Twitter as Thinking Communities: Responding, Reacting, and Acting on Linguistic Discrimination

• In Event: Reimagining Dialogue: A Qualitative Methodological Shift in Unraveling the Intersections of Identity, Language, and Power

Abstract

Twitter is a social media microblogging service that allows users to post and comment on messages called “tweets.” Participation in Twitter conversations are often driven by common interest and shared purpose or values. As such, Twitter can be considered an “affinity space” (Gee & Hayes, 2011) where people join by shared endeavor, not by credentials. This is a crucial aspect of Twitter conversations as, in theory, everyone can produce and distribute knowledge in a somewhat open forum.

In this study, we explore our qualitative research process in adopting dialogue as an autoethnography methodological approach to selecting, recording and interpreting Twitter threads and our participation in these threads as cultural artifacts (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011). In doing so, we acknowledge our subjectivities, identities, opinions, emotions and attachment to the topics being discussed as multilingual individuals. We purposely selected two Twitter threads that led us to retrospectively and selectively write about moments of revelation or epiphanies that stemmed from being part of a specific Twitter culture and possessing a particular cultural identity that was shaped by a goal of fighting linguistic discrimination.

We analyzed how we each and together responded and reacted to tweets and threads generated from linguistic discrimination cases disseminated through social media. We also reflected on ways Twitter community members engaged with what we posted or shared. The questions below guided our accounts:
What made us join the conversation? What points and topics draw our attention?
What do we think we (this community we formed) are?
How do we act on linguistic discrimination through this community?
What makes us react differently to posts or comments: like, comment, retweet? What makes us tag someone?

Our methodology purposefully reflected a dialogical style, keeping a non-standard usage while resisting and recreating typical norms for academic writing in standardized English. We focused on non traditional ways we produced and collected our data via dialogical tools. For example, we met regularly to write together and used speech-to-text or voice tools on Google documents to better record our ideas and memories as we talked about our participation in the conversations we selected. We also highlighted ways we considered the narrative as jointly-authored, incomplete, and historically situated (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We ended by discussing what Twitter conversations were salient and significant to unveil the growth of our intellectual affinity, friendship, allyship and thinking against linguistic discrimination in our work as researchers and practitioners. We concluded by emphasizing the importance of alternative forums, such as Twitter, in disrupting persistent barriers to marginalized, minoritized, and racialized researchers that are often stigmatized in mainstream research for not adhering to arbitrary standardized, monolingual linguistic norms of publication that are often non inclusive of multilingual writers.

References:

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: an overview. Historical social research/Historische sozialforschung, 273-290.

Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. Routledge.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Author

• Clara Vaz Bauler, Adelphi University