Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

While US society has been confronting, coming to terms, and finding ways to overcome its long history of racism, it persists in its institutions, economy, culture, and in the everyday life. Despite the growing discourses of inclusion and diversity that aim to create spaces for historically marginalized members of society, there is much work to be done. What is also apparent is the persistence of racial attitudes, individual racism that seem to erupt in different forms and in different settings. This paper is about one institutional setting, a small liberal arts college in Framingham, MA where such eruptions took place in the form of hate speech targeting black and brown students. The study shares the story of a faculty-organized response to an incident of racism on campus called #NapkinsAgainstHate which was a collection of student reactions written on napkins. The story continues with a digital humanities project that made textual and sentiment analysis of the archive of digitized napkins, and the subsequent dissemination of the results in the campus and classroom to further the dialogue around racism. The paper showcases the novel ways in which art, digital humanities and collective action can come together for social justice on a university campus