Public Scholarship in Social Loss
A couple of weeks ago someone called me a public intellectual and I honestly have been thinking about this ever since because I have absolutely never saw myself as a public scholar or at least I don't think I have ever defined myself that way. I am more of community builder and community supporter. But then I reflected on how much everything feels so different now that so many have left Twitter to the gatekept place that rhymes with ShoePie. So this week I want to talk about what public scholarship means at a time of deep social loss, and ask if we can even talk about public scholarship anymore when there is such a movement towards more gated micro-communities.
Public scholarship is research and knowledge exchange that is supposed to support and impact the public in positive ways. Public scholarship can be done in different ways like teach-ins and different kinds of community and higher ed partnerships. In the past it was probably a lot easier to spot what could be considered public scholarship. Now the overlap between communities of practice, advocacy groups, is more difficult to discover in the day to day. Occasionally the cool research being done would be shared with a group and then someone in that group would share it with someone else and slowly that work could find itself to places and spaces where folk can be supported. Now the channels and spaces where that information would be shared is like the beginning of a Bjork video.
[Gif of Bjork from the Oh So Quiet video putting her finger to her mouth in a sshh motion]
And when that loss of social spaces, thought spaces, feedback spaces is noted, what comes is more silence because in some ways this splintering of people across different platforms allows for the work that was done in community and with community to be hidden away to support more money making opportunities for those in academic spaces instead of supporting the community folk who helped to inform it in different ways (because capitalism).
I know some of you reading this right now are probably going whoa whoa, what are you suggesting here. Exactly what it says. Moving to spaces where only a few select folk can engage in the same sort of public discourse that was done previously, only benefits the folk that had that social and financial capital to start. I have even seen folk in open ed happily declare their erasing of years of research and resource sharing, because the ability to see the bigger impact of this for community folk who were using those resources or viewed certain accounts as a place of credible information is no where. Folk retreat to ShoePie with their ideas, their communities of likeminded individuals. Am I going to keep talking about this forever? Yes. Is this my new public scholarship focus? Possibly. Because there are many I used to see as colleagues online and value for their insights who have demonstrated in the last months how ultimately their community work is not really community work, it is just more gatekeeping and ableism.
So many of us are trying to figure out what our online community looks like now, or where it is, where the people we used to trust and chat with on the regular have gone. Meanwhile many have gone on to new spaces without a second thought, continuing on conversations, not realizing or caring about how many they have left behind. And I think if you really care about open sharing of resources then you need to care about open sharing of resources. You can't just erase 10 years of tweets about health or social supports or queer community resources and call it a day. I mean you can and so many have and that is sad. But what will it take to see how that resource erasure and social loss, is redefining public scholarship and so that the public is no longer there, no longer part of that resource creation, no longer part of sharing and expanding community. Gone are the personal learning networks (the PLNs) of old.
So when someone calls me a public intellectual it causes me to pause and reflect because what does that mean anymore? Is there space for what that used to be that reminds folk it was always and will always be of and for community. If your ShoePie echo chamber makes you feel better when you sleep at night, I support you taking care of your health, but if you haven't for a single moment thought about the others who used to engage with your work, your words, your thoughts and are okay with the closed space you now find yourself in- let me drop the etymology of clique here for your reading pleasure. Don't forget to latch that door real tight, you wouldn't want others to actually read anything you have to say.
Comments
Post a Comment