The Dark Side of (Digital) Public Engagement

I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful and honest appraisal of the underlying tension in how digital engagement is framed within the contemporary university: calls for public engagement frame it as an unalloyed good for all concerned in spite of the fact “we have not fully conceptualized or counted the costs of public writing from various social locations”. It is assumed that “when writing for publics, actors are individuals simultaneously embedded in institutions and dislocated from stratified status groups” whereas the reality is that “microcelebrity and attention do not operate in the same way for all status groups”.

The way in which we tend to talk about digital engagement is sociologically naive and politically dangerous, unable to come to terms with the complexity encountered when engaged scholarship blurs into academic microcelebrity or prepare people for the challenges this can generate. It is easy to negotiate this tension for some because “all press is good press for academic microcelebrities if their social locations conform to racist and sexist norms of who should be expert”.

With technological diffusion, critically engaged scholarship has embraced digital platforms to communicate, diffuse, and archive. Scholars who are also members of marginalized groups disproportionately take up this kind of engaged scholarship, often without commensurate credit from university administrators or colleagues (Ellison and Eatmen 2008; Park 1996; Stanley 2006; Taylor and Raeburn 1995; Turner et al 2008; Villalpando and Bernal 2002). Those activities look very similar to those associated with cultivating academic microcelebrity. There is a sense of a “public” to which we are in service. There is the ethos to disseminate scholarship and to leverage technology to de-institutionalize information.

One of many things I really like about this paper is how it identifies this tension at the individual level while framing in terms of the institutional incentives of corporate universities for whom digital engagement often equates to brand awareness. Universities have little incentive to address the complexity of digital public engagement and many incentives to look the other way while inciting their academics to march out into the digital public square. This complexity is something which is rarely encountered by those already privileged, able to rely on being read as intellectual even when their online activity falls outside of academic norms.

Were I white or male or of a higher class, it is possible that I could leverage the adage that all press is good press. The negative effects of microcelebrity are transformed into positive attention when made legible through bodies and identities more closely aligned to the assumed “natural” embodiment of rationality, intelligence and ability. That is to say that the difference between a black woman muckraking with an academic library card can be read differently than muckraking by white elite graduate students at new media outlets like Jacobin or in the public rendering of Evgeny Morozov. These persons’ social locations conform to the hegemonic (“natural”) embodiment of intellectual critique. This affords them a legitimacy rooted in academic authority even when they are not yet, or are still, academics.

But for those who without this structural privilege, visibility brings harassment and ‘success’ in micro-celebrity terms becomes something different considered in terms of the other facets of the micro-celebrity’s existence. The paper has a fascinating analysis of the challenges to expertise which ensued from Tressie’s public blogging, encompassing fellow academics, specialist readers and non-specialists alike. 3/4 of the negative comments from a total of 5,552 “call into question my academic affiliation, the merits of a university that admitted me, and explicitly or implicitly cite affirmative action as the reason that I am in a PhD program”.

Agnotology, Science and Public Engagement

One of the clear themes which emerged for me when reading Merchants of Doubt, a detailed exploration of corporate propaganda by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, concerns the politics of public engagement. What might in other circumstances seem like anodyne issues confined to the university, who talks about science in public and the status attached to this activity, become urgent questions of societal importance when seen in terms of the history of doubt merchandising. As they write on pg 263:

The scientific societies have tried to address this by developing formal statements on climate change that reflect the collective wisdom of their members, but these statements tend to be dry at best, and often nearly impossible for a normal person to decipher. Who among us has read the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, much less the thousands of pages of actual reports? Indeed, who on the planet has read all this stuff? What average citizen knows that the American Meteorological Society even exists, much less knows to visit its home page to look for its climate-change statement? 92 Clearly, it’s ridiculous to imagine that anyone would, so someone has to summarize and communicate it. Then another difficulty arises. Scientists are finely honed specialists trained to create new knowledge, but they have little training in how to communicate to broad audiences, even less in how to defend scientific work against determined and well-financed contrarians. They often have little talent or taste for it, either. Until recently, most scientists have not been particularly anxious to take the time to communicate broadly. They consider their “real” work to be the production of knowledge, not its dissemination, and they often view these two activities as mutually exclusive. Some even sneer at colleagues who communicate to broader audiences, dismissing them as “popularizers.”

If we talk of ’embedding a culture of public engagement’, it can easily feel like a trojan horse for the reconfiguration of academic labour: the centrality of scholarship giving way to viral self-marketing, as universities move ever further away from their traditional mission. I have a lot of time for this critique but I think it misses something important, mistaking contingent features of ‘public engagement’ as it has emerged within a particular context for intrinsic features of any call for more activity like this.

For many years, I’ve been driven by a sense of an explicitly political public engagement, though it’s hard to articulate this amidst the conceptual detritus of the impact agenda and the sterile conceptual frameworks of so much of the orthodox literature on public engagement. There is a transformation in academic labour underway which we need to resist but this shouldn’t preclude a turning outwards because the capacity of the natural and social sciences to influence post-democratic social life is declining by the day. To the extent we can recognise their current organisation as hindering our attempts to reverse this trend, we confront an exciting challenge to articulate a vision of a ‘culture of engagement’ which is driven by ‘bottom-up’ social concern rather than ‘top-down’ imperatives of university management.

