I'd like to talk about the value and innovation of social media use, particularly by black/African scholars, especially women. For me, decolonisation = innovation and I turned to social media because I'm dissatisfied with the rigidity of traditional modes of scholarship.

I've received many positive & a few snide comments about my level of social media engagement. Plus, there are some in the Ivory Tower who look down on active social media academics so I thought it’d helpful to address how social media activity has influenced me professionally.

First, I research a niche subject. There is no physical space where I can easily find a community. Survival meant building our own networks, where we could host conferences to bring forward other people in Africana studies of medical humanities. I needed social media to do this.

This is how many BAME/BIPOC academics in the UK network especially those in area studies where our representation is so minimal. Despite funded decolonisation events, our departments haven't budged an inch to reconceptualise how to actualise decolonial research.

I have much to say on how the #REF and decolonial scholarship are antithetical practices, but I digress. I moved online to seek innovation and collaboration in ways traditional academia fails to allow.

Through Twitter, I've been exposed to indigenous studies, events, conferences and scholars who do no exist in my local cirricula. I've collaborated w/Malawian & African(ist) scholars to build a slow growing collective of medical humanities research.

Most importantly, I've found African feminist writing, the mythical subject matter that all my reviewers claim doesn't exist. They publish on their own web platforms for the same reason that the institution is reluctant to accept their scholarship as valid. So they moved online.

On a forthcoming co-edited project under contract, I found 5 of the 10 contributors on Twitter. Whilst most African #medhums scholarship struggles to represent beyond South Africa, our online collective has brought voices from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Namibia, Tanzania & more

Finding these voices took time despite messing up the timelines. It meant investing in connectivity through social media as a means to support underrepresented voices. Because decolonisation = innovation.

I continue to share and boost the profiles of the scholars I find so that others can find them too. (And to understand more about black women's digital engagement, please follow the important work of @riannawalcot )

BIPOC/BAME scholars in this sense have more labour than the rest of our peers. Not only do we have to conduct our own research but we have to work collectively to validate the research of our peers who remain marginalised in various intersecting ways to justify our work as valid.

So before questioning the growing presence of online digital presence of your black peers/scholars, instead ask yourself why institutions have failed to create spaces for them within the Ivory Tower. We are on this space, working hard. all day, every day.