025 conference is being held in the loving memory of Dr. Ángel David Nieves (1971 – 2023). At the time of his passing, Dr. Nieves was Dean’s Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, Professor of Africana Studies and History, and Director of the Humanities Center at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Nieves also held positions at Hamilton College, Yale University, San Diego State University, and many other institutions. Dr. Nieves’s vivacious presence, teaching, and work left a lasting impression on everyone. His books, An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South (2018) and ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. (edited with Leslie Alexander, 2008) were significant explorations into the labors done by of Black feminists that served to eventually uplift all others. Like his subjects of study, Nieves, too, believed that all people deserve a good education and working conditions to lead a good life. His investments in social justice were total and all-encompassing. As a proud, queer, Brown man whose roots were in Puerto Rico, he was especially dedicated to supporting like-minded scholars such as those associated with The Caribbean Digital. The conference especially welcomes submissions that engage with the spirit and content of Dr. Nieves’ foundational work.

We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words in length. Abstracts should include name, academic affiliation, contact information, and short bios. Please submit using this form (requires Google sign-in):https://forms.gle/1iB8eZ8F4AhW4a4t8  by 30 June 2025. Successful applicants will be notified by 30 August 2025. Travel and accommodations for conference presenters will be covered.