At the broadest level the question that animates this research concerns the nature of the contemporary academy, and what it is to live and work within it. It thus builds upon, and speaks to, a now extensive body of multidisciplinary work that has sought to characterize university and research practice today. Key themes within this have included the “projectification” of research (Ylijoki, 2014; Fowler et al., 2015), an increase in precarity (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015; Sigl, 2016; Bataille et al., 2017; Roumbanis, 2019), the implementation of entrepreneurial or capitalistic logics to academic practice (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Fochler, 2016; Reitz, 2017; Rushforth et al., 2018), the rise of narratives of “excellence” as one way of auditing academic practice (Lund, 2015; Watermeyer and Olssen, 2016), and demands for international mobility and other often punitive ways of living the “ideal academic” (Lund, 2015; Balaban, 2018). Much of this literature has thus been concerned, explicitly or implicitly, with questions of equity and diversity (Ackers, 2008; Leemann, 2010; Heijstra et al., 2017; Angervall and Beach, 2018), as it suggests that only some people can afford—financially, emotionally, or intellectually—to maintain an existence within academia as it is currently instantiated. Relatedly, it has been argued that the emotional tenor of academic life has become skewed toward anxiety and a sense of insecurity, and away from practices of care or support (Cardozo, 2017; Lorenz-Meyer, 2018; Ivancheva et al., 2019).

This is now a substantial and diverse literature, and one in which there are key disagreements (for instance, concerning the extent to which “neoliberalism” is a helpful framing of the changes that are taking place: Amsler and Shore, 2017; Ball, 2015; Cannizzo, 2018). I do not attempt to review it further here, instead highlighting one aspect that will be particularly pertinent to my discussion: that of the ways in which “living” and “working” are increasingly entangled within academic identities (Felt, 2009). Felt and others have argued that academics exist within “epistemic living spaces” in which the epistemic is mingled with, and enacted through, diverse social, symbolic, and material practices (Felt and Fochler, 2012; Linkova, 2013). Knowledge production, the crafting of a career or professional identity, and other ways of living are thus entangled. Similarly, accounts of academic careers have described the quite stringent work that is required to craft and protect an academic identity, from avoiding imposter syndrome (Taylor and Breeze, 2020) to successfully inhabiting an academic role (Campbell, 2003; Winkler, 2013; Schönbauer, 2020), while discussion of international mobility or of “jetsetter” academics have emphasized the all-encompassing nature of what is required of individuals (Zippel, 2017; Balaban, 2018). Living and working in the contemporary academy appear on the one hand to draw on well-established notions of a “vocation” or “calling” (Shapin, 2009; Berthoin Antal and Rogge, 2020), while, on the other, merging these with more recent expectations of entrepreneurialism, self-reliance, and individual responsibility (Hakala, 2009; Loveday, 2017). Academic identities are therefore performed in ways that mingle knowledge production with informal relationships, the personal with the professional, and the material with the symbolic (Davies, 2020).

If the starting point for this research is the question of how life and work in the academy are currently articulated, then a second frame is studies of how these academic lives are performed on social media. A growing body of work explores how academics make use of digital tools and platforms, from the use of online learning tools to academic social networks such as Academia.edu (e.g., Delfanti, 2020; Lupton et al., 2017). Within this, the work of George Veletsianos (Veletsianos, 2016; Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012) on “networked participatory scholarship” has proven particularly influential. Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012), in the article that introduces the term, suggest that scholarship is changing through the emergence of digital tools; specifically, they write, “Networked Participatory Scholarship is the emergent practice of scholars’ use of participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (p.768). This is not simply an amplification or development of existing practices. Rather, their contention is that academic practice is undergoing qualitative changes in ways that are entangled with digital technologies, including the emergence of new kinds of networks and of greater engagement with different kinds of audiences in and outside the academy. Thus, Veletsianos suggests, “paradigmatic shifts in and evaluation of our identity as scholars, the purposes of education and scholarship, and the academic preparation of scholars” (2016, 26) are underway.

