Apologies for a rant:

Has a professor or someone senior to you in any way ever unfollowed you online or even figuratively ‘blocked’ you offline?

#AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter #phdchat #academia #sciencetwitter #anthrotwitter

As an ‘international’ Asian scholar who hasn’t had a job since submitting his PhD in June 2018 (and working my butt off to ‘stay in this’), I find this sort of move to be an insensitive, antagonistic and serious power play.

It’s honestly one that risks grave psychological trauma and professional danger for students and junior scholars... and when it happens to me, I think about how it has happened to others who may not be as confident or adept at navigating Twitter’s / academia’s politics.

Just because you don’t agree with someone junior, doesn’t mean you withhold your resources or guidance from them…

… or make outward, public gestures that show “I don’t like this academic anymore” or “he’s not an early-career person with a career I find worth following”.

If you’re an authority figure that’s worked in the field ten or twenty or thirty years more, with all the job security, contacts and money, you CAN’T go blocking unemployed BIPOC in anthropology—not unless they’re seriously doing bad stuff.

I don’t think that’s me. And I think some blocks/unfollows in the last month have come following my calling out bad behavior in the field. For the most part, I don’t name names and I design things to be tamer than I really feel anyway.

This is all its own kind of violence.

Not the same people we’re talking about, but @Nouronal touches on similar themes in this insightful, and gut-wrenchingly familiar, account of interactions she’s seen between an authority figure and junior scholars.

https://twitter.com/nouronal/status/1276190388995358727?s=21 https://twitter.com/nouronal/status/1276190388995358727

Yeah, I failed to call this kind of grief caused online and offline what it truly is—and it is just another manifestation of gaslighting.

Great thread by @GabrielleFayant.

https://twitter.com/gabriellefayant/status/1276303190196203524?s=21 https://twitter.com/gabriellefayant/status/1276303190196203524