Salty Tea on Public Scholarship
Jul. 26th, 2023 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI was invited to participate in a roundtable on "public scholarship" later this week, and I have some thoughts.
What does public scholarship mean to you? Share some of the principles that guide your work and some of your latest projects.
When I was growing up in the Deep South, I didn’t have a lot of cultural resources. I also didn’t have any money, so a lot of established paths in academia felt closed to me. The feeling of being culturally landlocked left a strong impression, so I considered it part of my life’s work to make accurate and interesting and useful information available to people in that situation, by which I mean people who are curious and intelligent but aren’t in a position to take a college class about, say, contemporary Japanese fiction.
I guess I want people to know that you don’t have to choose between Barbie and Oppenheimer, and that the world is so much wider and stranger and more complicated and beautiful. So, when I share my work online and in public lectures, what I’m trying to convey is the joy of living in a world filled with a diversity of people and languages and cultures.
Unfortunately, the strong presence of public scholarship on my CV led to me being denied tenure during the pandemic, and my “latest project” is to survive while slowly getting back on my feet.
How has public scholarship changed the way you write, research, and teach both within and beyond the university?
My work on gender, culture, comics, and gaming started to attract attention in 2013, when the alt-right movement that’s now known as Gamergate was coalescing into something serious. On top of that, I got my first real job teaching classes about comics and video games at George Mason University, whose massive competitive gaming community was a meatspace incubator for Gamergate ideology. As you might imagine, the harassment I suffered was intense. I even had my own page on Encyclopedia Dramatica, which was a wiki created by 4chan to catalogue targets of harassment.
Ironically, I could handle 4chan, but what I couldn’t handle was the harassment I got from the “antifandom” kids on Tumblr that started as soon as the Gamergate nonsense died down. I always did my best to stay in my lane while not going out of my way to provoke anyone, but that didn’t matter. Being harassed online almost every week for years on end broke me, and now I don’t say anything at all.
So, as a result of my public scholarship, “gender and comics” is a door that’s permanently closed for me, both within and beyond the university.
How has your academic training and background informed your public scholarship and vice versa?
A lot of my academic training involved doing deep dives into cultural theory, and the fact that I specialized in East Asian Studies meant that I was reading a lot gender theory and postcolonial theory that not only was coming from a non-Western perspective, but was also never meant for a Western audience or translated into English. What I found when I started doing public scholarship is that every single bit of this alienated people.
Many people in what might be called “the general public” find cultural theory alienating to begin with, and even people who are receptive to those sorts of ideas don’t find any cultural capital in the ideas of people who aren’t writing in English. So I really had to learn how to navigate this pushback and present my work in a way that’s accessible but not condescending. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’ve always been successful, and I still continue to get intense pushback. Still, if nothing else, I think this challenge made me a much better teacher and an infinitely better writer.
How do you think public scholarship might promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within comics studies and/or carve out a space for marginalized scholars and perspectives?
I’m really nervous about saying this, because this is going against what many people in academia believe, but I don’t think unpaid labor is ever going to promote anything except inequality.
The problem with the vast majority of work we consider to be “public scholarship” is that it isn’t compensated. Nobody pays you to be on Twitter, and nobody pays you to contribute to the sort of websites that accept writing in the genre of “public scholarship.” Unless you’re a superstar with connections in high places and an incredible amount of luck, you’re not going to make money from a Patreon for your podcast or YouTube channel. Meanwhile, nobody’s going to pay an academic to join a panel or be a guest on a video or podcast – that sort of money is reserved for people with “talent,” like performers, voice actors, popular artists, influencers, and so on.
What I’ve seen during the past ten years are young and brilliant and ambitious scholars from marginalized positions doing amazing public scholarship and then dropping out of academia entirely. They don’t get a job in academia, and then they don’t get a job outside of academia, and then they just can’t afford to keep doing work for free. This happens all the time, but it's so quiet and insidious that most people never see it. Meanwhile, the people who keep their heads down and follow the rules are given actual money in terms of grants, fellowships, postdocs, and tenure-track jobs.
So I’d argue that, in practice, a drive toward unpaid and uncompensated labor in the form of “public scholarship” is actually just another tool of discrimination against marginalized people who justifiably feel frustrated by formal academic structures.
Finally, who do you hope your scholarship speaks to? Who do you imagine as the “public”? And work do you want your public scholarship to do in the world?
What I’ve learned from the past ten years of engaging with and promoting public scholarship is that you have very little control over who “the public” is.
When I first started writing blogs and publishing popular articles and being active on Twitter, what I wanted was for my aspirational labor to serve as a gateway to a paid position as a writer. Unfortunately, no matter the quantity or quality of the public scholarship I produced, the work itself never became a stand-in for the personal connections and references you need to break into journalism or the publishing industry. In other words, the modest platform I created for myself never became a launchpad for rising to an actually meaningful platform. Instead, I got DM after DM after DM telling me to kill myself because I said that, for example, Sailor Moon has been influential to many American comics creators.
So I think, especially if you’re writing and doing research from a nonwhite or a non-Western perspective, you need to be really careful about the platform you choose for your public scholarship. In many cases, this means staying out of white-dominated “indie spaces,” especially spaces associated with fandom cultures. Instead, I think it’s important to do the work necessary to aim higher. It’s going to be tough to make connections outside of academia and be rejected and feel marginalized, but aiming for respected venues that compensate contributors will pay off in the long run – literally.
TLDR: It's not "promoting the work of people from marginalized positions" to expect us to perform uncompensated labor while exposing ourselves to harassment, and I think younger scholars need to be more realistic and judicious about what "public scholarship" actually means.
