Empowering Academic Knowledge Mobilization via Online Harassment Training: A Pilot

Dr. Jaigris Hodson was awarded a SSHRC PEG grant to partner with The Conversation Canada to explore the growing body of research related to online abuse within the scholarly community.

The challenge:

Digital-first publications like The Conversation Canada have provided researchers with unprecedented opportunities to reach broad audiences and make their work widely accessible. However, editors at The Conversation Canada have begun to raise concerns that the problem of online harassment is impacting the scholars who write for them with increasing regularity. In fact, a recent study conducted by Chen and Blanchett (2023) showed that 37.8% of The Conversation Canada authors had been targeted with toxic comments online, and 26% of these authors said this toxicity has had an impact on their knowledge mobilization. These experiences can result in scholars choosing to avoid communicating their knowledge, both in outlets like The Conversation Canada, and in online spaces, more broadly. With this in mind, finding ways to help scholars mitigate online abuse when it occurs is of utmost importance for the partner organization, as well as to the academic research community, writ large.

The goal and objectives of the proposed partnership:

In this project, The Conversation Canada, Hodson, and O'Meara will engage in partnered knowledge mobilization, with the goal of synthesizing and applying the growing body of research related to online abuse within the scholarly community. To achieve this goal, this project has the following three objectives: 1. Apply the existing research regarding online abuse communicating strategies and best practices to the Canadian academic community. 2. Build capacity among Canadian scholars and other research communicators to share their research online despite the presence of online abuse, bullying, or harassment. 3. Assist scholars in developing strategies to mitigate online abuse so that they can increase the national and international impact of their research using online tools.

Contributions of the project: We will convene a session at the 2024 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at McGill University in Montreal, open to all scholars and research communicators in attendance, and will both provide training, based on the best possible evidence, for how scholars should respond to incidents of online abuse, while also providing a network through which we can encourage bystander intervention and other forms of support; enabling scholars to help scholars, with the goal of mitigating the negative impacts of online abuse when they occur. The genesis for this project originated through conversations between Hodson and White about the online abuse experienced by authors for The Conversation Canada. Together, Hodson, White and O'Meara, along with collaborators Veletsianos, Tworek and Byma, will synthesize and apply recent scholarship related to online abuse and science communication, and create resources that can be shared first at this session during congress, and then more broadly, via the networks of those in attendance. Through this targeted knowledge mobilization effort, the partner hopes to empower those scholars who contribute content through the conversation, as well as develop new mechanisms for responding to online abuse when it occurs in the future. By using a Theory of Planned Behavior framework, this project will help to shift attitudes, social norms and perceived behavioral control to encourage lasting change.