Trolling, public engagement and the sociology of knowledge

In recent months, I’ve become preoccupied by how we make sense of the experiences of academics being harassed or trolled when using social media. My initial interest in this was in my capacity as a trainer and consultant. One of my roles is to encourage, train and support academics in their use of social media. The apparent rise of this experience necessitates a response. We need to know how to prepare academics for this experience, as well as be able to advise on potential responses and their likely efficacy.

However as a sociologist I’m dissatisfied with the idea that we leave trolling framed solely as a risk encountered in public engagement through social media. There is something more complex happening here, as a new media infrastructure changes the real and imagined relationship of academics to the wider public. It would be a mistake to frame this in terms of disintermediation: social media changes the role of previous gatekeepers to publics (e.g. journalists, broadcast researchers, think tank staff) while opening up opportunities to work with them in new ways. Their gatekeeping function becomes less straight forward. But it also empowers platforms themselves as gatekeepers, with mediation now being in large part enacted through the architecture of each social media platform.

This can produce what feel like unmediated meetings with the general public. It is imperative that we realise this is not the case and ensure a wide understanding of how platforms mediate interaction, as well as how we can collectively work to exercise an influence over these processes in order to ensure public engagement has a chance of succeeding. But it also invites us to call into question some of the assumptions about publics and our relation to them which were allowed to develop under the conditions provided by the older media infrastructure. I really like the account Jana Bacevic offers of these assumptions in this recent essay:

In assuming a relatively benevolent reception of scientific knowledge, then, appeals such as Chis and Cruickshank’s to engage with different publics—whether as academics, intellectuals, workers, or activists—remain faithful to Popper’s normative ideal concerning the relationship between reasoning and decision-making: ‘the people’ would see the truth, if only we were allowed to explain it a bit better. Obviously, in arguing for dialogical, co-produced modes of knowledge, we are disavowing the assumption of a privileged position from which to do so; but, all too often, we let in through the back door the implicit assumption of the normative force of our arguments. It rarely, if ever, occurs to us that those we wish to persuade may have nothing to say to us, may be immune or impervious to our logic, or, worse, that we might not want to argue with them.

What fascinates me about these encounters is how unprepared we seem to be for the possibility that ‘the public’ could be disinterested or even actively hostile to what we are doing. I don’t think online harassment can be reduced to such hostility, far from it, but I do think it’s often an important component of it. This is even more the case with trolling, though drawing a principled distinction between the two is a (challenging) topic to another post.

We urgently need to prepare for these encounters, including avoiding the dispiriting trap of drawing too sharp a contrast between old and new. We have not left behind an old world of mediated engagement where we can imagine pliant publics to enter a new world of unmediated engagement where we directly encounter hostile publics. There is still mediation and we still imagine our publics. But we now have the possibility of somewhat random, largely unpredictable interactions which I want to argue have important implications for the sociology of knowledge.

Making an Impact with Social Media

Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for making an impact with their work. However 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites poses an obvious challenge: how can you ensure you are heard above the din? How can social media be used by busy researchers in an effective and efficient way?

This workshop offers a practical introduction to these challenges, exploring how to use social media to engage with groups beyond the academy and ensure the impact of research. The session will include an overview of key considerations and group discussion of practical problems. The focus throughout will be on practical and sustainable techniques to build ongoing relations with publics outside the academy.

At the end of the day, participants will have learnt about the opportunities and challenges posed by social media for researcher impact, as well as having designed a bespoke impact strategy relevant to their own projects. Participants also have the option of purchasing five hours of coaching via Skype to support the implementation of this strategy. This includes a free copy of Social Media for Academics.

Mark Carrigan is a Digital Sociologist and Social Media Consultant. He is Digital Fellow at The Sociological Review and recently completed three years as Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Social Media for Academics, published by Sage in early 2016. This is the first book length guide to the use of social media within higher education and has been widely praised across a diverse range of reviews.

Intellectual diversity, disciplines and public engagement

Why do psychologists and economists enjoy more prominence in the public sphere than sociologists? I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple of days about what seems to me to be a failure of sociology to value or encourage media engagement by sociologists. It should go without saying that these aren’t the only reasons for the difference in visibility. It’s easier for psychologists and economists to talk confidently in terms of an accumulating body of knowledge because of the relative lack of dissensus within these disciplines. This shouldn’t lead us to minimise the methodological and theoretical disputes which occur within them, as much as to ask why these lead to growth outwards rather than fragmentation inwards? As this thoughtful review of Doug Porpora’s Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach by Priscilla Alderson put it,

One defence of our discipline’s diversity is that its adaptable rich variety can embrace numerous theories, methods and topics. However, variety does not preclude coherence, and coherence does not demand narrow uniformity – like the neoclassical mantras that now monopolise economics. Medicine is a hugely varied discipline yet, fortunately for society’s healthcare, it is unified by powerful common values and theories about causal realities. By contrast, and unfortunately for society’s wellbeing, sociology is split not only by disagreements but, more seriously, by basic contradictions: positivism accepts pristine independent social facts and aims to discover general laws, whereas interpretivism sees only local contingent variety; statistics and experiments are set against ethnography; sociology is variously taken to be value-free, relativist or a moral endeavour.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038026117701357

In this review, Alderson looks to social theory as something that could bring order to this mess. Not in the sense of imposing unity upon diversity but rather bringing divergent perspectives into the same intellectual space. In this sense, I share her aspiration to “position its many valuable insights and methods in relation to one another, showing how they connect and interact within larger relations, to be more like a coherent jigsaw puzzle in progress, rather than a heap of pieces”. But how else could we pursue this other than through social theory? I wonder if the internal diversity of disciplines and how they conduct external engagement are intrinsically linked?