One central aspect of this networked scholarship is the use of social media, and a number of studies have addressed the use of Twitter, in particular, by academics (Brantner et al., 2020; Gregory and Singh, 2018; Kimmons and Veletsianos, 2016). Stewart (2016), in an ethnographic study of academic Twitter users, argued that the platform “enables a collapsed space of engagement, wherein the analytic and text-based content of scholarship is shared via often-casual, participatory, and dialogic forms of exchange” (p.72). She charts the use of the platform not only for network-creation but for interactions involving intimacy, vulnerability, and care; as such, the now well-established notion of “context collapse” (Marwick and Boyd, 2011), where scholars may be subject to “unanticipated audiences and attention” (Stewart, 2016, 77), is a key risk. Other studies have shown, however, that academic users of Twitter are alert to these dangers and carefully manage their online presence. Self-disclosure, while potentially involving deeply intimate topics such as mental health or personal and professional challenges within the academy, is selective and tactical (Veletsianos and Stewart, 2016), while online identities are both “authentic” and “fragmented” (ibid; Jordan, 2020): social media users seek to present genuine expressions of the self, but spread across multiple platforms and designed for different audiences. While this work supports the notion of a sea change in academic practice—as Veletsianos and Stewart write, “scholars’ personal lives are often an integral part of online participation and as such mediate emergent forms of scholarship” (2016, 8)—more recent research has pointed out that opportunities to participate in such networked participatory scholarship are not distributed or experienced equally (Gregory and Singh, 2018). “Building an online academic presence,” argued Taylor and Breeze (2020), “is conditioned by the politics of class, race, and gender” (p.3). While Twitter appears to be a key site in which academics can perform identity work, for instance by rendering underrepresented identities within the academy more visible (Veletsianos and Stewart, 2016), not everyone is able to (safely) do this in the same way.

While the work described above has explored, in some detail, how scholars use social media, there has been less systematic attention to the content of what they post, with the emphasis largely having been on individual negotiations and performances of academic experience. ¹ In the context of this study, and of my interest in how academia is enacted, it is therefore important to draw on an adjacent body of work: that which has looked at the content of social media more generally, and specifically the “emerging patterns in public conversations” (Milner, 2018, 1) that can be identified within the rise of “mimetic media”: memes. Memes, Milner suggests, exist “in the space between individual texts and broader conversations, between individual citizens, and broader cultural discourses” (ibid, 2). They therefore offer an opportunity to explore the shared meanings held by (and sometimes contested within) particular communities.

Internet memes have been subject to academic study since at least 2014, when Limor Shifman defined the form as

(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which

As Shifman suggests, memes are both multiple—involving many versions of, for instance, an original image or text—and intertextual, in that they refer to other (online) content. Shifman and others distinguish memes (which are constantly tweaked, for instance, through mimicry or adaption) from virals (a single piece of content with high circulation); memes, then, are inherently communal, forming part of a wider conversation that implies a collective of people “in the know” (Philips and Milner, 2017). The slipperiness of memes is exactly that they travel outside of these implied communities, such that context collapse (Marwick and Boyd, 2011) is inevitable, their meanings are unclear, and the intention of their authors ambiguous. As Dynel notes, “online users’ voices behind their humorous memetic produce [sic] can never be established beyond any doubt” (2021, 191). Philips and Milner (2017) situat such communication as a form of “folkloric expression,” arguing that rather than being something dramatically new, memes, trolling, and other forms of internet ambiguity have many of the same features of folklore (the “lore” of any group with at least one thing in common; p. 25). As with folklore, mimetic expression is vernacular, informal, and simultaneously stable and conservative (referring to “tradition” and widely shared meanings) and dynamic and creative (constantly adapted and remade by individuals). This perspective thus takes us again to understanding such communication as a set of practices that connect shared meanings with individual interpretations of these.

One further aspect of memetic media will be important for my discussion. Memes—like much of the rest of the internet environment—are multimodal, involving diverse communicative modes such as “word, image, audio, video, and hypertext” (Milner, 2018, 24). This, of course, renders them even more complex, as intertextual referencing, remixing, and adaptation can happen in one or several of the modes that they include (an image that tweaks another, or text that quotes or adapts lyrics or phrases; see Figure 1). It is important to note that this multimodality has also become important to virality: even text-only tweets are often captured with screenshots so that they can be circulated as images on other platforms. As I describe further below, I will primarily be focusing on textual content in my analysis, but will seek to pay attention to the ways in which this is situated and extended through other communicative modes.

To say that experiences of disruption, crisis, and chaos were a key feature of tweets about the pandemic risks banality. Notions of a break from normality and of dramatic differences from the expected or mundane were common across mainstream media and in political and policy discussion; indeed, as noted above, this disruption is what allows underlying assumptions to be identified. In this section, I thus explore not only tweet content concerning a sense of chaos and crisis but also what this tells us about “normal” life in the academy.

