Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Emergence of the Social Media Scholar

Oluwatoyin,

If scholars can relax their hug on orthodoxy, they can work together to establish peer review situations on social media. 

All they need to do is to create e-publication platforms and groups on social media where scholars would submit their works and get published after being peer reviewed.

There are groups catering for diverse endervours on Facebook and LinkedIn(and may be on other social media)whose administrators subject posts from group members to serious scrutinies(reviews) before such post are uploaded (published)on such platforms. 

Scholars can do the same.

Thanks.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO).

On Sunday, February 13, 2022, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Chidi.

In this instance, the distinction is very, very significant.

You may observe that most academics, scholars employed by educational institutions, as I understand that term, do not use social media in publishing their scholarly work.

Why not?

They would be bypassing the ideally  rigorous  peer review  system that makes  academic texts in my view, collectively the best in the world for non-fiction, and will not be rewarded by the academic system which is tied to publication in a ademic journals and books, operating by principles of assessment that ideally ensure a particular standard of quality, and therefore contribute to sustaining academia as the primary bastion of carefully processed knowledge.

I depend heavily on academic books and journals for my work. They are collectively the best in non-fiction writing.

The academics texts that inspire me are part of my life's scriptures- Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World, Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language, the Cambridge Kant collection, all published by Cambridge UP, the Hindu Tantric series published by SUNY and Routledge. The superb books in African Studies by Indiana UP, such as Drewal's Yoruba Ritual and  Ogundiran's The  Yoruba : A New History. In my experience the name of such publishers on a book implies you are holding a first class book. 

I recall vividly wonderful articles I have read in various academic journals, articles I will never forget, some of which I can even quote from  by heart or as with some, recall the structure and image map of the entire essay, readily visualising the images, their location within the article and the text around them, having repeatedly read the essay-African Arts, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, Word and Image etc.

At the same time, however, I am not motivated by the idea of publishing with these platforms,  even though I know it will give me greater visibility and credibility if I am able to do so.

Why?

I don't know.I'm just not motivated. If I insist on toeing that line, the work will sit for years in my computer, as some projects have done, with no action taken.

There are times one needs to dialogue with one's spirit to understand where it wants to go. 

Thanks

Toyin

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022, 22:39 Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:

I do not think that there is need to define/designate scholars by the medium through which they diseminate/diseminated their scholarship.

In my opinion, scholars are scholars. There are no social media, Journals and scroll scholars.

The above also applies to all other endervours, like creative writing, in which ideas are diseminated through different media depending on the era.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)

On Sunday, February 13, 2022, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Who is a social media scholar?

A social media scholar is a scholar for whom social media is a primary publishing platform for their scholarly work.

I've long struggled to understand my style of scholarship and this is the best way I've found to describe it.

I learn from conventional forms of scholarship and participate in them, to a degree, but this participation  is inadequate to motivate my quest for learning and sharing knowledge.

Having identified what I am and where I stand in relation to other forms of scholarship, the next step is to work out how to maximize this orientation.

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