I’d suggest that communicating sociological knowledge – as well as public engagement more broadly, though in a somewhat different way – should not be seen as something extrinsic to sociological inquiry. Instead, it can potentially bring order to the discipline, through forcing its practitioners to develop their capacity to contextualise, translate and apply knowledge outside of the academy. Particularly when the practitioner in question is working beyond their area of immediate expertise and talking in terms of the discipline as a whole. This could then be something that feeds back into the core of the discipline, both directly (research and teaching) and indirectly (their broader influence).

The challenge is how to ensure that we recognise, value and encourage these capacities. My hunch is that few of these conditions obtain at present. There’s certainly a widespread openness to public sociology but a disconnection between the rhetoric and the reality. Furthermore, working with the media and pursuing visibility seems by many to be seen as vaguely suspicious (or worse). What I’d like to understand is how these practical challenges which can easily be construed as being outside the discipline, in fact reproduce core intellectual features which many would see as problematic.

Public Engagement and Social Media

There’s a really important piece in the LSE Impact Blog by Philip Moriarty describing his experiences using social media for public engagement. In many ways he has been the embodiment of the engaged academic, driven by a sense of responsibility to communicate scientific knowledge and an enthusiasm for engaging with the public about that knowledge. Not only has he been a prolific blogger and video blogger, he has spent countless hours engaging with these visitors and viewers, producing what he estimates as half a million words of comments and responses in the process. He believed passionately in they importance of this activity, the necessity of academics being willing to directly engage with the public and take advantage of the opportunities for this which social media have opened up.

His reflections on these experiences are essential reading for anyone interested in the future of social media for academics. In retrospect, he believes his efforts achieved virtually nothing. Though there have always been productive exchanges which he cited in the face of scepticism by friends and colleagues about the value of what he was doing, Philip argues that the obstacles to the engagement he pursued have their origin in the platforms themselves. The incentive to build a subscriber base, something which can be enormously profitable on YouTube, incentivises behaviour which has created an environment toxic to the reasoned discussion which public engagement presupposes. To approach it in the open-minded way he did, with a commitment to open debate and a refusal to block or ban, has created all manner of difficulties and his article is an important warning about the difficulties that social media can leave academics exposed to.

While it’s essential that we recognise these dangers, the risk is that it generates a backlash against public engagement through social media. Yet as Philip says, “Productive engagement online is possible”. What’s urgently needed is a more nuanced discussion about social media platforms, the opportunities and challenges attached to each, before we advocate public engagement be pursued through them. My recent preoccupation has been on how the way in which we talk about social media, as powerful new ways to get our ideas ‘out there’, can preclude such nuance. If we see social media as helping us scale the walls of the ivory tower, allowing us to form connections with a public that has been kept out by our impenetrable language and paywalled journals, we might get an unpleasant surprise when we encounter disinterest, antipathy or outright hostility in response to our efforts.

This shouldn’t lead us to rethink public engagement, it should lead us to question the assumption that ‘the public’ is present on these platforms waiting for us to engage with them. We need to understand how platforms influence who sees our activity, how they interpret it and how they respond to it. We need to be clear about the particular groups we are trying to engage with, how to develop connections with them and why they will be interested in connecting with us. We need to understand how things can go wrong and we need to develop support mechanisms for those who find themselves in such positions. We need to do this urgently, in order to ensure that the increasing visibility of academic life through social media isn’t seized upon to fuel the developing backlash against expertise and experts. This new interface between the university and wider society needs to be carefully managed. There are exciting opportunities here but also profound risks if we fail to meet this challenge.

Speaking and listening on social media

What does it mean to speak and listen on social media? It’s a question which might seem to invite a platitudinous response but it’s one which increasingly concerns me. In the last couple of years, I’ve found myself increasingly sceptical that a platform like Twitter facilitates meaningful debate given the constraints it imposes on expression. I largely avoid comments discussions on blogs and websites. I won’t go anywhere near YouTube comments threads, even though I sometimes find myself drawn uncontrollably to read them, like a moth to the flame. In short, I’ve largely lost what faith I had in social media as a means to facilitate debate. The constraints of these channels multiply misunderstandings while the culture they have given rise to encourages intemperate reactions.

However debate doesn’t exhaust speaking and listening. I’m aware that much as I increasingly avoid debate, I also spend less time listening on social media than I used to. In part this is down to abundance. When I dip into my Twitter feed, I can usually find 10 strands I want to follow up within a few minutes. When I do follow these up, I immediately find even more strands to follow. The escalation dynamics of social media, if your use is calibrated to maximise access to variety, constitute a recipe for productive distraction that can at times be overwhelming. My means of processing this productive distraction is largely through writing, hence social media sends me from listening to speaking.

