What does doing academia in general and anthropology in particular look like on social media? Each piece in this series works to answer this question by taking on an aspect of our work as graduate student Contributing Editors of the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Social Media Team (SMT). Our unofficial style guide outlines practices we have codified over the years, while other posts detail the relational ethic through which we collaborate as a team, including our internal training around handling harassment and our process for tackling problems as they arise. We also offer reflections on the stakes and politics of academic labor online, the citational practices and possibilities of social media, and live-tweeting as an academic genre.

The idea for this series first emerged in 2020 from our desire to sift through our experiences as the SMT and typify our expertise formed through over five years of managing the social media presence of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), more popularly known by the handle @CulAnth. In the years since, and with the upheaval and rightward swing of Twitter and the subsequent dispersal of many users to new platforms, questions about online community and academic labor have only become more urgent.

We wrote this deeply collaborative series on Zoom calls, across time zones, and in asynchronous conversations via document comments and group chats. Borrowing from horizontal organizing practices, each piece in this series had a “bottom-liner,” a person or persons who did the work to ensure that the post could be finished, but the pieces themselves were all collectively composed. For this reason, we have decided to represent authorship in a particular way: the bottom-liner(s) of each piece are listed first, then the rest of the team is listed alphabetically. As we discuss throughout this series, there is no real way for us to individualize our contributions, so the series’ authorship reflects this. We also see this as contributing to ongoing efforts at rethinking authorship and collaboration in scholarship.

--The SMT