On February 18, 2021, Doc Chatters learned about the origins and evolution of the Hashtag Syllabus movement and the expansive digital resources it has engendered. 

A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs a NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Sixteen, the Schomburg Center's Zakiya Collier and Dr. Yarimar Bonilla of Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center explored Schomburg's #Syllabi web archive collection and the Puerto Rico Syllabus, and discussed erasure and underrepresentation in academia, digital protest, and ways of deploying Hashtag Syllabi in the classroom.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Sixteen: Primary Sources

Zakiya and Yarimar discussed web-based work and collections, including:

The Schomburg Center’s Web Archives. You can also learn more about the Schomburg Center’s web archives.

The Schomburg Center’s #Syllabus Web Archive Collection,

Web-archived versions of Puerto Rico Syllabus, archived by the Schomburg Center.

Live version of Puerto Rico Syllabus.

Episode Sixteen: Readings and Resources

Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2013). 

Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). 

Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 43: 1(February 2015, 4-17.

Marcia Chatelain, “How to Teach Kids About What's Happening in Ferguson,” The Atlantic, August 25, 2014.

Meredith D. Clark, “Remaking the #Syllabus: Crowdsourcing Resistance Praxis as Critical Public Pedagogy,” Communication, Culture and Critique, 13: 2(June 2020),222–241.

Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021). 

Lisa A. Monroe, “Making the American Syllabus: Hashtag Syllabi in Historical Perspective,” Black Perspectives, October 24, 2016. 

Ed Summers “A Look at #FergusonSyllabus,” Marilyn Institute for Technology in the Humanities blog, January 19, 2015.

Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, eds. Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). 

Sherri Williams, “The Black Digital Syllabus Movement: The Fusion of Academia, Activism and Arts” Howard Journal of Communications 31: 5(2020), 493-508.

Join the Doc Chat Conversation

Doc Chat episodes take place on Zoom every Thursday at 3:30 PM.  Over the next several months, we are covering a range of topics: visual culture in 19th-century Mexico, the origins of wildlife protection in the US, Zine-making,  the history of New York City tenements, Russian propaganda posters, and much more.

Check out upcoming episodes on NYPL's calendar,  and make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter, which will include links to register. A video of each episode will be posted on the Research Channel of the NYPL blog shortly after the program. There you can also explore videos and resources for past episodes. See you at the next Doc Chat!