There’s more to it than this though. The architecture of social media rewards speaking but doesn’t reward listening. To speak and win attention for those speech acts, either positively or negatively, increases the visibility of subsequent speech acts. To listen carefully can be akin to invisibility. Hence perhaps the almost apologetic tones in which people who prefer to listen describe themselves as lurking. But what happens if ever fewer people are listening? My increasing fear is that social media too often facilitates only the pseudo-catharsis described by Winlow and Hall:

The political protest ends up continuing only for a short time as an online blog or a Twitter post, offering nothing more than a cathartic opportunity to vent one’s spleen accompanied by the sad recognition that in all likelihood no one is listening, and no one really cares.

Rethinking Social Exclusion, Pg 73

What does this mean in the context of the university? In a thoughtful essay, Jana Bacevic argues that by “sticking to critique on social media, intellectuals are, essentially, doing what they have always been good at – engaging with audiences and in ways they feel comfortable with.” But to what extent are those audiences imagined? To what extent are they ‘external’ or ‘internal’? They register numerically as ‘followers’ but the metrics of engagement often tell another story. Is this even engagement? To what extent is anyone listening? Are we simply talking amongst ourselves? Or even simply talking to ourselves and occasionally overhearing each other’s chatter?

There are many responses to these concerns. One might be to call for more organisation of this space, to provide platforms for robust and productive debate. I this would be a mistake. But we do need to think seriously about what the public expression of academics and intellectuals means in an age of social media. I found this section of Lambros Fatsis’ PhD thesis rather inspiring (pg 246):

The fourth precondition here offered for the rejuvenation of public-spirited citizenship, as opposed to self-interested demagoguery, rests on a fundamental change of approach in the way we understand public expression, suggesting that a shift from the acclamation and assertiveness of speaking to the compromise and attentiveness of listening is as vital, as it is systematically sidelined. Making our thoughts known and conveying them successfully in conversation so that they come to mean something to us depends not only on what and how something is being said, but also on what and how something is being heard, listened to and understood. Public expression therefore does not rely solely on speaking our minds, but also involves the manner in which information is taken in, and it is precisely the balance between those two communicative faculties that allows for dialogic negotiation as opposed to monologic recitation.

If we move away from ‘speaking our minds’, seeing social media as a window to the world through which we can channel our many discontents into an imagined public sphere, we can begin to preserve social media as a space for speaking and listening. It encourages us to examine our assumptions about our audience, something which can be done quantitatively (through metrics provided by platforms) and qualitatively (through assumptions we make about them and its congruence with our prior knowledge).

In fact, it can move us away from thinking in terms of ‘audience’ at all, rejecting a view of social media as a platform for speech in which we ‘earn’ visibility, instead seeking technologies for interlocution. Such technologies offer powerful affordances for what Lambros describes as a shift from intellectuals-as-speakers (“an exclusive class of spokespeople who give voice to our grievances and concerns”) to intellectuals-as-listeners.

Public engagement, social media and university boundaries

In her wonderful Lower Ed, Tressie Cottom describes how her public profile led to her being in contact with someone who was enormously relevant to her ongoing research. From pg 103:

Aaron found me through my public writing and blogging and social media and decided that speaking to me might be interesting. He emailed me and kept emailing me over the course of a year. Eventually, I was giving a lecture in the same state where he lived, and he invited me to have coffee.

One of the most fascinating conversations I ever had while doing asexuality research was with a woman in her 80s who found out about me through an interview in a newspaper. She was unwillingly to be formally interviewed but an extensive phone conversation was enormously useful to my attempts to understand the changing social conditions in which being asexual is rendered problematic or otherwise. In both cases, we can see visibility facilitating people coming to us, creating opportunities if we are open to them but also complicating habitual expectations about how we manage relationships with groups external to the academy.

I’d love to hear other people’s experiences of such encounters. It strikes me that this is an advantage to public engagement which is rarely recognised. I suspect it’s a relatively common experience amongst people who engage in a lot of this activity and it’s one we should recognise and explore in a systematic way. The focus of a lot of what I’m doing over the next few months will be university boundaries and how they’re being changed by new technology. The role of public engagement in narrowing the gap between researchers and the researched is an important aspect of this. But there’s a theoretical complexity to how we conceptualise these boundaries which engaging with the work of Jana Bacevic has left me newly aware of.

Recognising such a benefit is interesting if we frame public engagement in terms of academic labour. It’s often cast as another thing to do, adding additional items to already over long to do lists. This implicitly conceives of it as something extrinsic to the research process, as if everything else about the professional practice of those involved remains fixed, only to be supplemented by these additional activities. But in reality public engagement is something relational, both in terms of the working patterns of the engaged and their relationship to the wider community of their research and ‘wider society’. It changes both in a way which complicates the initial comparison one made in which a working life without public engagement is compared to one which includes such activity.

