Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Andy Coverdale
literature and conferencing. Engagement in social media encourages and supports an approach to
academic enquiry that links the discourse, arguments and perspectives with the contextual and social
dynamics of the research field. Web 2.0 environments have the potential to provide access to the
personal traits, professional circumstances and social relations that underpin academic discourse,
and in doing so, make the nuances, cliques and hiearchies of faculty and the wider academic field
more explicit, potentially reinforcing or challenging assumptions based on offline and formal academic
discourse.
Rebecca suspects that some of the insights she has gained from following several academics through
social media give her the ‘edge’ over other doctoral students who may not be as well connected. As
she has become increasingly participative and engaged herself, social media have also revealed her
own emerging positioning and allegiances in the discursive environment. Chris suggests this more
informed perspective has helped him ‘signpost’ key arguments and their proponents. Exploiting this
‘insider knowledge’ is dependent on the nature of visibility and interaction fellow academics choose to
engage in. Hannah greatly values academics who embrace the informality of social media, presenting
a richer, more authentic voice by disclosing activities, interests and beliefs on matters external to, or
on the periphery of, their core research interests. Such representational approaches have influenced
Hannah’s own social media practices and the ways in which she presents herself online.
Observational data from this study suggests that whilst relations within local research communities
are heavily influenced by departmental roles, non-localised academic networks formed largely
through the web are strongly stratified along hierarchical reputations (i.e. individuals indicating a
tendency to communicate with academics of equal or equivalent academic status). Participants have
expressed conscious decisions to engage in networking strategies that may lead to opportunities to
‘be on the radar’ of senior, respected and influential academics in their field, with the view that they
may possibly engage in direct discussion.
4. Discussion
Social media are enabling access to emerging online research networks and communities within,
across and outside of departmental and institutional boundaries, yet collocated research
environments have shown to be highly influential in determining how and why PhD students begin or
continue to engage in academic peer networks. The boundary crossing and interdisciplinary activities
demonstrated by the participants of this study would seem to support the need to adopt holistic
perspectives of doctoral education.
All the participants have broadly followed a trajectory that has seen them increasingly engaged in
activities online through multiple and distributed social media and typically overlapping online
communities and networks, requiring them to manage their own status reputation and identity within
and across different socio-technical and academic contexts. The identity management and boundary
negotiation inherent in their social media practices are manifest in decisions related not only to their
digital outputs, but also in their profiling strategies, the links they create across different platforms, and
the memberships of their online communities and networks.
Becher and Trowler (2001) use the metaphor of academic tribes and territories to explore the
relationship between the normative mode of disciplinary and professional contexts, and the
operational mode of academic participation and social interaction. It is into this landscape that
doctoral students must orient themselves, and seek to establish their own scholarly identities in the
contested academic territory (Thomson and Kamler, 2010). In contrast to the primarily territorial
possessions defined by their institutional departments and training centres, participants have
demonstrated tribal tendencies which operate in a state of flux through convergent and divergent
patterns of mutuality and fragmentation inherent in academic migration, interdisciplinarity and multiple
memberships. The tension between the potential for curiosity and expansive learning, and the
legitimating forces of enculturation is manifest in how they appropriate research foci and frameworks,
epistemologies, tools, methods and norms of enquiry. The participants’ use of social media has been
shown to be instrumental in making these ongoing decisions explicit to a distributed research
community, and in doing so, is inherent in the processes of socialisation and identity production of
their doctoral practices.
Even within the small number of participants, levels of critical and reflective thinking about how they
used social media varied considerably. Dissemination of the activity systems analysis has facilitated
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