Making a feminist impact: mobilising knowledge through scholarly activism Free

When I concluded my intensive lecture on 14 March 2020, it would be the last time I would teach in a classroom for three years. There was an eerie quiet in downtown Sydney three days after the World Health Organisation declared the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic. I made my way home from campus as quickly as I could, shuddering at the thought of the invisible disease clinging to doorknobs and handrails. In the coming weeks, all face-to-face classes at my university would be cancelled and we would begin working remotely, carving out some semblance of normalcy as we locked down in our countries, cities and homes.

On 25 May 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd after he allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. Floyd’s death at the hands of police, captured in the witness videos that circulated of his murder, became the flashpoint for a global movement for Black lives, raising a reckoning of how systemic racism wrecks violence against people of colour. The seemingly unending terror unfolding over the year brought persistent global inequities across racial/ethnic, colonial, socioeconomic and gendered divides into sharp relief.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, I had begun to feel fatigued by the struggle for survival in the neoliberal academy. Writing about social justice attracted scrutiny, backlash and mockery. I pushed myself harder to win approval, only to be cut down to size again. I succumbed to one illness after another. I was working myself to death.

In the isolation of lockdowns, I yearned for community. The collective expression of grief and rage around the world stirred my hope that support and belonging were closer than it seemed. After the marches, I decided I wanted to create something from my research that bore the power to transform the oppressive structures and cultures within the academy. Over the next three months, I worked through the evenings, building a blog where I could disseminate my research around intersectional feminism in the hope of putting knowledge in the hands of individuals and communities who I imagined would be able to apply them to practice.

Six weeks into my PhD fieldwork, my ethnographic study came to a halt as we received our directives to stay home, to limit our time in populated places. We shifted our lives into online spaces. I was studying a material aid organisation providing services deemed “essential”; while my study of the organisation moved online, their work to support vulnerable people in the midst of the pandemic continued and gave me a thread of reality to hold onto.

In June 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning with race and the violence of white supremacy sent a jolt through so many. The lifting of lockdowns saw people take to the streets, and many of us also took to our online communities to express outrage and hurt. I saw friends learning about white supremacy and racism in real time. I’d never seen so many talking about race, bringing this dialogue into mainstream, everyday places. A capitalist habit of consuming information, becoming experts, sharing infographics and think pieces and then moving onto the next focus made me uneasy. I wanted to be part of a community that had already been doing the work of resisting white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, and intended to continue. I wanted to be part of ongoing and committed efforts for justice, and I knew others also felt this way.

The organisation I was studying was hesitant to make their own statements about race, despite delivering material aid services to First Nations peoples the past three years. The rose-coloured glasses with which I’d started my fieldwork wore off. At the same time, my romantic notions of working in academia were being challenged as I witnessed many precariously employed staff reckoning with limited support and communication from universities. My representative role as a graduate student shifted. I no longer received invitations to department meetings, but instead found myself undertaking a pastoral care role for overwhelmed PhD students, including international students far from home managing xenophobia within and beyond university walls, or others locked out by so-called Australia’s closed borders.

Instead of investing all my faith in the university system, I looked more carefully online for potential “co-conspirators” who knew so intimately the ways in which institutions perpetuate these harms, in everyday ways and in structural ways. I was seeking community, a way to experience and participate in principled spaces.

The primary aim of the website was to create an accessible platform for scholar-activists, circulating resources to support critical scholarship, education and community organising. Helena developed the website alongside her study of blogging, adapting her plans and activities for the website as she followed a self-guided curriculum of podcasts, online courses and websites. She learnt about blog writing, search engine optimisation and digital marketing and updated her existing skills in web design and coding. She learned the particular styles blog posts follow and began translating her research findings for a wider audience.

During the planning phase, Helena decided to define “intersectional feminism” as the website niche. The term best described her research expertise and had seen growing interest within and beyond academia during the pandemic. The first blog posts she prepared spanned a diverse base covering theoretical overviews of intersectionality theory, feminist teaching guidelines and organisational diversity and inclusion practices. After the posts were published, she tracked visitor traffic and feedback around the topics to inform where she would focus her future posts.

She learned that blogs generally see a 70–90% bounce rates (the proportion of visitors who leave immediately after arriving on the website), especially those who find the website via a search engine. In order to create opportunities for community-building, Helena decided she would create a mailing list alongside the blog and build sign-up forms throughout the website to encourage visitors to subscribe. When she promoted the blog posts via social media, visitors would easily encounter invitations to subscribe to the mailing list. The mailing list enabled her to stay connected with people who may otherwise visit the website once and forget about it.

To encourage people to join and stay on the mailing list, she created additional resources for subscribers that could not be found elsewhere. She began writing a monthly newsletter and shared original PDF workbooks such as one that provided reflection prompts around internalised oppression. However, subscribers reported that they were most drawn to the personal stories Helena shared through the emails that resonated with their own experiences. Unlike traditional email marketing where newsletters are used as one-way business-to-consumer communication, the newsletter regularly invited readers to respond directly to the email with their feedback. By maintaining open lines of communication, the co-creational processes of knowledge mobilisation could be developed.