...but of course I won't actually say any of that. What I'll do instead is be gracious and polite while supporting the other panelists and speaking as little as possible.
What does public scholarship mean to you? Share some of the principles that guide your work and some of your latest projects.
When I was growing up in the Deep South, I didn’t have a lot of cultural resources. I also didn’t have any money, so a lot of established paths in academia felt closed to me. The feeling of being culturally landlocked left a strong impression, so I considered it part of my life’s work to make accurate and interesting and useful information available to people in that situation, by which I mean people who are curious and intelligent but aren’t in a position to take a college class about, say, contemporary Japanese fiction.
I guess I want people to know that you don’t have to choose between Barbie and Oppenheimer, and that the world is so much wider and stranger and more complicated and beautiful. So, when I share my work online and in public lectures, what I’m trying to convey is the joy of living in a world filled with a diversity of people and languages and cultures.
Unfortunately, the strong presence of public scholarship on my CV led to me being denied tenure during the pandemic, and my “latest project” is to survive while slowly getting back on my feet.
How has public scholarship changed the way you write, research, and teach both within and beyond the university?
My work on gender, culture, comics, and gaming started to attract attention in 2013, when the alt-right movement that’s now known as Gamergate was coalescing into something serious. On top of that, I got my first real job teaching classes about comics and video games at George Mason University, whose massive competitive gaming community was a meatspace incubator for Gamergate ideology. As you might imagine, the harassment I suffered was intense. I even had my own page on Encyclopedia Dramatica, which was a wiki created by 4chan to catalogue targets of harassment.
Ironically, I could handle 4chan, but what I couldn’t handle was the harassment I got from the “antifandom” kids on Tumblr that started as soon as the Gamergate nonsense died down. I always did my best to stay in my lane while not going out of my way to provoke anyone, but that didn’t matter. Being harassed online almost every week for years on end broke me, and now I don’t say anything at all.
So, as a result of my public scholarship, “gender and comics” is a door that’s permanently closed for me, both within and beyond the university.
How has your academic training and background informed your public scholarship and vice versa?
A lot of my academic training involved doing deep dives into cultural theory, and the fact that I specialized in East Asian Studies meant that I was reading a lot gender theory and postcolonial theory that not only was coming from a non-Western perspective, but was also never meant for a Western audience or translated into English. What I found when I started doing public scholarship is that every single bit of this alienated people.
Many people in what might be called “the general public” find cultural theory alienating to begin with, and even people who are receptive to those sorts of ideas don’t find any cultural capital in the ideas of people who aren’t writing in English. So I really had to learn how to navigate this pushback and present my work in a way that’s accessible but not condescending. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’ve always been successful, and I still continue to get intense pushback. Still, if nothing else, I think this challenge made me a much better teacher and an infinitely better writer.
How do you think public scholarship might promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within comics studies and/or carve out a space for marginalized scholars and perspectives?
I’m really nervous about saying this, because this is going against what many people in academia believe, but I don’t think unpaid labor is ever going to promote anything except inequality.
The problem with the vast majority of work we consider to be “public scholarship” is that it isn’t compensated. Nobody pays you to be on Twitter, and nobody pays you to contribute to the sort of websites that accept writing in the genre of “public scholarship.” Unless you’re a superstar with connections in high places and an incredible amount of luck, you’re not going to make money from a Patreon for your podcast or YouTube channel. Meanwhile, nobody’s going to pay an academic to join a panel or be a guest on a video or podcast – that sort of money is reserved for people with “talent,” like performers, voice actors, popular artists, influencers, and so on.
What I’ve seen during the past ten years are young and brilliant and ambitious scholars from marginalized positions doing amazing public scholarship and then dropping out of academia entirely. They don’t get a job in academia, and then they don’t get a job outside of academia, and then they just can’t afford to keep doing work for free. This happens all the time, but it's so quiet and insidious that most people never see it. Meanwhile, the people who keep their heads down and follow the rules are given actual money in terms of grants, fellowships, postdocs, and tenure-track jobs.
So I’d argue that, in practice, a drive toward unpaid and uncompensated labor in the form of “public scholarship” is actually just another tool of discrimination against marginalized people who justifiably feel frustrated by formal academic structures.
Finally, who do you hope your scholarship speaks to? Who do you imagine as the “public”? And work do you want your public scholarship to do in the world?
What I’ve learned from the past ten years of engaging with and promoting public scholarship is that you have very little control over who “the public” is.
When I first started writing blogs and publishing popular articles and being active on Twitter, what I wanted was for my aspirational labor to serve as a gateway to a paid position as a writer. Unfortunately, no matter the quantity or quality of the public scholarship I produced, the work itself never became a stand-in for the personal connections and references you need to break into journalism or the publishing industry. In other words, the modest platform I created for myself never became a launchpad for rising to an actually meaningful platform. Instead, I got DM after DM after DM telling me to kill myself because I said that, for example, Sailor Moon has been influential to many American comics creators.
So I think, especially if you’re writing and doing research from a nonwhite or a non-Western perspective, you need to be really careful about the platform you choose for your public scholarship. In many cases, this means staying out of white-dominated “indie spaces,” especially spaces associated with fandom cultures. Instead, I think it’s important to do the work necessary to aim higher. It’s going to be tough to make connections outside of academia and be rejected and feel marginalized, but aiming for respected venues that compensate contributors will pay off in the long run – literally.
TLDR: It's not "promoting the work of people from marginalized positions" to expect us to perform uncompensated labor while exposing ourselves to harassment, and I think younger scholars need to be more realistic and judicious about what "public scholarship" actually means.
...but of course I won't actually say any of that. What I'll do instead is be gracious and polite while supporting the other panelists and speaking as little as possible.
