‘I Have a Folder in My Email Called Hate Mail’: Academic Public Engagement, Digital Hate and the Unequally Distributed Risks of Visibility
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2023 Number 110 & 111
‘I Have a Folder in My Email Called Hate Mail’: Academic Public Engagement, Digital Hate and the Unequally Distributed Risks of Visibility
Hannah Yelin, Laura Clancy pages 187-206
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:110-111.11.2024
Abstract
Public engagement through ‘traditional’ and social media is an increasingly important way for scholars to communicate research with wider audiences, with academics encouraged to maintain a public profile to disseminate work. This has important activist potential for radical knowledge production, but only if all voices can participate on equal, safe terms. Existing work on digital hate rarely accounts for the diversity of the academic community, and therefore we cannot adequately account for how certain voices are being excluded from public debate. Drawing on data from eighty-five survey responses and thirteen indepth interviews with UK academics across disciplines, this article argues that the risks of visibility are unevenly distributed in ways that exacerbate harm to already marginalised groups. Our data challenges popular notions that visibility is its own reward. We demonstrate how visibility exposes academics to the kinds of online misogyny, racism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, fatphobia and transphobia that characterise cultures of online hate. We reflect upon how academics in the ‘wrong’ body are denied intellectual authority in public debate through abuse targeting their intersectional identities and right to belong.1 Our data finds that digital hate not only affects academics’ careers, but also causes significant physical and mental harms that seep into academics’ personal lives. There cannot be meaningful, radical potential in public knowledge sharing if we cannot protect those most at risk of harm in the process.
SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article
You have the following options:
- If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
- If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below
Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate
- Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription. - Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon
To cite this article
Hannah Yelin, Laura Clancy (2023) ‘I Have a Folder in My Email Called Hate Mail’: Academic Public Engagement, Digital Hate and the Unequally Distributed Risks of Visibility, New Formations, 2023(110 & 111 ), 187-206. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:110-111.11.2024