Before the website was launched, Helena prepared over 30 blog posts, which were scheduled to publish biweekly for the first three months. The posts with the highest readership included an overview of intersectionality theory, an introduction to bell hooks and a comprehensive list of books about intersectional feminism. With the blog posts automated from launch, Helena dedicated her attention to promoting the blog on social media and growing the mailing list.

From the website’s launch on 1 November 2020 until it was closed down on 30 June 2023, it recorded 155,000 unique visitors. The mailing list attracted 1,804 subscribers over two years. As its members grew, content for the blog, newsletter and social media posts became increasingly informed by feedback from community members. For instance, recurring reports from community members about experiencing bullying and harassment in academia led Helena to deliver an online workshop in March 2021 on “Surviving the white patriarchal academy” and regular questions about publishing led her to deliver another workshop two months later on “Publishing scholarly activist work”. The two workshops were attended by 626 participants in total. Figure 1 presents a timeline of the website’s development.

Over the life of the website, visitors participated remotely to build an online community around its activities and co-create impact. As community members, they regularly corresponded with Helena via email and social media, sharing feedback about the content and format of the website and offering suggestions for improvements. Broken links or typos were usually quickly reported to her to correct.

The core group of community members comprised of doctoral candidates and early career academics who primarily identified as women. Many of these academics were boundary spanners, branching across academia and activist practice. This group of members was the most active, each emailing Helena as often as every two weeks with personal experiences and anecdotes, reflections on and aspirations for their career, and requests for feedback and guidance on their research and career.

Helen was a doctoral candidate at the time the website was first established, regularly engaging with Helena and the growing community via social media specifically. The online engagement was dynamic, including exchanges in post comments and reply tweets as well as replies to “stories” shared on Instagram. Helen shared content from the website’s social media accounts with her own networks, adding her own commentary. Building on Helena’s work with commentary was an opportunity to contextualise Helen’s knowledge within broader feminist scholarship, and allowed her a pathway to developing a more confident “voice” in these online spaces.

Other members included marginalised women who worked in leadership coaching, business consultancy, or community advocacy. Almost all these women had some kind of affiliation with higher education institutions, either having completed a PhD, considered enrolling in a doctorate degree, or previously left an academic career.

Visitors to the website, more broadly, comprised educators of all gender identifications as one of the website’s largest draws were the teaching resources available for download. The degree to which visitors participated varied. For example, the website circulated among a Dalit scholarly activist community in India from mid-2021. Their members began regularly corresponding with Helena via email, offering suggestions for the reading list published on the website, and participating in online workshops. However, most visitors to the website were more passive. The website saw a 1,500–2,500 jump in monthly organic visits over August and September from educators in the United States who were searching for teaching resources at the start of their academic year. Many of these visitors accessed (and possibly utilised) resources without communicating with Helena or participating in any other events.

Knowledge mobilisation has emerged in public policy as a way through which research impact could be created and enhanced. It encompasses a broad range of activities where research findings are directed towards policy and practice, including “knowledge synthesis, dissemination, transfer, exchange, and co-creation or co-production by researchers and knowledge users” (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2023). Knowledge mobilisation at its core involves making scholarship more accessible, extending the reach of academic knowledge beyond scientific journals and putting it in the hands of those who can apply that knowledge to social practice (Ahmad et al., 2022).

The blog itself focused on knowledge dissemination where scholarly ideas and research findings could be translated for a wider audience. For instance, a personal trainer contacted Helena to report that she was applying feminist principles to her training. After reading some blog posts and exploring more recommended books, she changed the messaging of her work to focus on “strength” and “energy”, rejecting idealisations of weight loss and challenging anti-fatness in her industry.

It was apparent shortly after launching the website that the earliest academic visitors saw the blog as an educational resource and applied it to their teaching. Educators wrote to Helena to let her know that they had circulated the website among their students or students reported that they had found the website through their lecturers and tutors:

By maintaining open lines of communication via the mailing list and social media, knowledge co-creation began to occur. When community members requested more educational resources around intersectionality theory, Helena created and distributed a slide deck. Early adopters offered feedback, asking for a class activity that would be scalable between small and large groups of students, leading to the resource being further refined and downloaded by 380 educators.

The intersectionality slide deck was complemented by additional resources to support teaching. These resources included a guide to establishing diverse and inclusive classrooms such as how educators can set expectations with students and administrators and hold principled space and a framework that walks educators through how they might handle a sexist or racist incident in class through a restorative justice approach.

As many of the community members implementing these resources were both tutors and PhD candidates themselves, Helena sought to address the struggles they voiced with another resource focused on supporting marginalised PhD candidates through the social, cultural and financial pitfalls of a doctoral degree.

