Slides from January 31, 2018

1. Anger in Academic Twitter:
Sharing, Caring, and Getting
Mad Online
DR. KAREN GREGORY
CAMRI WORKSHOP
UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER
31/1/18
@CLAUDIAKINCAID
SAVA SAHELI SINGH: @SAVASAVASAVA

2. How many people here identify as “an academic”?
How many of you have a public, social media account?
How many of you feel pressure to maintain a professional
account?
How many of you maintain two accounts: one
professional, one private?
How many of you know your Institution’s academic
freedom policies, if they exist?

3. Digital Academics
“Scholars seem to take to social media because it pushes against the very rigidity and
constraints of traditional scholarly practices.” (Singh, 2016)
 Extending the classroom, new locations for teaching and learning
 New networks for collaboration, networked scholarship
 Extending access and encouraging participation
 Public and open data
 Greater “impact”: Extreme surges of excellence will occur!
 Private platforms, metrics, and data.
 Reputation economy > Digital brand?

4. An “Accelerated” University
 Insecurity, precarity, contingent work
 Rapid cycling or shortened timescales
 Blurring of boundaries between personal and work time/space
 Disaggregation of the ‘functions’ of academic work
 Continual monitoring and assessment of ‘performance’
 Entrepreneurialism & Hustling
 The transfer of academic management/organisation to digital systems.
Beetham, Helen. 2016. Employability and the Digital Future of Work. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Networked Learning,
edited by Susan Jane Cranmer, Nina Bonderup-Dohn, Maarten De Laat, Thomas Ryberg and Julie-Ann Sime

5. Extending the University: Digital Labour
 Free labor (Terranova 2000), Content creation, Circulation.
 Emotional Labor and Affective Labor (Hochschild 1983, Hardt 1999, Clough
et al, 2007)
 Hope Labor (Kuehn and Corrigan 2013)
 Branding and Microcelebrity (Marwick 2013, Marwick and boyd 2010, Senft
2008)
 Important here: mental health and well-being in the University (Hall 2014,
Bowles and Hall 2014, Mountz et al 2016)
 What of slowness? Of worker-slow downs? Or refusing?

6. “Troubles Talk” (Mewburn 2011)
”Doing a PhD comes with many pleasures and pitfalls. Under the yoke of the neoliberal
university, a lot of those pitfalls have been exacerbated, and their costs heightened. The
magnification of academic cultures of competition and self-marketing, the desperate
shortage of academic jobs, and increasing casualisation of academic workforces bear
down on our shoulders, squeezing and structuring the way that we think and feel in
daily academic life. There’s a lot to be angry and grieved about.” (Kalayji blog post,
2017)
 Bloch (2012): "Academia is an organization that generates strong feelings of shame,
bitterness, and anger," but the display of anger within academia is relatively taboo or a
"breach of feeling rules."

7. Academic Twitter
 Loose community of academics and scholars who use Twitter as
part of their academic identities, and recent scholarship.
 Profession and personal roles and identities blur.
 Academics ”most commonly write about academic work
conditions and policy contexts, share information, and provide
advice." (Mewburn and Thompson 2013)
 The platform encourages and rewards “hyper-personal”
communication (Stewart 2016)
 “Call-out culture”
 “Passionate tweeting” (Marwick & boyd 2010)
 “Tactical platform” (Stewart 2016)

8. Strengths of Twitter
 A space for academics to channel that anger towards finding strength in community: “When
faculty of color rightly fear that their experience with institutional racism is singular rather than
part of a broader pattern, social media provide a space to find affirmation and solidarity”
(Matthew 2016)
 Diversity, plurality of voices across academic hierarchies.
 Ability to bring to light otherwise untenable conversations, particularly about race, gender,
discrimination and labour issues in the university.
 Could be used more “tactically.”
 Organising space?

9. Anger & Backlash
 Passionate and political tweeting (Steven Salaita, George Ciccariello-Maher)
 Anti-racism (Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson, Johnny Williams, Keeanga-Yahmahtta Taylor)
 Context collapse on steroids, active troll/hate campaigns against academics. Cyber-harassment.
 As the classroom has been extended, protections for such discussions have not.
 The platform itself has not responded to concerns about hate speech, attacks, harassment, trolling.
 AAUP, 2017: “A New Reality? The Far Right's Use of Cyberharassment against Academics”
 Wingfield 2015: We should understand these cases as "canaries in the coalmine" of the weakening
protections for academic labour.

10. Collectivising the Anger: #iammargaretmary
 September of 2013: adjunct professor Margaret Mary Vojtko passed away from
complications resulting from cancer treatment and a heart attack. Margaret was
eighty-three years old and had taught at Duquesne University for twenty-five
years, but when she passed away she had no health benefits or retirement
benefits.
 Vojtko had been earning adjunct wages at Duquesne (between $3,000 and
$3,500 per course, a wage set after an effort by United Steelworkers to organize
adjunct faculty), working from contract to contract and with little job security. Just
prior to her death, Duquesne had failed to renew her contract.

11. Some conclusions
 Social media is both better and worse than we think for academics. Disciplines
matter, gender matters, race matters– a lot. Perhaps the defining feature of when
the backlash has occurred.
 Social media is potentially effective when used collectively and to resist the
personalization of the platform. Smarter and more strategic skills here, about how
to to be vocal, as well as about how to use silence (ie. Not amplifying trolls or
putting people in harm’s way.)
 Tressie McMillan Cottom’s advice: https://tressiemc.com/essays-2/academic-
outrage-when-the-culture-wars-go-digital/ “Institutions should value these skills
as much as they do the public notoriety."