Particularly during the early stages of the pandemic in March, tweets frequently noted or alluded to the “unprecedented” nature of the current moment. This was, as one tweeter wrote, a “GLOBAL PANDEMIC” (caps in the original) and therefore an entirely new situation. Not only was this moment unprecedented but it was also “trying,” “tough,” or “difficult” in multiple ways. Themes of struggling and of the need to endure repeatedly emerged within the dataset, with, for instance, stories of students with close family members ill with COVID, the “emotional toll” of the situation, the challenge of dealing with constant uncertainty, or the sadness of defending one’s thesis at a time of social distancing. Tweeters spoke of struggling to concentrate, feeling despair or demoralization, or of mental health issues triggered by the crisis.

Such emotions and experiences were certainly not unique to academics. What was it, exactly, that academic tweeters described as being disrupted? Here key themes concerned the interruption of “normal” academic life through home-working, home-schooling, and care responsibilities, but also through the sudden removal of conferences and other face-to-face events such as defenses, the demand for online teaching, and ubiquitous Zoom meetings. Thus, on the one hand, some tweeters talked about the pleasures or affordances of quarantine and lockdown: one might use the time to finally finish the PhD thesis, or to catch up on reading. On the other hand, tweeters also asked for advice concerning disrupted fieldwork and the need to move to digital formats, made jokes about missing the lab, and worried about students who had “disappeared” since the move to online teaching. Much of this discussion was oriented to the need to the need to produce – particularly text, in the form of theses or articles, but also CVs, datasets, or good student evaluations. Concerns about an inability to concentrate, disrupted work days (for instance due to home-schooling), or a desire to “stay in my pyjamas all day,” “eat ice cream,” and “cry” all relate to an imagination of academic life as oriented to productivity. What was being disrupted by the pandemic, and the changed work practices it entailed, was the steady production of text and the capacity to “get more writing done.”

If the academy is enacted as oriented to productivity and the creation of text (in particular) within these tweets, it is also framed as being simultaneously solitary and social. It is this dynamic that lies behind the dual acknowledgment that much research (and more specifically, writing) is carried out alone (and that academics might therefore be somehow better prepared for the pandemic), but that it also involves important communal occasions (conferences, group meetings, and defenses). The pandemic was therefore described as simultaneously involving continuities with mundane academic life and as dramatically different from it. Tweeters joked about the PhD experience—limited human contact, the need for self-discipline, and digital communication—as being good preparation for lockdown, while also telling stories of efforts to replicate, via Zoom or other tools, social encounters such as discussions over coffee or conference attendance. The opportunity to participate in communal celebration—at the conclusion of a PhD or course, for instance—was particularly missed. Here, as in other aspects of the material, there was a sense that face-to-face copresence was something intrinsic to academic life.

This material from academic Twitter thus enacts academic life as productivity-oriented and as simultaneously solitary and social. It is these features that were disrupted so violently by the pandemic: much of the anxiety and struggles that are described within the data come from interruptions of productivity–through additional care responsibilities, anxiety, or extra work connected to the pandemic, for instance—and from enforced changes in rhythms of solitude and copresence. Merely describing these themes, however, gives little sense of how they were enacted within tweets, and in particular the degree to which the use of humor to tell stories of disruption is key to these accounts. The themes described above were articulated in the form of jokes, humorous stories, and remixed memes as much as through straightforwardly descriptive text. The challenges of working from home, for instance, might be conveyed by a story about a child running in and asking to take their clothes off in the middle of a lecture, while disrupted rhythms are implied by joking questions about what day it is. Importantly, ideas about (lost) productivity were also conveyed in this way. One tweeter wrote that while they were impressed by people who were managing to finish articles or develop analyses during lockdown, all they had managed was a small-scale study of the relation between pandemics and wine consumption; another noted that with classes being canceled and university buildings closed, they would be forced to actually work on their dissertation. Such humor is an important feature both of the platform generally (Philips and Milner, 2017) and of this particular dataset. In referencing challenges in a lighthearted way, it reinforces particular imaginations of academic life—that productivity and professional demeanor are important, for instance—whilst also gently subverting them (showing that ideals are rarely lived up to, or that procrastination is as much an issue as lack of time).