My discussion so far has been about public engagement in general rather than social media in particular. However the opportunities and problems of the former are increasingly being forced as an issue by the widespread adoption of the latter. The boundary between the researcher and wider society is being changed by the uptake of new communications technology, making it more likely that the people we research and write about will talk back to us about what we say. Embracing this relationality can bring great benefits to the research process, with the the potential for important new connections being just one example of this. But there are liable to problems created if we ignore it. My suggestion is that what at present seem like outliers (people who are extremely visible through public engagement activity) represent the future normal, one which researchers will urgently need to adapt themselves too.

Social media didn’t create the ambition to rethink scholarly communication, it gave us the tools to do it effectively

When we talk about the possibilities which digital media offer for rethinking scholarly communication, it’s easy to slip into the trap of thinking this ambition is a new one. We counterpoise the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, the innovative and the traditional, the digital and the analogue. In doing so, we obscure past projects which sought to rethink how scholarly ideas are disseminated. These are projects from which we could learn much. The Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, created by Pierre Bourdieu in 1975, is one such project:

We shall present here, side by side, texts differing very greatly in their style and function: ‘finished’ texts, on the one hand, as they are called by academics journals, but also short notes, accounts of oral presentations, work in progress such as interim research projects and reports, in which theoretical intentions, empirical procedures of verification, and the data on which these are based, are all that much more visible. The desire to provide access to the workshop, which has different rules from those of method, and to present archives of a work still under way, implies a rejection of the most clearly ritual formalisms: justified typography, standard rhetoric, articles and issues of similar length, and more generally, everything that leads to the standardisation and ‘normalisation’ of the products of scholarship. Recognising no other imperative than those imposed by the rigour of demonstration, and secondarily by the aim of visibility, will mean freedom from the censorships, artificial devices and perversions generated by a concern to conform to the established customs and good manners of the university field: a rhetoric of caution or false prediction, with the apparatus and panoply of celebrity discussion that is never more than self-celebration, the ostentatious displays of signs of belonging to the most selective and select groups in the intellectual universe.

Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action, pg 90

The ambitions here are familiar ones from discussions about what social media means for scholarly communication:

Diversifying the types of scholarly output in circulation.
Sharing work-in-progress, revealing the scaffolding that lies behind the carefully crafted reality of journal articles and monographs.
Rejecting scholarly formalities where these operate as rituals, marking inclusion and exclusion, rather than contributing to the intellectual endeavour.
Rethinking the norms of scholarly communication with an aim of improving visibility, overcoming self-serving control of ideas (and the evaluative practices which constitute their proxies) in order to liberate scholarly communication.

The ambition was to “make visible, sometimes by a simple graphic effect, what is generally hidden” (p. 91) and doing this was seen to involve manifesting in its own representational activity the demystification which was its ambition in relation to the social world. If I’ve understood correctly, Bourdieu’s point was that sociological reflexivity has to extent to the communication of sociological knowledge, as well as to its production, if its critical value isn’t to be lost at the point of dissemination.

The value of social media lies in the tools it offers to these ends, understood in terms of their practical utility in specific organisational contexts, particularly in the absence of significant resources. But in overcoming the trite distinction between analogue and digital, between traditional publication and contemporary innovation, we need to be alive to the myths of social media which are in circulation, particularly as they manifest themselves in the academy.

The Morphology of Public Engagement

In recent weeks I’ve become fascinated by what I’ve thought of as the poetics of impact and engagement. What linguistic techniques can we identify in how ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ are written about? What work do they do in terms of foregrounding and backgrounding the issues entailed by this paradigm shift within the university? This fabulous essay by Audrey Watters has left me thinking about the morphology of impact and engagement: the “functions” we can identify within these narratives and the “pieces that moved the stories forward”.

This is the wikipedia overview of the meaning of morphology within the study of folklore:

Antti Aarne’s theories, enlarged and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson in 1961 and by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004, look at motifs rather than actions – for example, “a soldier makes a deal with the devil” or “a soldier marries the youngest of three sisters.” More than 2500 folk and fairy tales have been cataloged under this taxonomy; the AaTh or Aarne–Thompson number is as well-known to folklorists as Francis James Child‘s identification of ballads are to scholars of folk songs.

Vladimir Propp was a Russian structuralist scholar. He criticized Aarne’s work for ignoring what motifs did in a tale, and analysed the basic plot, or action, components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His Morphology of the Folk Tale was published in Russian in 1928 and influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, though it received little attention from Western scholars until it was translated into English in the 1950s.

In the Afanasyev‘s collection of Russian fairy tales, Propp found a limited number of plot elements or “functions” that constructed all. These elements occurred in a standard, consistent sequence. He derived thirty-one generic functions, such as “a difficult task is proposed” or “donor tests the hero” or “a magical agent is directly transferred.”

In this way, we can identify an emerging morphology to impact and engagement. The engaged academic who lives for their public, prospering as both scholar and public figure. The recalcitrant stick-in-the-mud who refuses to recognise the necessity of change. The earnest research managers who must shepherd such folk along as the environment changes around us all. These are just some initial speculative thoughts but I’d like to pursue this idea in a systematic way.

