"Digital Humanities and the Radical Act of Humanizing"

Digital Storytelling Colloquium presentation by Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Recording available on YouTube

Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History, Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program and  Associate Professor. She has spent her life listening to and now documenting the lives of people who live on la frontera. Professor Leyva specializes in border history, public history, and Chicana history. She is co-founder of Museo Urbano, a museum of the streets, that highlights fronterizo history by taking it where people are-- from museums to the actual streets of El Paso. She came to academia after a decade of social work in the Black and Brown communities of east Austin, with a desire to make academia and especially history relevant and useful to people. Her work has been recognized nationally. She is the recipient of the National Council on Public History "Best Public History Project Award" and the American Historical Association Herbert Feis Award that recognizes "distinguished contributions to public history." She has also received several faculty awards from UTEP and the College of Liberal Arts. In 2014, the government of Brazil invited her to conduct community dialogue training with new and emerging historical sites from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She is currently interviewing community members who grew up or currently live in El Paso's southside barrios as well as former Braceros. She is the oral historian for the "Voices from the Border" series. She is also completing a manuscript on interpreting Latinx history in museums and historic sites, based on oral histories conducted with museum and historic sites professionals. She has curated, and co-curated, many museums exhibits with her students. Dr. Leyva has published numerous articles on Chicana, lesbian and border history. In addition, she has published poetry in Ixhua, La Voz de Esperanza, and Cantos al Sexto Sol.​ 

​Read her blog: Fierce Fronteriza.

The IDRH Digital Storytelling Colloquium is a series of virtual events focused on the ethics, politics, and techniques of digital storytelling. Stretched over the length of the academic year, the events will feature exemplary projects from across the world and across the KU campus, model digital storytelling practices, and introduce participants to a range of digital storytelling tools. Some meetings will be webinar-style presentations; others will be Zoom-style collaborative meetings. Across all events, the vision of the colloquium is to build a community of inquiry and an incubator for ideas.