Constellations of Community, Care, and Knowledge:A Collection of Vignettes from Pandemic Times

interdisciplinary program for emerging Digital Humanities (DH) scholars at McMaster University.Over the year of our residency, we found ourselves interrogating normative assumptions about and approaches to graduate training, mentorship, productivity, pedagogy, and public scholarship in DH.At the same time, our individual experiences of precarity and illness during a pandemic heightened the nefarious ways in which, in-and outside of academia, the colonial and the neoliberal abound.Our collective response to the pressures of both the pandemic and the university, however, centred on a deliberate and collaborative development of a community that privileged the networking of care and co-production of knowledge.The following six vignettes describe, honour, and extend our community practice as a means to reflect on the potentials of what we term intentional constellations of community in DH.By mobilizing a compilation of pieces rather than a unified authorial voice, we consider knowledge-making as a collaborative endeavour, in turn practicing relational methods to upend straight, colonial, and neoliberal modes of inquiry.Taken together, our interconnected vignettes enact a shared reflexive practice that we aim to centre in DH graduate training and mentorship.Established in 2012 as a collaboration between the University Library and the Faculty of Humanities, the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship (SCDS) offers technical and consultation services, workshops, and other learning opportunities that invite campus community members into digital scholarship approaches.As part of its annual programming, the SCDS hosts a graduate residency for students to conduct individual research projects within a physical space on campus.By being in the Centre space and attending Centre events, graduate residents receive an expansive graduate training experience with an emphasis on transdisciplinary learning communities in an effort to trouble an understanding of its staff as outsourced experts, thereby making space for multiple disciplinary competencies and lived experiences.We did not have this residency experience.Due to COVID-19 restrictions, our residency became completely remote.Through our computer screens and in our at-home offices, the remote residency necessitated a collective experiment with methodology and method.Without the boundaries of office cubicles, the residency became an opportunity to explore interdisciplinary dialogue, recursive learning experiences, and the development of "rhetorical, critical, and contextual mindsets" (Opel and Simeone 26) through communityoriented models of DH research.These relational, mediated interactions became so crucial to our residency experiences.And yet, we also noted how their affects and pleasures evaded or exceeded documentation and analysis.Thus, rather than offering an inventory of our collective residency activities, our vignettes call for and enact a deeper recognition of forms of DH graduate education that unfold relationally, affectively, and reflexively.

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