As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship.
Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.
Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.
It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics.
In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and livelihood. The regime then plants a wide array of disinformation resources and deploys a range of strategies directed at silencing scholarship.
These tactics are not limited to forms of government that are identified as authoritarian. In democracies across the globe, the rise of the far right and the turn to populist authoritarianism has been catalysed through organised attacks on academe. The framing of academia as against the interests of the nation forms the basis of the infrastructure of disinformation and hate targeting academics, mobilized through digital platforms and simultaneously lent credence through brick-and-mortar organisations that deploy letter-writing campaigns, political pressures, threats of withdrawing funds etc.
In the context of the majoritarian far-right globally, power is threatened when the voices of minority communities at the "margins of the margins" document their everyday challenges to health brought on by the hate deployed by the far-right.
Over the past two years, I have witnessed this in the ways in which both white supremacists and Hindutva supremacists run targeted hate campaigns attacking my scholarship and the scholarship of CARE. This hate is often deployed under the performance of public interest, narrated as a grievance. Far-right groups running such campaigns often perform narratives of grievance as disaffected students or disenchanted parents when running such attacks.
The attacks are largely run from behind anonymous accounts.
For a large number of social scientists doing such work, the university offers very little protection to the scholarship. When faced with organized disinformation campaigns targeting them, academics often find that they are on their own.
I want to acknowledge here the strong leadership shown by Massey University. I have been privileged to have the support of senior leadership at Massey. As I have written elsewhere, the commitment of Massey leadership to safeguarding scholarship addressing the sustainable development goals (SDGs) has materialized as a University that has offered consistent support for my scholarship and the scholarship of CARE.
This is not however the case for a large number of academics who study marginalization processes.
Moreover, the democratic processes and institutions in nation states are not adequately built to address, prevent, and respond to such attacks. In many instances, democracies lack institutional infrastructures for protecting academics against disinformation campaigns. In other instances, democracies lack adequate processes to monitor and respond to foreign interference into scholarship. In yet other instances, police and intelligence agencies lack the adequate pedagogy to respond to the targeted disinformation and hate campaigns, often themselves being immersed in majoritarian ideology.
The absence of structural responses to attacks on academics is coupled with the turn toward the neoliberal rhetoric of self-help.
Academics being targeted find themselves in the midst of self-help advice that adds additional burdens on the academic who is already negotiating the burdens of targeted attacks. From being encouraged to take individualized safety steps to being encouraged to seek out counseling, academics are often told that the solutions lie in more individualized entrepreneurialism directed at mitigating risks. So in addition to our third or fourth shifts doing academic labour, we must do the labour of safeguarding ourselves and our families.
Missing from the conversation is the role of governments in democracies in ensuring the safety of academia. This responsibility should not just fall on Universities to place resources into securing safety of academics. National level policy frameworks that monitor the disinformation targeted at academia and develop preventive responses are vital.
What is largely missing from existing conversations on the scholarship of marginalization is the toll doing social science work studying and addressing marginalization takes on the health of academics. Over the past year or so, as I have negotiated physiological changes in my body in response to the hate, reflected in the form of changing data points on my blood tests, I have become increasingly aware of the stress generated from the vicious hate targeted at academics.
Responding to these blood test results draws upon another layer of entrepreneurialism, taking charge of my health, monitoring numbers, responding with lifestyle changes such as exercising, eating healthy and meditating, and going in for additional tests to keep an eye on the numbers.
In this sense, the materiality of the toxicity of the hate is reflected in the body of the academic, adding new forms of labour to be performed to optimise health.
Academia forms a key resource in the ongoing and necessary work of addressing SDG 16, promoting peace, justice and strong institutions. In the face of the hate that is catalyzed through digital platforms, academia forms a critical resource in developing community-led interventions, in documenting the forms of disinformation and hate, and in developing policy frameworks to adequately regulate digital platforms. To ensure that those of us doing this work in academia are safe while doing this work, democracies must step in to build safeguards around academic institutions.