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Ecologies and Institutions:
Rebuilding a Shape-shifting Caribbean with Digital Humanities

Schuyler Esprit
Create Caribbean Research Institute
November 17, 2017
UF Informatics Institute
CISE Bldg E251, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM

In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Marie, what do we gain or lose by continuing to frame higher education as a primary conduit for preserving Caribbean heritage and Caribbean sustainability? What new forms of academic collaboration can create or improve community accountability to the Caribbean people, whom this work should serve? How do we reshape the spaces for teaching and learning within and across Caribbean communities to facilitate academic and intellectual exploration as well as community and social justice?

The presentation will use the short history of Create Caribbean Research Institute’s mission and platform to illustrate the inherent paradoxes in developing Caribbean institutions. I focus on the ways that renaming and redefining digital humanities has been critical to establishing of a digital humanities center in the Caribbean. The term “institution” is loaded in the context of the region’s history but also, more directly, in the emergence of digital humanities as a field of study and work. In many ways, how we perceive the institutions to which we belong or the ones with which we want to collaborate.

This event is free and open to the public. Advance registration is requested.


About the Speaker

Schuyler Esprit is a scholar of Caribbean literature and cultural studies. She is Dean of Academic Affairs at Dominica State College as well as Founder and Director of Dominica State’s Create Caribbean Research Institute. She has pioneered Digital Humanities projects and digital technology training at the K-12 and College level in Dominica as well as collaboratively, linking classes at the Dominica State College and classes at colleges in the United States. She is now completing a book manuscript and its digital companion, both entitled Occasions for Caribbean Reading, an historical exploration of reading culture in the Caribbean.


“Ecologies and Institutions” is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Rothman Endowment. Co-sponsors include the Creative Campus Program, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Caribbean Arts and Humanities, the Science Fiction Working Group, and Imagining Climate Change, the George A. Smathers Libraries, the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, the Department of English, the Department of History, the UF Informatics Institute, France-Florida Research Institute, and the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department.