The Dangers of Public Scholarship
Apr. 12th, 2023 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI was invited to participate in a roundtable panel on public scholarship at this year's Comics Studies Society Conference. I opened a blank document to list some talking points, and suddenly a thousand words of intense negativity appeared. This is what I wrote...
When speaking about the dangers of public scholarship, it’s of course necessary to put the issue of harassment front and center. Being harassed online is not going to happen to everyone, thankfully, but there are two factors that make it more likely.
First, you’re more likely to encounter harassment if you’re speaking from a marginalized position about topics that pertain to identity, such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, disability, and so on. Given how algorithm-driven social media platforms encourage “engagement” by curating users’ feeds to provoke emotional reactions, it’s fair to say that this sort of harassment is built into the system by design.
Second, you’re more likely to become a target for harassment if you occupy a position in which you’re visible but you don’t have clout. This is especially a danger for academics, many of whom may have hundreds of followers but very rarely have thousands. Your relative visibility will make it possible for hate groups to find you and identify you as a target, while your lack of clout will make it easy for them to attack you, as they correctly asses that you don’t have the resources to defend yourself.
Online harassment is never pleasant, but at least it’s possible to block people or simply turn off your computer. I think the more insidious dangers of engaging in public scholarship stem from its lack of compensation, as well as a lack of understanding on the part of senior scholars.
It’s worth saying that the work you do online is real work, and it goes without saying that you don’t get paid for it. As academics, I think a lot of us have been encouraged to believe that we shouldn’t be compensated for our labor. Because the drive to invest our time and energy into public scholarship is motivated by noble intentions, it tends to fall into the same mentality of “performing a service to a field.” This mentality is dangerous, as the vast majority of people involved in academia are not earning a living wage to begin with.
I also want to be honest and say that I have never, in more than ten years of engaging in public scholarship, been scouted or otherwise offered any sort of paid opportunity. When people from outside academia do contact me, they generally want me to do work for them for free. For me at least, the social media fantasy of being discovered by a sympathetic editor who wants to publish my work in a paying venue has never materialized, even when I was hustling and networking my eager young heart out.
Investing your time and energy into public scholarship is also dangerous because it often doesn’t “count” as “real” scholarship according to university career advancement metrics, nor does it help you create an alternative career path. It is always morally correct to share your research, of course, but it’s important to acknowledge that public scholarship is not a safety net for a precarious academic career. In fact, being active online may even erode the stability of your career.
For career academics, there’s a real danger in being misunderstood by senior colleagues, many of whom still regard any work shared outside of formal academic channels as suspect. This distrust makes it very easy for bad actors within academia to turn personal grudges into career-damaging ammunition. Given how opaque the system of peer review can be, you may never know the identity of the person who wrote a scathingly negative review of your article, or your fellowship application, or your tenure file. It’s entirely likely that you may never have even met this person at all.
This danger is an acute concern for people in marginalized positions. From the outside, it may sometimes seem that academia privileges marginality; but, as highly respected scholars such as Sarah Ahmed have argued at length, this celebration of diversity is little more than window dressing. When it comes to peer review, tenure review, and grant review committees, anonymity only protects the entrenched elite who actively stymie the careers of junior scholars. For many older scholars especially, public engagement through venues such as online publications and fan convention panels is perceived as a sign that your scholarship is not serious, or that your work is unworthy of being supported by university resources.
And again, this is an issue of being visible without having the clout to defend yourself. You can be the friendliest, kindest, and most supportive colleague in the world, and it makes no difference. I think everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: academia is extremely competitive, and the tenure system provides a haven for a truly chilling number of bigots and predators. Precisely because public scholarship is so visible, it’s all the more likely to be misinterpreted or attacked by someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
In my case, I feel like I’ve had to work twice as hard simply because, despite an impressive CV and the support of many sympathetic colleagues, my work has been rejected with alarming frequency. This came to a head when I was denied tenure at the beginning of the pandemic. As you might imagine, this put me in a difficult position, all because a tiny minority of senior colleagues didn’t like it that a relatively young nonbinary person was talking about gender and media online. To me, the parallels between the random harassment I’ve experienced on social media and the random harassment I’ve received from senior colleagues are crystal clear.
This is why I want to emphasize that the related dangers of not being compensated for your work and having your work misunderstood by senior scholars are very real, especially if you’re speaking and creating from the margins.
