The DSCC is pleased to announced that Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies Ariella Rotramel is joining the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program to work on two projects related to sex work.
As part of their research on casino cocktail waitressing in Atlantic City, Ariella will conduct an oral history project that will center women’s voices and place women’s knowledge in conversation with media and legal narratives about their work. Selected digitized interviews, photographs, and textual information presented on an open-access website will provide a deeper understanding of servers’ lives and their context, an important means of countering popular stereotypes.
A related second project will produce an open educational resource (OER) on sex work, which will be available for other educators and students to use as course content and will provide valuable information for sex workers and the general public.
In both projects, Ariella will engage student collaborators, integrating parts of the project into meaningful assignments for their courses on sex work and labor studies. Students in Ariella’s Sex Work course will have the opportunity to contribute directly to the Sex Work OER, embodying the principles of open pedagogy.
A past participant in our Technology Fellows Program, Ariella has long been committed to the intentional use of technology in their pedagogy and scholarship, wielding digital tools and methodologies both to enhance teaching and learning and to foster equitable access to information within and beyond academia.
You can hear about some of Ariella’s past work integrating technology into their pedagogy in a virtual workshop this Thursday, March 25 from 1-2:30pm. “Opening Up Knowledge: Wikipedia as a Site of Collaboration and Learning” is part of Trinity College’s Art + Feminism CT series of events for Women’s History Month. Read some of Ariella’s writing on the benefits of teaching with Wikipedia here.
We are so excited to work with Ariella on these digital scholarship projects this year!
For more information about the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, please reach out to Lyndsay Bratton (lbratton@conncoll.edu).