Performances of the contemporary academy are thus instantiated through a humorous tone that does complex work in both reinforcing and subverting ideals concerning what academic life should look like. This point can be further illustrated by one popular meme, an academia-oriented adaptation of the “unfinished horse drawing” meme ⁵ which was circulated in mid-March. This appears in this dataset as a screengrab of another tweet, and has been favourited almost 1500 times, but the meme also traveled to other platforms, rapidly losing its original attribution. As shown in Figure 2, it uses the “unfinished horse drawing” image (used in multiple other memes) as a basis for a depiction of teaching in 2020 and, in particular, the move to online teaching. The online meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme notes that memes based on this image convey “the feeling of being rushed through a task and express the feeling that something's quality has diminished over time.” As such, its adaptation in the context of academic life and “pandemic pedagogy” communicates the disruption that has taken place and the drop in teaching quality that has occurred. It does so, however, in a manner that is humorous, highly visual, and self-mocking in the contrast between what is planned and what is actually carried out. The use of wry irony is typical of the humor that is deployed within discussion of pandemic disruption in this dataset, and of the ways in which even chaos and disruption are communicated through self-aware reflection.

If a first key theme within this material is of articulations of chaos and disruption that are frequently conveyed through humor and ironic self-reflection, a second relates to care and care practices. Tweets in this dataset are not only oriented to funny stories about disrupted working practices. Just as frequently, the content seeks to express compassion, care, and emotional honesty, and to offer (or request) support, empathy, or advice. Tweeters thus frame themselves as being part of particular groups (faculty, PhD students, supervisors, and academics generally), offering mutual support to those communities and giving guidance for supporting others outside of them.

Students are one frequent object of these care practices. Many tweeters expressed concern or gratitude for their students, or advised others about how to look out for them. One tweet, from Mrach favourited several thousand times, asked readers to “check in regularly on your PhD students … Many (perhaps most) live alone with no family nearby. We supervisors are the closest they have to a family.” Others focused more on junior students, advising others to drop penalties for late assignments, be cautious that using COVID-19 in teaching might be triggering for some individuals, or find ways to maintain relationships with students despite the move to remote teaching. Students were thus viewed as a key population which was suffering from the effects of the pandemic and which users of academic Twitter had the possibility to influence or support, whether by showing “kindness” or by trying to understand how to help individuals with little or no digital connectivity.

Tweeters also sought to care for “each other” and for “ourselves.” Articulations of care were directed within and between a community of academic Twitter users, with this community framed as being in need of compassion and care during the pandemic. Such articulations took different forms. Tweets might express offers of support (“we are here to support you”), discuss what it means in practice to “be kind to yourself,” remind people to check in on their friends and colleagues, ask for advice or for a “Zoom happy hour” because the tweeter was struggling, discuss the systems and structures in place at institutions to support well-being and mental resilience, or talk about how one was “staying sane” during such a difficult time (for instance, by painting or taking time off work). Such messages foregrounded the emotions tied to experiences of the pandemic, disclosing information about one’s own struggles and repeatedly emphasizing that it was normal to be finding the situation difficult. Tweeters thus both acknowledged negative emotions associated with the disruption described above, and affirmed that readers are “amazing and resilient” if they are managing to “survive.”

Care, in this material, is thus enacted as being vital to academia, but as often missing within it (cf. Cardozo, 2017; Ivancheva et al., 2019). The fact that so many of these tweets call for compassion and for care practices implies a backdrop where these are lacking or undervalued. Indeed, this is explicit within some tweets. One frequently favourited tweet discussed “the countless academics whose lack of compassion has consistently torn others down in the past few months,” and noted that this was more disappointing to them than their own, very natural, struggles. Similarly, the advice given—to check in on students or colleagues, to advise students that their mental health should be their priority, and to find things that help you “stay calm”—suggests that these practices are currently largely missing, and therefore need to be encouraged. Academic life is framed as requiring an influx of care through the mutual and self-supporting activities and practices the tweets promote.

Just as stories of disruption often came bundled with jokes and irony, expressions of care were instantiated through a distinctive affective repertoire. Here, memes and images were less important; instead, text (and sometimes Tweet threads, where several tweets are used to tell a longer story) was used to convey advice and support. The emotional tone of this content featured not only expressions of struggles or suffering and articulations of care and compassion in response to this but also gratitude, celebration, and motivational language. Thus, a thread of positivity ran through much of this content: tweeters wrote “props to other grads” who were similarly enduring difficult situations, that one needs to “survive to thrive” in “HARD” times, said “thank you” publically to colleagues or students, or gave “shout outs” to key individuals and groups. Similarly, academic Twitter was used as a key site to celebrate achievements (such as finishing or defending the PhD) or just enduring (even if one had not achieved anything, or were not pleased with your work, you should still consider yourself “excellent,” wrote one tweeter). As Veletsianos and others have suggested, then, disclosure is a central feature of how academic Twitter is used (Stewart, 2016; Veletsianos and Stewart, 2016; Jordan, 2020). In this material, tweeters rarely complained about their situations, although they might express that they were finding them hard in particular ways. Instead, they expressed gratitude, gave themselves and others advice, shared encouragement or motivation, and asked for support. I discuss the one key exception to this in the section below.

