Community Organizing with Academics in the Digital Age: HASTAC Case Studies

It has never been enough to say "if you build it, they will come," and as academic communities continue to be reconfigured both online and off, these questions must be at the forefront: build what? Who is building? For whom? By which means and for what purpose? How will we define success? Join us for a 'behind-the-scenes' tour of what it means to organize two cutting-edge and collaborative academic communities.

This panel considers online communities through two case studies. Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning Competition, works with hundreds of grantees and their winning projects from around the world. Young innovators, academics, entrepreneurs, activists, educators, students and other grantees use social media to collaborate, socialize, share their work, and network with others in the interdisciplinary field of digital media and learning.

Fiona Barnett is the Director of HASTAC Scholars, a program that is now in its 4th year, and is comprised of roughly 200 students a year. The Scholars hail from 75 different universities and literally every academic department and discipline, and join as a community to think about the intersection of digital media, technology and learning from a variety of perspectives.

These two communities are structurally quite different, but as organizers, we have encountered the same questions, including what it means to collaborate across disciplines, methodologies, geographical space, time zones, and engage with projects that push the boundaries of public-private endeavors. After many years behind the scenes, we are starting to make sense of the numerous struggles and victories, and will discuss questions such as: (1) what it means to collaborate by difference; (2) how to negotiate the tensions between consensus, collaboration and collectivity when building a community; (3) how to identify both technological and cultural solutions to problems; and (4) how to support the types of institutional and interpersonal changes necessary to imagine these new communities.

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Education

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