The revolution will not be peer reviewed: (creative) tensions between academia,social media and anti-racist activism

Every so often, the media prominently reports on grotesque acts of racism, despite its everyday existence in insidious, throttling incarnations as a source of stress and anxiety for Black people globally (D. R. Williams et al., 2019). The murder of George Floyd by police on 25 May 2020, in the USA, made international headlines and reignited struggles against ‘living in a racism pandemic’ (Shullman, 2020). These waves of anti-racist activism will necessarily be expressed in diverse forms, such as art, documentary, podcasts, poetry, audio-visual, social media, mainstream media, street protests, civil disobedience, petitions, dialogue, critical pedagogies, conferencing, political lobbying, and academic publishing. Depending on one’s intentions, the form in which a message appears is as important as the message’s content. As the enduring theory goes, the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1967).

In this editorial, I turn attention to the medium of academic, peer-reviewed publications, and its relationship to (social) media activism. In this deliberately ironic and self-reflexive critique, I wonder aloud whether our current academic responses (if any) are rapid and meaningful enough to address the urgent, persistent, traumatic, psychosocial asymmetries plaguing society – and Black people, in particular. From racism to discriminatory practices against any ‘subaltern social group’ (Green, 2011), these intersectional marginalities across race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, or nationality demand a politics of urgency that psychology professionals would be remiss to ignore.

I draw on long-standing debates about the relationship between academia and activism. For example, Flood et al. (2013) lament that while refereed papers may hold the key to career progression and grants success, ‘the most prestigious journals are often not interested in activist scholarship, due to peer influence and disciplinary expectations’ (p. 20). These authors offer strategies for publishing in both refereed and non-refereed media using multiple modes of communication. The most ubiquitous mode of our current zeitgeist is social media.

Protest hashtags, as one example of anti-racist social media activism, subvert traditional methods of knowledge production and create a counter-space for epistemic disobedience. When a hashtag goes ‘viral’, it interrupts the status quo and fractures hegemonic power relations by tapping into common experiences of oppression and providing the space for the development of critical consciousness (Tanksley, 2019) and cyber-catharsis. Psychological models confirm that a core prerequisite for resistance and liberation is the development of critical consciousness of anti-Black racism (Mosley et al., 2020). #BlackTwitter, for example, evolved as a virtual community and cultural conversation (Brock, 2012) through the globalizing, unifying perks of the internet, transcending space, time, and location.

The provocation of a hashtag disrupts normative narratives and toxic structures. #BlackLivesMatter challenges White supremacy, #MeToo challenges toxic patriarchy, #FeesMustFall challenges educational commodification, #TakeAKnee challenges police brutality, #SayHerName challenges police brutality specifically against Black women in the United States, and #RhodesMustFall challenges coloniality. A hashtag – quickly, accessibly, and inexpensively – grows into an organizing principle and archive that is intuitively understood by those to whom it is directed. A hashtag rapidly gains followers, retweets, comments, likes, and discursive currency. Within minutes, it can catalyse global conversations and influence tangible outcomes, as we have seen with #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall in South Africa (Pillay, 2016) or #ICantBreathe following Floyd’s murder in the United States.

In Barnett’s (2019) doctoral study, The revolution may not be televised but it will be hashtagged, she explored the impact of social media on social movements, racial perceptions, and real-world activism. Findings indicate that discourse via social media affords activists ‘the opportunity for organization, mobilization and free expression of a movement’s people, purpose and plans. As a result, social media has become a preferred medium giving voice to the marginalized’ (Barnett, 2019). This changes the centre of intellectual gravity and potentially democratizes knowledge production and dissemination.

Why, then, does academic work and (social) media engagement appear to lack coherent convergence in their textual iterations of activism? One problem is that the location, politics, and aesthetics of our intellectual labour, even as critical psychologists, are overdetermined by the global system of neoliberal capitalism. In South Africa, the corporatized public university is celebrated (e.g., Bentley et al., 2006). This ‘mercantilization of knowledge’ (Lyotard, 1984) forces our interventions to – first and foremost – take the form of a commodifiable journal article or book, to satisfy the ‘publish (something, anything!) or perish’ production-line (Rhodes et al., 2018). Despite the virtues of anti-racist academic work, the first guaranteed and direct beneficiaries are us as authors – who will be rewarded financially and professionally for ‘productivity’. This is in keeping with the marketplace functions of research, however innovative or decolonial the methods claim to be. Gray (2017) argues that these values serve a governmentality function and implicitly diminishes genuine academic autonomy by disconnecting our work from actual social justice, despite universities invoking societal problems as ‘rhetorical tropes’. As Swartz et al. (2019) further note

The multiplicity of conflicting but coexisting narratives about what universities should do in South African society – producing excellent research, preparing a labour force, or addressing societal inequalities – exposes a persisting tension surrounding the purpose of a public university. (p. 567)

Billig (2012) puts it more bluntly: ‘if we look closely at our writing styles and at the ways we publish, then we will see that we are greatly affected. . . academic capitalism needs successful academic capitalists to thrive’ (p. 11).