While tweeters in this material rarely discussed injustice or unfairness at a personal level, ⁶ or complained about their individual situations (though they might disclose that they were finding these challenging), a thread of critique did run through the dataset. This critique was rarely aimed at individuals; instead, tweeters drew attention to inequity and injustice within academia, and criticized the institutions, structures, or systems seen as responsible for these. Academic Twitter, in this dataset, was thus not only concerned with personal struggles or with care practices within a community of academic Twitter users, but with wider questions of equity and with academia’s place within these.

The objects of this critique were institutions or groups such as “universities,” “faculty,” “this administration” (the Trump presidency in the United States), and “educators,” but also “us” and the “academic twittersphere.” Criticism or comment might also not be directed at any particular actor, but reflect on inequity without localizing blame to any specific site. The subject was, broadly, fairness or equity within the academy. Tweeters discussed, for instance, the different access students had to the technology that they now needed to access teaching, and their different home situations; the gendered challenges of working and teaching from home; cases where mainstream media focused on scientific work against COVID-19 by men, ignoring contributions by women; unfairness in how universities were treating their students and staff; and the ways in which casual or temporary academic staff were particularly badly affected by the situation. The discussion thus focused on the ways in which challenges (and opportunities) are differently experienced by those with different backgrounds and identities. As one tweeter wrote, “unearned privilege” was a central dynamic that structured how academics were able to deal with the pandemic and the demands it put on them.

This is well illustrated by a discussion that arose in response to a tweet by the celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson (Fahy, 2015). In a 1 April tweet that has been favourited 113,000 times (and which did not reference #AcademicTwitter or #AcademicChatter, and therefore does not form part of this dataset), deGrasse Tyson wrote that “When Isaac Newton stayed at home to avoid the 1665 plague, he discovered the laws of gravity, optics, and he invented calculus”: the point was, implicitly, that others stuck in lockdown situations might use the time productively. The tweet appears in this dataset as a screenshot alongside the comment that Newton did not have to deal with online teaching, home-schooling, shortages of essential supplies, and other aspects of daily life in the pandemic for many academics. By suggesting that “staying home” was straightforward, resulting in empty time that could be filled with scientific work, deGrasse Tyson was ignoring the diverse and often difficult situations that people found themselves in, and the degree to which having such empty time was a product of resources (family members who might care for one’s children, for instance, or a low teaching load). Other critique in this dataset was similarly focused on notions of productivity, which was seen as a key site where inequity became apparent. One tweeter wrote, addressing those anxious about their levels of productivity, that the pandemic “accentuates privileges” and that not everyone was able to be productive to the same extent, while another talked about the “duplicitous bullshit” of rewarding people who were managing to be particularly productive at a time of global crisis. Such comments relate to my earlier discussion of productivity—understood as the efficient and speedy creation of text or analysis—as central to enactments of the academy, but nuance and complicate this emphasis by pointing out that the ability to achieve this is in fact structured by unevenly shared privilege and opportunity.

By incorporating a thread of critique and attention to social justice, this Twitter material thus performs the academy as flawed not only through a deficit of care but also through its entanglements with and reflections of wider societal inequality. Particularly subject to criticism are university administrations and other institutional structures that demand productivity, a rapid switch to online teaching, or strict student attendance without acknowledging the barriers that some individuals and groups face in achieving this (from a lack of digital infrastructure to care responsibilities). While academics are themselves sometimes framed as complicit within this (hence the calls for “we,” the “twittersphere,” or “fellow researchers” to take heed of critique), the emphasis is on systemic factors that perpetuate historical privilege and on (flawed) university leadership. The academy is enacted as a place where an emphasis on productivity can all too easily be connected with a refusal to acknowledge unequal opportunities; this, in this material, leads to normative calls for institutions to act in more just ways, and for academics themselves—in the shape of the community that coalesces around #AcademicTwitter and #AcademicChatter—to be aware of injustice, show solidarity, and act in reflective and caring ways that seek to remedy or counter inequity.