PUBLISH AND PERISH: ACADEMIC CANCEL CULTURES, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND NETWORKED ACADEMICS

This dissertation examines and describes some of the social media practices of contemporary academe. Drawing from thousands of posts and interactions, as well as blogposts and institutional guidelines, this research uses these data points to reconstruct chronological narratives of its primary case studies – the controversies surrounding the publication of Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” (2017) and Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender Critical Feminism (2022) and the online uproar preceding AoIR 2020 over de Castell et al.’s abstract, “Twittering Research, Calling out, and Cancelling Cultures: A Story and Some Questions.” These broad narratives reveal a climate, “academic cancel culture”, and a tactic, the “academic cancellation campaign.” An academic cancellation campaign is any attempt to use social media to vilify or otherwise defame a scholar or their scholarship, particularly when they do not conform to a hegemonic or popular epistemic view. These campaigns self-situate as counterpublics while seeking institutional legitimization as an endgame, i.e., the removal of a panel from a conference or the retraction of an article. Consequently, institutional neutrality has become more integral than ever in maintaining the norms of academic practice and publication. The dissertation concludes by sketching out rhetorical personae that emerged from the data, including the “cancel dissenter”, “cancel initiator”, and the “digital scholar-journalist.”