Risam will examine the challenges of creating visualizations of global migration. She argues that even the most well-intentioned data visualizations, created to promote empathy for forced migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, frequently undercut their own goals through project design and data. She will further discuss alternative approaches to visualizing migration that address such challenges to equity and justice, including her work on the team behind the immigrant detention data visualization project Torn Apart/Separados.

Roopika Risam is an Assistant Professor of English and the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education, and Interim Coordinator of the M.A. in English. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media. Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is co-editing two volumes: Intersectionality in Digital Humanities with Barbara Bordalejo for Arc Humanities Press and The Digital Black Atlantic with Kelly Baker Josephs for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). Along with Carol Stabile, she is co-director of Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective recovering archival writing by women in media activism. Currently, she is co-chair of the Association for Computers and the Humanities 2019 conference. Additionally, she recently received the Massachusetts Library Association's Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record.