Fred Moten and Stefano Harney famously asserted that, ‘it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.’ (Moten, 101) While they write about a potentially generalizable American university, I position their words against the academic landscape of Great Britain and Ireland. For the contemporary university in this context is not a place of sustained refuge; humanities departments are particularly under attack and risk of closures due to their perceived lack of profitability. The University of Lancaster announced in June 2025 that it would seek voluntary redundancies to fill a £30 million budget deficit. The University of Nottingham announced in November 2025 that it plans to shutter its modern language and music faculties. Ulster University stated in December 2025 that it would be freezing promotions for academic staff. These are only a few more recent examples and while this is in no way a new phenomenon, the acceleration and normalization of departmental closures throughout the UK and Ireland is not just alarming, but existential; universities cannot offer enlightenment, if they ever could, without critical humanities on offer.

It is possible in the digital humanities to see these closures as merely unfortunate, but ‘not our problem.’ Yet this paper argues that we cannot ignore the disenfranchisement of the humanities if we are to produce meaningful and informed digital scholarship and offers a few models for potential advocacy and solidarity in action. Solidarity is necessary today, not tomorrow. In Ruha Benjamin’s work on anti-racist technologies, she states that, ‘The point [of solidarity] is not simply to help others who have been less fortunate but to question the very idea of “fortunate”: Who defines it, distributes it, hoards it, and how was it obtained? Solidarity takes interdependence seriously.’ (Benjamin, 193-4)

At the moment, digital humanists appear ‘fortunate’; business is booming. There are at least thirty-eight masters courses on digital humanities, art, and heritage and the opportunities are expanding rather than contracting. The University of Cambridge began a DH PhD track in 2024 and the University of Glasgow started a DH MSt for 2026 admissions. Yet without the support and fidelity of humanities scholarship, this growth cannot be sustained.

This paper leverages ethnographic methods to explore the DH landscape in the UK and Ireland in order to map the connections and frictions between DH and the Humanities. First, the author mapped course offerings and departments since existing resources were outdated. Then, the author surveyed fifty digital humanists in the UK and Ireland to obtain qualitative data about how they perceived their work and affiliations, how their institutions perceived their work, and opportunities for growth and collaboration. The survey suggests an appetite for community organizing and championing that can help support the digital humanities and the humanities.

The survey results were supplemented by several participant interviews in addition to comparative interviews about the advocacy and collaboration work performed by the Royal Historical Society and the Software Sustainability Institute.

In this landscape, scholars have often not learned advocacy and organizing methods as part of their professionalization. Nor is there much time to dedicate to such efforts with teaching, research, and administrative loads. However, this is where advocacy organizations can be the most beneficial. This research is rooted in and through the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association (UK-IE DHA) and leverages the association as a nascent case study that is informed by the practices of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). Through the reports and advocacy efforts of these organizations, alongside interviews about their methods, I propose a potential roadmap for a new sort of DH advocacy which situates itself in and amongst the struggles facing the broader humanities disciplines.

Advocacy research is inherently iterative; methods are proposed, attempted, and subsequently applied to divergent contexts with varied success.