#DisruptJMM: Themes of online social justice advocacy and community building in STEM

Abstract

In 2019, #DisruptJMM, a Twitter hashtag, began circulating after an Inclusion/Exclusion blog by Dr. Piper H pointing to the need to make commonplace conversations about human suffering in the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). While the #DisruptJMM hashtag has been used since 2019, the vast majority of use was in the JMM 2020 meetings. Twitter hashtags are used by activists to push forward conversations, join communities around a single idea, and create change. In this article, we draw on frameworks from community building seen in other equity and inclusion advocacy hashtags such as #GirlsLikeUs (Jackson et al., 2018) to qualitatively code and analyze tweets which used the #DisruptJMM hashtag. This analysis gives us a glimpse into the evolving conversations on social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in the mathematical community. We see an emergence of community around recentering humanity in mathematics. This community supported each other's efforts, reflected on who is represented, and amplified discussions of power and privilege with a particular emphasis on bringing visibility to colonialism and sexual harrassment.