“You Need to Be Sorted Out With a Knife”: The Attempted Online Silencing of Women and People of Muslim Faith Within Academia

Abstract

Academics are increasingly expected to use social media to disseminate their work and knowledge to public audiences. Although this has various advantages, particularly for alternative forms of dissemination, the web can also be an unsafe space for typically oppressed or subordinated groups. This article presents two auto-ethnographic accounts of the abuse and hate academics researching oppressed groups, namely, women and people of Muslim faith, experienced online. In doing so, this article falls into four parts. The first section provides an overview of existing literature, particularly focusing on work which explores the violence and abuse of women and people of Muslim faith online. The second section considers the autoethnographic methodological approach adopted in this article. The third section provides the auto-ethnographic accounts of the author's experiences of hate and abuse online. The final section locates these experiences within broader theoretical concepts, such as silencing, and considers possible implications of such online hate in both an academic context and beyond.

Female journalists under attack? Explaining gender differences in reactions to audiences’ attacks

“…These results contribute to the existing literature on attacks against public figures and journalists (Barlow and Awan, 2016;Johnen et al, 2018;Preuss et al, 2017;Shin et al, 2017), which is largely anecdotal and limited to women. Our results enrich this literature by a theoretically driven and quantitative comparison of the prevalence rate of three avoidance strategies for both genders and two contrasting explanations of gendered avoidance.…”

“…Generally, public figures such as politicians, celebrities, popular academics, and journalists have become highly exposed and accessible. This has made them easy targets for shaming, defamation, and trolling (Barlow and Awan, 2016;Johnen et al, 2018;Preuss et al, 2017;Shin et al, 2017).…”

“…Generally, public figures such as politicians, celebrities, popular academics, and journalists have become highly exposed and accessible. This has made them easy targets for shaming, defamation, and trolling (Barlow and Awan, 2016; Johnen et al, 2018; Preuss et al, 2017; Shin et al, 2017). Some of them regularly receive large amounts of vulgar, pathologizing, inappropriately generalizing, disparaging, offensive, and threatening feedback against either them or their work (called attacks in the following).…”

Rxivist.org: Sorting biology preprints using social media and readership metrics

“…There are downsides to using these numbers but none that are not also present in traditional publishing: bioRxiv download counts have been shown to be vulnerable to manipulation [11] but so have citation counts [12]. Discussions of online platforms are frequently fraught with unexamined assumptions about factors such as race and gender [13–15], but the entrenched hierarchies of traditional publishing have well-studied inequalities of their own (e.g., [16]), and traditional measurements of impact have been blown by the shifting winds of bias since they were developed [17,18]. Every new metric also risks a reincarnation of the “Matthew Effect” [7]—authors with lots of downloads and existing "microcelebrity" in their field [19] may just end up getting more downloads.…”

Direct contacts with potential interviewees when carrying out online ethnography on controversial and polarized topics: a loophole in ethics guidelines

“…However, this not only creates a tension (in the context of Case Study I, for instance, the researcher had to keep a low profile on social media and not publicly comment on the propagation of medical misinformation during the 2020 pandemic to avoid attracting attention from potential research participants), but also exposes the researcher to potential abuse and unwanted attention (pertinent in the context of Case Study II, when the researcher had participants trying to track down her personal Facebook profile in order to communicate with her there, whilst another requested to follow her personal (private) Instagram account). Female scholars have voiced concerns about their experiences with online harassment, especially those who work in this field (see Chess & Shaw, 2015; Barlow & Awan, 2016). As highlighted by Chess and Shaw, while research on online harassment increases awareness, it also exposes scholars to the very harassment they are studying.…”