...but of course I would never say any of that out loud. I think what I'm going to do instead is be very quiet, smile a lot, and agree with other people. If I say anything, I think it might be good to emphasize that the work involved in "public scholarship" might be more appropriately directed toward networking and finding paying job opportunities outside of academia.
When speaking about the dangers of public scholarship, it’s of course necessary to put the issue of harassment front and center. Being harassed online is not going to happen to everyone, thankfully, but there are two factors that make it more likely.
First, you’re more likely to encounter harassment if you’re speaking from a marginalized position about topics that pertain to identity, such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, disability, and so on. Given how algorithm-driven social media platforms encourage “engagement” by curating users’ feeds to provoke emotional reactions, it’s fair to say that this sort of harassment is built into the system by design.
Second, you’re more likely to become a target for harassment if you occupy a position in which you’re visible but you don’t have clout. This is especially a danger for academics, many of whom may have hundreds of followers but very rarely have thousands. Your relative visibility will make it possible for hate groups to find you and identify you as a target, while your lack of clout will make it easy for them to attack you, as they correctly asses that you don’t have the resources to defend yourself.
Online harassment is never pleasant, but at least it’s possible to block people or simply turn off your computer. I think the more insidious dangers of engaging in public scholarship stem from its lack of compensation, as well as a lack of understanding on the part of senior scholars.
It’s worth saying that the work you do online is real work, and it goes without saying that you don’t get paid for it. As academics, I think a lot of us have been encouraged to believe that we shouldn’t be compensated for our labor. Because the drive to invest our time and energy into public scholarship is motivated by noble intentions, it tends to fall into the same mentality of “performing a service to a field.” This mentality is dangerous, as the vast majority of people involved in academia are not earning a living wage to begin with.
I also want to be honest and say that I have never, in more than ten years of engaging in public scholarship, been scouted or otherwise offered any sort of paid opportunity. When people from outside academia do contact me, they generally want me to do work for them for free. For me at least, the social media fantasy of being discovered by a sympathetic editor who wants to publish my work in a paying venue has never materialized, even when I was hustling and networking my eager young heart out.
Investing your time and energy into public scholarship is also dangerous because it often doesn’t “count” as “real” scholarship according to university career advancement metrics, nor does it help you create an alternative career path. It is always morally correct to share your research, of course, but it’s important to acknowledge that public scholarship is not a safety net for a precarious academic career. In fact, being active online may even erode the stability of your career.
For career academics, there’s a real danger in being misunderstood by senior colleagues, many of whom still regard any work shared outside of formal academic channels as suspect. This distrust makes it very easy for bad actors within academia to turn personal grudges into career-damaging ammunition. Given how opaque the system of peer review can be, you may never know the identity of the person who wrote a scathingly negative review of your article, or your fellowship application, or your tenure file. It’s entirely likely that you may never have even met this person at all.
This danger is an acute concern for people in marginalized positions. From the outside, it may sometimes seem that academia privileges marginality; but, as highly respected scholars such as Sarah Ahmed have argued at length, this celebration of diversity is little more than window dressing. When it comes to peer review, tenure review, and grant review committees, anonymity only protects the entrenched elite who actively stymie the careers of junior scholars. For many older scholars especially, public engagement through venues such as online publications and fan convention panels is perceived as a sign that your scholarship is not serious, or that your work is unworthy of being supported by university resources.
And again, this is an issue of being visible without having the clout to defend yourself. You can be the friendliest, kindest, and most supportive colleague in the world, and it makes no difference. I think everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: academia is extremely competitive, and the tenure system provides a haven for a truly chilling number of bigots and predators. Precisely because public scholarship is so visible, it’s all the more likely to be misinterpreted or attacked by someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
In my case, I feel like I’ve had to work twice as hard simply because, despite an impressive CV and the support of many sympathetic colleagues, my work has been rejected with alarming frequency. This came to a head when I was denied tenure at the beginning of the pandemic. As you might imagine, this put me in a difficult position, all because a tiny minority of senior colleagues didn’t like it that a relatively young nonbinary person was talking about gender and media online. To me, the parallels between the random harassment I’ve experienced on social media and the random harassment I’ve received from senior colleagues are crystal clear.
This is why I want to emphasize that the related dangers of not being compensated for your work and having your work misunderstood by senior scholars are very real, especially if you’re speaking and creating from the margins.
...but of course I would never say any of that out loud. I think what I'm going to do instead is be very quiet, smile a lot, and agree with other people. If I say anything, I think it might be good to emphasize that the work involved in "public scholarship" might be more appropriately directed toward networking and finding paying job opportunities outside of academia.
