Dhakir Abdullah - Public Open Digital Scholarship Fellow

Hello, my name is Dhakir Abdullah, and I am a PhD candidate within the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. An Alabama native, I did my undergrad at the University of Montevallo where I majored in psychology and minored in philosophy. My Research Interests include, among other things, the concatenated significance of Herman C. Hudson, in his role as the Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affairs, and the Black Studies Movement at IU in the late 1960s and early 1970s in leading to the founding of the then department of Afro-American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

I count myself very fortunate of having had the esteemed privilege of serving as the 2022-2023 Public Open Digital Open Scholarship Fellow. In this capacity, working alongside Dr. Abegunde, Willa Tavernier, Ms. DeLoice Holliday, and Vanessa Elias, I helped to introduce and help students to understand how to incorporate different digital methods into their semester long projects for their A623 Contemporary Social Issues course. Working with this class was truly rewarding! I acquired a set of skills which I do not feel I could have gotten in any other way. However, I must say it was quite a challenge to support students who were working on very different projects with varying methods, a task with a higher level of complexity, in comparison to a similar scenario in which all students are working on more uniform projects. By virtue of the former, however, I am better prepared for similar challenges in the future. In order to be able to support this class in the best way possible, thorough my work with the Institute of Digital Arts and Humanities, I was introduced to and became familiar with various digital humanistic research and tools which will no doubt prove scholastically auspicious during my continuing academic pursuits.