A New Materialist take on the possibilities and impossibilities of becoming a scholarly blogger

ABSTRACT

As social media platforms become increasingly entangled in how academia gets performed, there is growing pressure on individuals to cultivate a digital presence or risk becoming invisible. While some adopt new and emerging online communicative tools with gusto and élan, there are others who resent and resist their creeping territorialisation of workspaces. This paper uses a feminist New Materialist onto-epistemology to offer an alternative understanding of the material, discursive, and affective forces that enfold to nurture and/or neuter the uptake of scholarly blogging practices in academia. Unlike conventional humanist ontologies, a New Materialist approach views agency as distributed across all matter – not just the human form. This approach allows for the social, historical, affective, technological, and spatial forces, fluxes, and flows shaping and reshaping diverging scholarly blogging practices and performances to be plumbed. The insights generated have implications for how academic developers might encourage the uptake of scholarly blogging within and across their institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• New Materialisms
• online spaces
• diffraction
• scholarly blogging
• agential realism
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sherilyn Lennon

Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Her research uses emerging post-qualitative research designs to unpack issues relating to  gender, literacy and rurality.

Naomi Barnes

Naomi Barnes is a Lecturer in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia.  Her research expertise lies in the fields of digital rhetoric and social media.