2025-2026 Praxis Program Charter

Program

Creating work

We aspire to create work that sparks intellectual curiosity-both within our own thinking and for those who encounter our projects. This means balancing professional rigor with creative exploration and pushing beyond conventional approaches to ask questions that matter. We want to create work that challenges assumptions, opens new perspectives, and invites deeper engagement with the materials and methods we’re exploring together.

Embracing challenge

We embrace intellectual discomfort as a sign of growth. The best learning happens at the edges of our competence, where we’re stretched just beyond what feels easy. We commit to pursuing work that productively frustrates us-projects that require us to wrestle with new tools, unfamiliar concepts, or complex problems. We embrace challenges that energize rather than deplete, pushing us toward breakthroughs we couldn’t have anticipated.

Making room

We recognize that experimentation requires safety. Our cohort should be a space where failure is not just tolerated but expected as part of the creative process. Mistakes reveal new pathways, teach us about our methods, and remind us that digital humanities is fundamentally about exploration. We commit to making room for each other through trial and error, celebrating productive failures as much as polished successes.

Following curiosity

We value curiosity-driven inquiry alongside goal-oriented work. Not every exploration needs to lead to a deliverable or fit neatly into a research agenda. We encourage each other to follow threads of interest, to tinker with tools or questions simply because they fascinate us. We recognize that following curiosity often yields unexpected insights and keeps our work vital and meaningful.

Listening deeply

We commit to generous listening across our different disciplines and perspectives. This means engaging with each other’s ideas-asking questions, offering responses, and building on one another’s thinking. Our range of backgrounds is one of our greatest strengths, especially if we listen deeply for every voice and genuinely attend to what each person brings to our collective work.

Group Health/Wellbeing

Community

We will foster a sincere sense of community by respecting each member’s differences in experiences, needs, and opinions, while encouraging dialogue and discussion. Ours will be an approach of multiplicity: diversity enriches our participation in the program. We will support each other’s learning and be patient when life gets in the way of meeting expectations about work and deadlines.

Conflict & Resolution

When conflict arises, we will work to address it before misunderstandings or grievances are worsened by time. Expectations, obstacles or difficulties, and ability to commit to events and deadlines will be clearly and honestly communicated. For the simple problems that need to be addressed one-on-one Whatsapp messages will be the default place of communication. For more complex conversation when possible we will talk in person.We will work towards democratic decision-making, compromise, and alignment. When necessary, we will ask for the help of a mediator external to the issue.

Accountability

Clear, prompt, and honest communication about rising issues or inability to meet group expectations will be met with kindness and patience by the group. The Whatsapp group serves for prompt and important communication with the cohort and Slack for wider problems to which the staff should be alerted as well. We will be realistic about group work priorities and offer solutions when appropriate. We will always put people first, before work.

Relationship with Staff and Peers

We are not only each other’s colleagues, but also colleagues of the Scholars’ Lab Staff. We mutually value and respect them as part of our learning community. We welcome difficult feelings and conversations, without the need to perform positivity when the latter is inappropriate. We share the commitment to make communication about events, expectations, and priorities straightforward and efficient.

Goals and Aspirations

We view Praxis as a space for intentional growth. Our aspirations are rooted in the belief that the best work emerges from the foundations of curiosity and solidarity. We aim to challenge ourselves and each other for the sake of knowledge and for team building. By this, we mean moving beyond our individual intellectual pursuits to build a collective practice of teamwork, reflection, and public scholarship. To that end, we commit to the following goals:

Practice of Teamwork

While our PhD journeys are often by default and reward solitary exploration, we commit to the transformative practice of collective creation. For us, this means moving beyond simple collaboration to a dynamic of genuine reciprocity, where we seek to practice mutual support, sharing burdens and enjoying shared explorations. It also means being proactive, anticipating the needs of the project and our teammates, and communicating with honesty and kindness.

Intellectual Pursuit

Our intellectual pursuit is twofold: to develop tangible skills in Digital Humanities and to weave together the distinct threads of our disciplinary expertise. We aspire to create something that requires each of us’s input: a project that synthesizes our respective expertise in Art History, English, and Sociology into a more complex whole. We will share our skills generously to build a shared intellectual foundation for our work.

Commitment to Epistemological Reflection

We recognize that all knowledge is situated. Therefore, we commit to an ongoing practice of epistemological reflection, both individually and as a group. We will consistently interrogate our own positionalities and the ways they shape our perspectives and our work. We will ask critical questions: Whose knowledge is being centered here? Which voices are absent? How do the tools and methods we use reflect or challenge dominant epistemologies, both globally and locally?

Responsibilities as Public Scholars

We understand that our work does not exist in a vacuum. We commit to practicing a form of public scholarship grounded in responsibilities and relations. This means recognizing that our project and our process are in conversation with multiple communities, including the University of Virginia, the broader DH community, and the local communities of Charlottesville.

Practices

We will break each project into manageable milestones and assign them individually with clear deadlines. However, we will respect and acknowledge members’ inability to meet up when issues come up. The responsibility of coordinating this will rotate among group members as needed.

We will prioritize our wellness. No one is expected to attend a meeting or complete tasks at the expense of their health or stability.

We will endeavor to meet on a selected day in the last week of every month outside of our regular praxis space to check in and reflect on our progress. We will use this monthly forum to celebrate our accomplishments ( personal & professional) by sharing them with one another.

We agree to speak with kindness and curiosity. Encouragement is the default - critique is invited, not imposed.

We commit to maintaining respectful and timely communication within our group. This includes actively participating in our WhatsApp group chat, responding to messages promptly, and staying engaged with ongoing conversations and updates.

To support our collaboration, we will use a shared Google Doc to organize and distribute essential materials such as notes, meeting summaries, and schedules. In addition, we will use Google Doc Calendar to share commitments, deadlines, and event reminders, ensuring that everyone stays aligned and informed.

A Place of Thanks

In this charter, we make it part of our constant to recognize not only each other and the sheer awesomeness that we are, but also the people around us, making this experience unlike any other. Community should never be just a word thrown around and with no meaning. So with that, a continuing place of gratitude.

To Ronda, who is the safe presence in the room, ready to ask about our day, and a constant place of support.

To Brandon, who provides us with positive and supportive feedback and comments on our work. And an odd morning joy even at 9 in the morning with students wholly unready to be greeted with a smile and Good Morning.

To Amanda, who always enters the room with a contagious level of excitement and care for the work.

To Shane, who has an unlimited amount of patience for our questions, interruptions, and, at times, a complete lack of understanding.

To Jeremy, who allows us to completely derail a conversation so we can go down a number of rabbit holes and feed into our chaos quite perfectly.

And lastly, to those who have presented their research: thank you to Ammon, Chris, Drew, and Lisa Blackmore, not just for saying this is what I do, but for opening their doors and saying, if you ever have any questions or are interested, come chat.