ACH 2026 Keynote Bios

Dr. Laura Gonzales (she/ella) is a researcher, translator, educator, and community engaged practitioner. She is the author of Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication (Utah State University Press, 2022). Dr. Gonzales is the recipient of the 2023 Best Book Award by the Conference on Community Writing, the 2020 CCC Advancement of Knowledge Award, and the 2020 Technology Innovator Award. She is the editor-in-chief of Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric and the President of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.

Community, Participation, and Transborder Technology Design

In the age of growing technological surveillance and extraction, what are communities doing to sustain each other? This presentation will offer examples of how practitioners, scholars, and community members are collaborating to develop technologies, orientations, and policies to maintain humanistic values in technology design. Drawing on user experience and participatory design methods, Gonzales suggests supporting community knowledge, efforts, and desires should remain the central focus of digital humanities. The presentation will be primarily in English and Spanglish.

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Dr. Maria José Afanador-Llach (she, her) is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Since October 2025, she has served as Director of the Department of Digital Narratives in the School of Arts and Humanities. She is a historian whose work focuses on the transition from colony to republic in northern South America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, examined through the lenses of spatial practices, geographical imagination, and political economy.

Her research also addresses digital archives and the integration of digital history into higher education curricula in Latin America. Between 2016 and 2025, she served as editor of The Programming Historian en español and is a member of the Red Colombiana de Humanidades Digitales.

Practices and Values in Digital Humanities: Perspectives from Latin America in a Global Context

This keynote explores the practices and values that have shaped Digital Humanities across global and Latin American contexts. Framing values as ethical and epistemological commitments and practices as situated forms of collaboration and knowledge production, the talk examines tensions between instrumentalism and critical approaches, as well as issues of representation and inequality. Drawing on Latin American perspectives, it argues for a more critical, inclusive, and socially engaged digital humanities.