Dialogues on Disability: Social Media as Platforms for Scholarship The past five years have seen a new discussion emerging about the benefits and pitfalls of social media for/as academic scholarship. Without a doubt, blogging, tweeting, facebooking and other forms of social media are, as Amber Regis explains, ‘online tools that enable users to create, connect and communicate, to produce and disseminate content’.Footnote 1 I offer my narrative to this ongoing discussion, on my experience as a graduate student using social media and on how it has shaped certain aspects of my dissertation research.
In 2011, I began blogging extracts from my dissertation on the history of nineteenth-century British aural surgery, which narrates the outlandish claims of some practitioners and documents their varied attempts at finding a cure for aural diseases. I catered my posts for a general audience, though I wrote in typical academic prose. A small subset of my research covered the social history of deafness, a topic that I came to examine through the lens of a medical historian. That is, I approached the subject of deafness only as the medical practitioners in my story viewed it: as a medical condition to be cured not as a cultural or linguistic minority.Footnote 2 This was the focus of my dissertation, but it was also evidence that I belonged in a particular academic community that could be reached online.
I initially used Twitter only to promote my work to other historians of science in the blogosphere, using the hashtags #histsci, #histmed and later, #earsurgery #deafness or #signlanguage. Twitter eventually became an engaging platform for me to share comments, quotes, images or facts that I came across during my research trips and wanted to share. Steadily increasing followers made me aware that I was neglecting a tremendous portion of my audience who were interested in my work and its implications: scholars of disability history and d/Deaf individuals. Conversations with these scholars forced me to address pivotal historical narratives that I otherwise might have ignored. For instance, following a Twitter remark on whether the concept of ‘deafness’ historically existed as a problem to be addressed, I wrote a longer post covering different scholarly positions on the issue. A reader wrote a comment disagreeing with my view, expressing that ‘the challenge with [my] project is going to be separating out the medicalisation of deafness with the culture of Deafness and the different tendrils that expand out – and overlap – from each’. The kinds of discourse on deafness – and disability in general – that followed forced me to readdress how certain historical concepts informed my engagement with sources.
My blog and Twitter exchange slowly transformed through these dialogues on disability. As I continued posting on topics related to my research on aural surgery, I was also exploring what Beth Linker terms the ‘borderland’ between medical and disability history.Footnote 3 These explorations led to more frequent blog posts, tweets and dialogues on the history of deafness as I shared everything from photographs of Alexander Graham Bell caught watching two people use sign language in 1896; an illustration of an ear operation; photographs of silver ninth-century ear pickers; and most frequently, a tremendous variety of photographs and advertisements for all sorts of hearing devices. Rather than being a distraction to my dissertation, these topics actually helped me to broaden my scope and familiarity with the literature.
More importantly, dialogues on social media not only gave me a platform for showcasing my expertise on a particular historical topic and connecting with a broader network, but it also helped others to find me. I received tweets, comments on my blog, and even emails, with requests to write guest blog posts, address scholarship issues, provide further information on materials related to my research, or even assist in helping a child’s application for admission to a school for the Deaf. Readers contacted me for assistance in locating research records.
Some even kindly shared their own findings; which were pivotal in helping me shape the first chapter of my dissertation on the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (est. 1792). This mutual exchange of records and sources with the broader public was much faster than standard practices of academic networks. Through social media, I was meeting individuals searching for the same historical records as I was, looking for clues into their own pasts, while I was interested in shaping the stories around these records.
This kind of mutual exchange certainly raises important questions about engagement with different types of audiences through social media, which can blur the boundaries between specialist and non-specialist knowledge. I’m not saying that the historian must passively accept all exchanges with the public in order to shape his or her work; rather, one should be cautious. For instance, one of the most notable exchanges I underwent involved a descendant of one of the historical figures in my dissertation. The correspondence and exchange of sources between us led to a much more detailed chapter, allowing me to construct a richly detailed narrative of a historical figure that initially I had paid little attention to.
Using social media as a platform for exchanging ideas and sources with the broader public can add an interesting dimension to dissertation research. But it can also help with networking outside your own discipline, forcing you to consider important implications of your research findings. I received an invitation from a scholar to present my work at a large conference on Victorian disability, which I did nervously. This was the first time I had interacted with disability studies scholars. Lunchtime conversations with these scholars were crucial in helping me frame how I wanted to construct an interdisciplinary framework for my dissertation, but without taking away from the central narrative: the history of a surgical specialty. The same conference not only expanded my network, both online and offline: it gave me new options for graduate funding, two publication invitations, membership in new networks (especially the British Deaf Society), and collaborations for future conferences and monographs.
There’s another element below the surface that I hardly talked about on Twitter or my blog, which is how social media has helped me around disability barriers, especially at conferences. Being hard of hearing means there are occasions I miss important points raised at a conference talk or a plenary session. Or, sometimes, the live conversation goes far too quickly for me to follow, effectively creating a form of social exclusion for me. Twitter invites two types of interaction through conversations: (1) standard conversations with other users, either in the audience, in different sessions, or elsewhere, and (2) conversations between the speaker and the audience. The second is supremely beneficial for the graduate student: it allows you to recognise what your presentation’s take-away message was. Assessing these tweets helped me reconfigure some of the main elements of my argument. And when tweeted well, I could also follow along or check afterwards what I missed while listening or tweeting at a talk. Twitter, can, in other words, provide a condensed form of closed-captioning.
My experiences with social media for scholarship research and networking were certainly positive. Social media allowed me to form dialogues with scholars and readers outside my own field of expertise and create a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge. Having a presence in social media essentially meant I had a public platform that made my work accessible to a wider range of scholars – some I never would have come across in conferences simply because of disciplinary barriers.
