Informal Events at IMC Leeds 2017: Public Medievalism and Disability Mentorship

by JONATHAN HSY

Are you heading to the International Medieval Congress in Leeds tomorrow? Note these INFORMAL EVENTS not listed on the official program: on Monday, an informal discussion on public medievalism and countering the alt-right; on Wednesday, an informal mentorship gathering for medievalists with disabilities (and allies).

Full information below! [Click image to enlarge; equivalent text also provided in this blog post.]

#PublicMedievalism event at #IMC2017; original tweet here

#PublicMedievalism: Developing Methods to Counter the Alt-Right

An informal discussion for delegates at #imc2017

Wilson Room, Emmanuel Centre, 13:00-14:00, 03/07/2017

For enquiries please contact Shihong Lin (on twitter @shlin28) and James Harland (on twitter @djmharland)

The rapid growth of social media usage and the emergence of social media subcultures such as #medievaltwitter have led to historical scholarship arguably never being more open, vibrant, or accessible. Alongside this development, however, has been an alarming growth of appropriation of the past by resurgent far-right and white supremacist movements to promote their goals, as charted by authors such as Dorothy Kim at In the Medieval Middle and The Public Medievalist’s special series, Race and Racism in the Middle Ages.

The battle for the past is fought across the twittersphere. Alongside a regular output of memes promoting distorted, far-right interpretations of a purely white, Christian past, events such as #femfog and Rebecca Rideal’s withdrawal from the Chalke Valley History Festival have also attracted backlash online, and most medievalists with a presence on twitter will have experienced the reception and misinterpretation of their output—either by open members of the alt-right or members of a wider public informed by nationalistic and racialist ideas.

We invite delegates, especially those who make frequent use of Twitter, to an open, informal discussion on the development of methods to effectively counter this trend, while ensuring that our twitter output remains no less lively, engaging, and publicly accessible.

Informal disability mentorship event #disIMC at #IMC2017; original tweet here

Medievalists with Disabilities

An informal gathering for disabled students, ECRs, academics, researchers and allies. All welcome!

12:45-14:15 on Wednesday 5th July, St George Room, University House

Accessible via lift from either Refectory Foyer or via University House

Bring your lunch and come and meet other medievalists with disabilities, or support your disabled colleagues. This gathering is completely informal, and we hope it will be the start of a supportive community.

[event hashtag for twitter is] #disIMC

If you have any queries, especially about accessibility requirements, please contact Alicia Spencer-Hall by email via aspencerhall [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @aspencerhall or contact Alex Lee by email via alexralee12 [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @AlexRALee.

If you're not attending IMC in Leeds this year, you can follow the official hashtag on twitter #IMC2017. The hashtags for these two informal events are #PublicMedievalism and #disIMC respectively.

P.S. Online PDF and mobile-accessible version of the official #IMC2017 programme is available through this link on the Congress website.

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

by MICHELLE R. WARREN [Guest Posting]

[Hello readers! This is the first in a series of blog postings on diversity and (medieval) academia that we will feature on this site. This posting comes to us from Michelle R. Warren (on twitter: @MichelleRWarren). Stay tuned for more perspectives. - The ITM co-bloggers]

[EDITED 24 August 2014: In this thread, note also Dorothy Kim (on twitter @dorothyk98), Helen Young (on twitter @heyouonline), and Jonathan Hsy; note Karl Steel in a related thread here and here.]

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

"When things break, make collage." I made this my Twitter motto when my students convinced me to branch out and open an account. Never could I have predicted that tweets would bring me to a blog post on this space, sharing some of thoughts on racial and ethnic diversity in the US academy. For the past four years, I've served as the faculty director of Dartmouth's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF), a research and mentoring program for students committed to diversity issues and curious about earning a PhD. The fellows pushed me to those first tweets. Almost immediately, a bunch of medievalists—friends, acquaintances, strangers—followed me. It was exciting. I ignored them. I had joined for other reasons.

Recently, those distinctions collapsed, and all for the best. In MMUF, I engage students (most of whom identify as minorities in one way or another) to consider the "hard choice" of an academic career. While I help demystify academia for them, they help me identify the structural barriers and individual concerns that make diversifying the professoriate difficult—time to degree, expectations from family, presumed incompetence, stereotype threat, employment prospects, lack of mentorship, etc. Numerous programs, policies, and organizations are dedicated to countering these pressures, supporting individual success while working toward institutional change. So my ears perked up when a medievalists' conversation (as retweeted by Jonathan Hsy) turned to academic diversity. And instead of ignoring them, I chimed in. Then, in a reply to the thread, Adrienne Boyarin retweeted an announcement about the Faculty Diversity Program at SUNY: immediately I sent off a nomination for one of our MMUF alums. Now everything is connected.

"Lead from wherever you are." This is one of our mottos in MMUF. Many people feel helpless in the face of the numerous problems that plague the education system; few of us have direct influence on hiring practices. But everyone has influence on something. The potential to diversify the professoriate is affected by many things that happen well before anyone gets to college. Change seems slow and uneven at best. The pipeline is not flat. So just about anything can be a contribution (I'll leave aside why diversification matters). Transformation is possible—whether it's teaching something you don't know, speaking out against injustices, finishing that dissertation…or even just sharing a tweet.