CBR: Intersectionality in Digital Humanities. Chapter 2: Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities, by Roopika Risam

Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam (editors). Intersectionality in Digital Humanities. Arc Humanities Press. 2019.

Chapter Reviewed: Chapter 2: Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities, by Roopika Risam.

Review by: Elisa Castro, Master Student, College of Liberal and Fine Arts, University of Texas at San Antonio.

Have decades of digital studies enhanced, altered, or muted the project to recover and represent more diverse histories of writers, thinkers, and artists positioned differently by gender, race, ethnicity, sexualities, social class, and/or global location?  (p. 14)

Roopika Risam’s “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities” persuasively argues that intersectionality is essential to the field, with her most significant contribution being her clarification of how the relationship between theory and praxis shapes whether digital humanities challenges or reproduces existing hierarchies. Situating her analysis within the U.S. culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Risam traces how debates over canon formation, representation, and difference shaped the conditions under which DH emerged. However, rather than simply explaining this genealogy, she uses it to expose a persistent tension: although DH often promotes itself as innovative and interdisciplinary, it has frequently reproduced a canon centered on white, male subjects. This tension becomes the foundation for her argument that technological innovation alone does not guarantee epistemological transformation. Instead, her reframing challenges the assumption that innovation is inherently progressive, prompting readers to reconsider the epistemic foundations and exclusions that continue to shape the field.

Risam’s engagement with intersectionality, rooted in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work, is key to this reframing. Crenshaw developed intersectionality to account for how overlapping systems of oppression shape the lived experiences of women of color, particularly in ways that single-axis frameworks cannot capture. Risam extends this insight into DH by arguing that intersectionality must operate not only as a lens of analysis but as a methodological tool embedded within digital practices themselves. This is where the relationship between theory and praxis becomes especially productive to readers: intersectionality is not simply something scholars “apply” to digital projects, but something that should structure how those projects are designed, built, and interpreted. By foregrounding this shift, Risam implicitly critiques forms of DH that treat theory as secondary to technical production, instead insisting that method is always already theoretical.

This argument becomes more concrete through Risam’s discussion of the “big-tent digital humanities,” drawn from Patrik Svensson. While this model is often invoked to celebrate inclusivity, Risam pushes it further by aligning it with intersectionality’s capacity to hold difference without resolving it. At the same time, Risam’s argument resonates with earlier critiques of theory’s institutionalization. Scholars like Barbara Christian warned that radical, marginalized forms of knowledge risk being absorbed and neutralized when formalized as “theory.” Risam acknowledges this risk within DH, particularly in relation to critiques like Adam Kirsch’s concern that DH reduces literature to data. However, her emphasis on intersectionality offers a way to navigate this tension. Rather than rejecting DH’s methodological innovations, she insists on making them accountable to marginalized epistemologies. This is where her contribution becomes especially valuable: she does not position intersectionality as a corrective from outside DH, but as a framework that can transform its internal logics.

Risam offers a range of “action items,” from “painless inventions,” like constructing thoughtful, intentional, intersectional metadata, to “painful interventions,” which involve deeper scrutiny of a project’s code, databases, and historical content. She highlights projects such as The Orlando Project as models, showing how gender can be treated as one dimension among many, including race, class, and sexuality, enabling more layered understandings of identity and “cultural formation.” At the same time, she recognizes that academic work inevitably requires definition and delimitation, noting that “every definition is necessarily exclusionary,” even as “disciplinarily legible projects” depend on such constraints. Still, she argues that digital humanists can intervene by making absences and exclusions visible within canonical structures. Drawing on Barbara Christian, she also emphasizes that “people of colour have always theorized,” situating intersectionality not as new, but as part of a longer, often unrecognized intellectual tradition embedded in earlier digital humanities work. 

This framing pushes the reader to rethink how “best practices” in digital humanities are never neutral; even technical decisions like metadata design carry political and epistemological consequences. It also brings forward the tension between scholarly legibility and critical openness, suggesting that work within institutions often requires negotiating this friction rather than resolving it. This tension becomes even more generative in her discussion of social media–based initiatives like #transformDH and postcolonial efforts such as #dhpoco. These projects extend DH beyond institutional boundaries, foregrounding community-centered, collaborative forms of knowledge production. In contrast to more traditional academic projects, they embody intersectionality as praxis by positioning participants as co-creators rather than subjects. Here, Risam most clearly demonstrates the transformative potential of DH: when intersectionality is fully integrated, it not only reshapes how knowledge is produced but also who gets to produce it.

Risam’s article offers a compelling and necessary call to action that is archetypal of what digital humanities opened up within academia in the first place: an ethical and methodological commitment to integration, innovation, and experimentation. She foregrounds how digital humanities, when practiced critically, has the potential to challenge entrenched structures of knowledge production rather than reproduce them. Notably, Risam frames this work not as optional or supplementary, but as a responsibility of digital humanists, urging the field to move beyond merely producing disciplinarily legible projects and toward actively interrogating and dismantling the canonical boundaries that sustain exclusion. In doing so, she reframes digital humanities as a site of intervention, accountability, and possibility. Rather than offering a definitive conclusion, I end this review where Risam does, with a question that prompts reflection on the foundations of our work as digital humanists: “And aren’t exploration and innovation at the very heart of digital humanities?”