The (Coming) Crisis of Free Speech in the Digital University

In the last couple of years, prominent commentators have increasingly claimed there is a crisis of free speech in higher education. Well meaning participants in reasoned debate are apparently unable to move without being accosted by left-wing activists keen to shut them down or move them on. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the timing of this putative crisis is interesting, given it coincides with what I think are unprecedented intrusions of the state into university life in the United Kingdom:

We’ve already seen the police ask a university for attendees of a fracking debate. The president of the Lancaster Student’s Union was warned by police, who she discovered taking photos of her office, that she may have been committing a public order offence by displaying a poster in her office window. Police used CS gas and pulled a taser on Warwick students who were screaming in terror. They launch secret operations to spy on peaceful student protestors. University staff are increasingly expected to function as proxy border guards. Police violence is increasingly an expectation at student protests, including some astonishing and egregious instances of brutality. Punitive bail conditions are becoming the norm for student activists and some university managements have gone out of their way to exclude and persecute ‘trouble makers’.

Where could it lead? In Turkey, we’ve seen a purge of the academy, with over 7000 academics dismissed. There’s little sign of any comparable action on the horizon in the United Kingdom, though it’s a salutary reminder of how far such intrusions can go and an obvious incitement to international solidarity. The more salient comparison is with the United States, where Donald Trump’s recent threat to Berkeley neatly illustrates how attacks on the public university and opposition to the gains made by ‘political correctness’ are being linked by contemporary conservatism:

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

The notion of political balance is being used as a (superficially liberal) stick to impinge upon the intellectual autonomy of the academy, something already in a state of disrepair after many years of the culture wars and managerial attacks on pay and conditions. It seems likely that attempts to enforce this legislatively are going to become a recurrent feature of the policy landscape.

NC Senate has tabled this amendment from Republican Sen. Hise to require political party quotas in hiring UNC system professors. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/2ej6oYsQLx

— Colin Campbell (@RaleighReporter) February 21, 2017

When we look at the situation in America, it becomes easy to see the parallels to how the ‘crisis in free speech’ is being presented in the United Kingdom. Take for instance, this morning’s Times article about a meeting which took place at the University of Sussex:

Academics were accused of intellectual vandalism yesterday after it was revealed that lecturers at a university advertised a seminar on how to respond to right-wing attitudes among students.

Researchers and lecturers at the University of Sussex held a departmental meeting entitled “dealing with right-wing attitudes and politics in the classroom”. Critics accused them of seeking to suppress free speech and said that the episode reflected a climate on university campuses where student unions, and increasingly universities themselves, were curbing free expression.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/lecturers-offer-advice-on-stifling-right-wing-views-9xh78vwcm

Who are these critics? What’s their stake in this debate? Their position remains fascinatingly opaque. The ideological character of universities is changing, with anything that can be construed as a left-wing bias being a potential basis for attack. But attempts to manage that change, to find ways to sustain existing practices in the face of disruption, are vulnerable to attack as well. This thread by Alison Phipps is worth reading in full:

Fascists are distributing their literature on campuses, demanding platforms for their ideas, positioning us as censorious

— Alison Phipps (@alisonphipps) February 21, 2017

There are multiple things going on here. The crisis of free speech in higher education is overdetermined. For instance we can identify a managerial interest in curbing the freedoms of academic labour, a concern for crisis management as university communications change, a long-term agenda to shift the ideological tenor of the university system, an intrusion of the surveillance state licensed by Prevent, a broader hardening of protest policing, the politicisation of foreign student numbers and the expanding frontiers of Border Force, a more grass roots upsurge in far-right activism on university campuses and many others factors besides.

We need to be careful not to fall into a simplistic analysis which sees this as a right-wing plot in the face of which we must immediately defend ourselves. But we urgently need to reject the idea that the crisis of free speech is a matter of censorious millennials undermining the institutional culture of the university. This is such obvious nonsense as an account of the change underway in our universities that it wouldn’t even be worth engaging with, if it were not promulgated with such vigour by so many influential outlets.

My particular professional interest in this concerns social media. Firstly, the digital university is a transparent ivory tower, such that it has become inordinately more susceptible to (low cost) surveillance while failing to have undergone the democratisation which digital communications was expected to bring. It’s a toxic brew, which leaves those within it naive about the tendency of those outside it to scrutinise and intervene, as well as poorly equipped to respond effectively. Secondly, the intense politicisation of academic speech we’re seeing is only inadequately recognised at best in invocations to public engagement and impact. We need to recover public speech as a labour issue, particularly if the tendency of universities to force people into the public square is going to increase.

These problems are manageable but the prevailing language of social media for academics, in which ‘social media’ is seen as something everyone ‘should use’ (or shouldn’t) does nothing but hinder us in this endeavour. There’s a great field of conceptual detritus concerning ‘impact’, ‘engagement’, ‘social media’, ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech’ which we need to clear, if we want to have any hope of recognising the complexity of our present circumstances or responding adequately to them.

The Challenge of Public Engagement Projects and the Role of New Intermediaries Like @Soc_Imagination and @TheSocReview

In a recent article on the LSE Impact Blog, Martha Henson reflects on the challenges which typify digital projects and the implications this has for the uptake of social media in higher education. She highlights a pattern which occurs with depressing frequency, in which “a failure to understanding digital marketing, and a failure to invest any serious time and effort in promotion” lead to otherwise laudable digital initiatives failing. The lesson she takes from this is an important one: “stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren’t prepared to promote them properly”. On one level, it’s hard to argue with the conclusions she has drawn:

Do NOT embark on any digital project if you aren’t going to at least make a decent effort to tell people about it or otherwise figure out how people are going to see it.

