Critical Making-Focused Undergraduate Digital Humanities Programming: Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina University

This article 1 introduces the Digital Culture and Design (DCD) program at Coastal Carolina University (CCU), which is an undergraduate digital humanities (DH) program pedagogically centred around critical making.Drawing from such thinkers as Jentery Sayers, Natalie Loveless, and Stephanie Springgay, we understand critical making expansively to include not just physical fabrication, but also critical-creative work in digital, even virtual, environments with digital tools. 2 That is, in DCD we ground students' theoretical understandings of digital technology in hands-on, practical engagement with that technology-even when that engagement takes place in a virtual, web-based, or otherwise apparently "immaterial" environment.We do this in part because the notion that critical making means only or even primarily physical (i.e.non-virtual) fabrication threatens to re-ascribe immateriality to the digital. 3 In a practical sense, teaching critical making as both physical fabrication and asset creation for digital environments trains students to be critically minded about the materials they make, which are often in and for digital platforms.In a programmatic sense, we keep the making critical by striking a balance between DH theory and DH methods across our curriculum and in our classes.Here, we explain how we strike this balance in order to offer both a framework for building new DH programs and concrete curricular ideas for teaching DH classes.We begin by situating our program and its students within wider cultural frameworks, focusing on the ways DCD has been developed to best serve our particular student population.We then turn to a curricular overview, which is itself grounded in two case studies from our curriculum.The case studies provide an in-depth view of how we balance DH theory and methods through critical making pedagogy.We close by sketching the variety of professional paths for which the DCD program prepares its graduates. The Digital Culture and Design programCoastal Carolina University (CCU) is a comprehensive public regional liberal arts Research 3 university in Conway, South Carolina, close to Myrtle Beach. 4 CCU has an undergraduate student body of approximately 10,000, 30% of which are students of colour; over 55% of which are women or gender minorities ("Coastal Carolina University Undergraduate Demographic Report" 2); over 25% of which are first-generation students (DiMatteo); and 64% of which were on need-based financial aid (with 34% on Pell Grants, specifically) in Fall 2020 ("Coastal Carolina University Tuition & Financial Aid"). 5 While demographic data can only tell us so much, it does provide a quickly accessible snapshot of our student body, particularly with regard to how our students intersect with matrices of systemic privilege.Guided by feminist pedagogies of care, we articulate the contours of our students' positionality relative to identity factors including class, gender, and race in part to provide a sense of their collective pre-existing knowledge and experience within the field of DH when they enter our classroom. 6Generally speaking, our students will not enter the major with prior knowledge of coding; they will rarely have had opportunities to play with, and potentially break, technological or computational materials; and they are students for whom the stakes of failure-a core pedagogical value to critical making-are financially, socially, emotionally, and culturally very high.Bearing this in mind, and as