Creating a Qualitative Researcher Identity with Social Media

Social media presents opportunities and dilemmas for academics. A recent special issue on “socially mediated publicness” (Baym & boyd, 2012) explored how social media is impacting the very meaning of public engagement. While some recent scholarship has (e.g., Donelan, 2016) provided recommendations for how social media can be leveraged by academics to further career opportunities, others show that avoiding social media can increase productivity and a sense of well-being. We share our strategies for developing a social media presence as qualitative scholars and dilemmas we have faced: developing a public identity while maintaining a private one, engaging in “marketing” and “branding” our scholarly work while also being professors, and identifying a community for our social media interactions. As the move to ‘publicness’ is not new (McClancy, 1996), we situate our discussion in the literature around mobilizing knowledge and justice through ‘going public’ (Vannini, 2012), and the challenge of ‘being popular’.