If you are going to make an in-gallery app but only have room for a small piece of signage and no budget or space for print promotion, do not bother. If you are going to create a game and put it on your website and think maybe your organisation might be able to muster up a single tweet and facebook post about it, give up now. If you are creating an amazing interactive video experience but the entire budget is going on production and you’ve run out of money to market it, stop.

Furthermore, if you think that a digital experience, be it mobile or online, game, video, or guide, is going to sell itself, and thereby itself be marketing for your TV show or exhibition, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Actually, I suspect this attitude is partly to blame for some of the failures in this area. There seems to be some confusion over whether these digital add-ons are marketing themselves but, by and large, it doesn’t work this way, things just don’t magically “go viral”.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/18/stop-wasting-money-on-digital-projects-if-you-arent-prepared-to-promote-them-properly/

But perhaps we need to interrogate these difficulties a little further. I’m sure Henson is correct in her diagnosis that in many cases “these digital projects *are* just seen as add-ons”, with the promotional activity therefore falling to the production team for the project. But in the context of higher education, I think there’s a more diffuse problem of what Oili-Helena Ylijoki calls ‘project time’:

First, project time entails a strict timeframe, defined in the research contract. Every project starts and ends at given dates, and there are milestones in-between. Thus, the project has an internal clock that determines how long research can take, what stages there are and what results need to be gained by certain dates. In this way, project time has fixed, pre-set temporal boundaries, which separate not only different phases within a given project but also one project from another, making it an entity of its own with a logo, an acronym and web pages (Vermeulen 2010).

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/23/project-time-versus-process-time-in-accelerated-academy/

The dominance of project time within higher education compounds the problem that Henson identifies (as I suspect it also will in other fields where the temporality of projects is dominant) because it means that building an audience falls within the temporal horizons of the project itself. It’s a time consuming task that is unlikely to succeed within the window of a project. Furthermore, it’s one which benefits from activity that engages with multiple audiences in a variety of ways i.e. something to which most projects will be unsuited. It’s labour intensive, iterative and long term.

Obviously, this is why promotional activity of the sort Henson bemoans the absence of is important. But this is also why the new intermediaries of social media for academics become so important: websites like The Sociological Imagination, The LSE Impact Blog, The Sociological Review and Open Democracy (and many more) have pre-aggregated a specialised audience relevant for many of the interesting projects that are emerging all around us. This leaves them obviously valuable as promotional partners but I’m suggesting we need to see them in a more fundamental way as platforms for public engagement. Initiatives like these are not something peripheral to the mainstream of public engagement but rather are a crucial component of any engagement project which seeks to utilise social media.

What’s the difference between ‘public intellectualism’ and being unusually willing to talk about stuff in public?

In the last year I’ve had a selection of requests from the media to talk on an eclectic range of issues: contemporary sexual culture, the quantified self, dystopic social change, the limits of liberal tolerance and hipster hatred. I’m fairly confident in dealing with the media and I enjoy the challenge of condensing ideas in the way necessary to communicate them effectively. However apart from a couple of occasions where people asked me to talk about open access and scholarly publishing, all these interactions have been concerned with asexuality. This is a subject I obviously do know a lot about and have felt confident discussing because I don’t doubt that I have genuine authority to speak: I’ve conducted one of the largest empirical studies, I’ve written widely about it and I’d like to think I’ve become reasonably effective at contributing to asexual visibility. I don’t say this to boast but only to illustrate that on this topic, any reservations I have about engaging with the media are entirely extrinsic to the subject. In terms of stuff I’ve been asked about recently, I’d actually really like to have said ‘yes’ in almost every case but I lack confidence in bringing any genuine expertise to the issue in questions.

However I also wonder if my notion of ‘genuine expertise’ is rather restrictive, suggesting as it does that the category of ‘public intellectual’ amounts to little more than someone unusually willing to speak in public on a range of topics far beyond those they have academic warrant to do so on. I have no qualms whatsoever about expressing my ideas on any subject when it’s on my blog but this feels different – it’s obviously not private but it’s also not public in the same way as speaking to a journalist writing an article for a national paper is. Perhaps if academics aren’t willing to speak beyond the range of their research topics then ‘public intellectuals’ come to be replaced by ‘social commentators’ who have no such qualms and, in many cases, lack the genuine expertise the former group has in a certain set of topics. Maybe it’s a case of primary and secondary knowledge? So I should feel uncomfortable with speaking on issues where I have no real academic grounding but should be willing to speak on those where I have a familiarity with the academic literature even if I haven’t undertaken research myself.

Or maybe I do want to be one of the ‘social commentators’ I just invoked so derisively and that my problem here is not with ‘public intellectualism’ but is rather with my commitment to ‘being an academic’.

CfP: Writing Communities: People as Place

Writing Communities: People as Place

Falmouth University PG/ECR Conference July 29th – 30th 2014 (£25)

Researching place often means researching communities. Landscapes are peopled. History has a living voice. Researchers not only work with communities, but also write them—creatively and academically.

This Postgraduate / Early Career Researcher conference invites papers around the pleasures and tensions of writing with/from community engagement. Abstracts from creative writers, artists, historians, geographers and social scientists are particularly welcome, as well as from any PG/ECR whose research involves communities.

Discussions could include:

– Strategies of engagement (however successful)
– The influence of expectation
– Investigations of the lyric ‘I’ in people/place creative writing
– Selection methods of artists using the words/opinions of communities in their work
– Concerns over appropriated voices/artistic license
– How non-CW (creative writing) researchers use CW approaches (poetry, thick
description, etc.) in their research
– Methods & case studies of successful community engagement (from all sides) &
writing strategies of final project
– How to ‘give back’ the work to the community & reactions from the community of
work/identification with outcomes
– Work with online/subcultural communities

These are only suggestions. Any abstracts around the conference theme are welcome.

All delegates will be invited to read some work at the drinks reception on the evening of the 29th. These will be published in an e-chapbook by ChickenBeak Books (Falmouth small poetry press) and made available online.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, with a brief biography, to writingcommunities@outlook.com

to arrive by May 18th 2014.

More tickets available! Social Science and the Politics of Public Engagement

Social Science and the Politics of Public Engagement
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Open University Camden Centre, 1 – 11 Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, London

In recent years new technology has begun to facilitate ever more novel forms of research practice across the social sciences. New opportunities for collaboration exist in an information environment that is being radically and rapidly restructured by digital communications. An increasingly digitalised culture increasingly produces ‘by-product data’ as an unintended secretion of everyday social practices while also dramatically reshaping the circulation of academic research within the wider world. Universities themselves are undergoing profound changes, some by deliberate design and others as unintended consequences of broader social changes originating elsewhere. Given such changes, it seems untenable to conceive of or enact ‘public engagement’ in a way which fails to account of the shifting grounds upon which those seeking to support particular versions of the public find themselves standing. The constitution of contemporary publics cannot be taken for granted nor can the stability of the context within which ‘engagers’ seek to act.

This event seeks to explore this unstable landscape through exploring a number of innovative projects which pursued novel forms of research practice while also being orientated towards those beyond the academy. Through a discussion of these projects, their methodological innovations and the publics that formed around them, the seminar will seek to shed light on emerging questions about the future(s) of social science, its contested politics and of its relations to emerging ideas and practices of public engagement. The event will address, amongst others, the following questions:

– In a post REF 2014 environment, what could and should a social science informed public engagement agenda be?
– How, specifically, might the social sciences intervene in and help shape the PE agenda in the next couple of years?
– How could social scientists collaborate, both with each other and with those innovating forms of PE in other domains, to re-make what PE means?
– How can a critique of institutionalized approaches to PE and impact be articulated with commitments to public activism, social justice, relevance and responsibility?

Speakers:

Keri Facer, Professor of Educational & Social Futures and AHRC Leadership Fellow for the Connected Communities Programme, based at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol.

Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics.

Shamser Sinha, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Youth Studies at University Campus Suffolk.

More speakers TBC

Organisers:

Nick Mahony is Research Fellow and Co-Director Publics Research Programme, Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University. Nickleads the Creating Publics project which aims to ‘re-conceptualise public engagement with social science research in an age of emergent publics’. He is co-investigator on the RCUK-funded ‘Catalyst’ project and the ESRC-funded project ‘Making publics across time and space’. With Dr. Hilde Stephansen, he is also currently building a new OpenLearn website called ‘Participation Now’. At the heart of Participation Now is an evolving archive of contemporary participatory public engagement initiatives. The aim of this project is to support practitioners, researchers, students and citizens interested in new – participatory public engagement related – thinking, practice and innovation.

Mark Carrigan is a sociologist and academic technologist based at the University of Warwick. He edits the Sociological Imagination and co-convenes the BSA Digital Sociology and BSA Realism and Social Research groups. He is a research associate at the LSE’s Public Policy Group and was formerly managing editor of the LSE’s British Politics and Policy Blog. His research interests include sociological theory, methodology, biographical methods, longitudinal qualitative research, asexuality, sexual culture and digital sociology.

There should be a ticket widget below here – it seems to be a bit unreliable though. If you can’t see it then click here to register.

Event Registration Online for Social Science and the Politics of Public Engagement powered by Eventbrite

Are some disciplines more sociable than others? (CC @CreatingPublics)

There are a range of social scientific disciplines which have spawned sub disciplinary areas of practice and inquiry explicitly concerned with their public role and purpose. For instance:

Public Sociology
Public Geography
Public Anthropology
Public Archaeology
Public Criminology

But others seemingly have not. Why is this? Could it be a matter of explicit naming conventions, such that the disciplines closest to sociology have taken their lead from public sociology but that similar trends exist elsewhere? What do these trends have in common and how do they differ? At some point this year I want to try and assemble a public sociologist, public geographer, public anthropologist, public archaeologist and public criminologist to produce a podcast discussion of these issues. If you might like to be part of this then please get in touch: mark@markcarrigan.net

Also I’d love to hear any Public X examples I’ve missed. Please tweet or comment if you know of any!