As a tutor and PhD candidate, Helen engaged resources addressing intersectional feminism as a means of building the theoretical framing of her own research project. Access to additional resources that mobilised concepts in practical, applied ways enhanced the academic rigour of the PhD research. Importantly, it also helped connect Helen to avenues of scholarly activist practice, where she drew from these resources to educate her networks. Through conversations as well as social media posts, she aimed to encourage reflection and discussion amongst friends, family and colleagues motivated to build their own activism. As is common for many universities, as a casual academic engaged to tutor undergraduate subjects, she was provided with limited training as a teacher. Instead, she found the website and the community supported and resourced her to manage complex discussions of race, class and gender in online classrooms. These resources also built her confidence to engage in anti-racist, feminist teaching practices. These were vital for tutorials densely populated with students both international and domestic who often bore the weight of assumptions from their university teachers and administrators about their intelligence, capacity and commitment to their education based on their race, or their socio-economic background, or both.

Not all attempts at knowledge mobilisation were successful. The early months of the website in particular were a continual process of trial and error. Helena experimented with an array of topics including organisational diversity and inclusion, mental health and well-being, self-care and even collated her learnings on blogging to produce two articles on how scholar-activists can create their own blogs. This varied set of knowledges generated interest from different sectors of the community where academics would gravitate towards articles on mental health while practitioners were more interested in D&I practices. The resources around blogging were the least read and shared on the website, suggesting that the community had little interest in creating and maintaining their own blogs, and no further resources were created on that topic.

The scholarly activist ethic of the website attracted marginalised academics and community organisers through the expression of feminist values. Two days after launch, the website was featured in a blog by a Canadian educator and nonprofit manager. The blog post compared two experiences of leadership: the first of receiving an unsolicited message on LinkedIn from a man who offered to send a copy of his book if postage was paid upfront and the second of the launch of Helena’s website. The blog post posed the question, “how do we build leadership and confidence based on our own strengths and reciprocity, rather than following the narrow parameters of white male norms?” She offers:

In this way, community members were pivotal in socially constructing the website’s impact as one that embodied feminist values of collectivity, vulnerability, generosity and service.

The community’s recognition of Helena’s efforts as an act of scholarly activism was also an invitation for its members to recognise their own capacities as leaders to enact change. As a social construct, leadership is by and large rendered in masculinist terms. White patriarchal ideologies define what is considered “leadership” and who is seen as a “leader”. Leaders are overwhelmingly constructed as brilliant minds and charismatic visionaries, entrenched in notions of individualism, autonomy, competition, command, self-reliance and linear rationality (Calás and Smircich, 1991; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Liu, 2021; Śliwa et al., 2012). Those who fail to conform to hegemonic standards of white masculinity (as well as cis-heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, neuronormativity and the elite classes) are often disregarded as leaders, assumed to lack the qualities required to enact social change.

The first workshop delivered in March 2021 offered a textbox at registration for participants to volunteer what they are struggling with the most. Members reported that they felt isolated, alone and lacking in mentorship and a support network. Some internalised their struggles, stating that they felt they were victim to “self-imposed pressures”, the “impostor syndrome”, “lack of confidence”, or simply taking on too many research projects. Many responses described a sense of helplessness to enact change within oppressive systems, most notably, cultures marked by sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity and neuronormativity, such as “fighting for gender equality in a country that thinks that there’s no longer need for it”, “white ignorance”, “gendered and raced privilege” and “a history of sexual harassment in my department”. Helen shared an invitation to attend this workshop with members of her network who had disclosed to her their own experiences of oppression and exclusion within their organisations. Helen saw this invitation as a means of communicating her support and belief in the stories told by colleagues and friends about how the institution of academia had presented real challenges. She regarded the workshop as a potential resource as well as a principled space to discuss these experiences; an invitation designed to share.

The sense of navigating a system alone was also reflected in the accounts of academics who struggled to meet institutional demands to publish. One member reported their difficulties “circumventing the hardened orthodoxies of journals” and another affirmed that “academic systems (formal and informal) can be baffling to so many of us who don’t grow up with connections to this world”.

As the community developed, members also began to claim their power to challenge the oppressive cultures of their institutions. For instance, a Haitian scholar working in the United States reached out and shared her resignation letter stepping down as the Department Chair. Her letter enumerated the misogynoir and exploitation she experienced in her leadership role. She expressed her resolve that she did not need to perform “leadership-as-usual” and recognised that the most powerful action she could take as a leader was to refuse to lead within a white patriarchal institution.

Other community members took smaller though still meaningful steps. An emerging scholar shared one of her recent publications, introducing it as a series of reflections around “women’s leadership and mental wellbeing, trying to publish while balancing self-care, fear of being left behind, the need for a clear vision and voice”. She reported that she had begun questioning the career advice she had received from a senior colleague who told her that the “trouble” with her scholarship was that it “doesn’t fit neatly into any one discipline” and while she agreed with his assessment, she revealed that her interdisciplinary perspective that spanned both practitioner and personal standpoints was still valuable “even if it … doesn’t have a clear home”.

Leadership was reimagined within this community as being about service, generosity and ultimately uplifting others to make an impact, not self-aggrandisement. Unlike conventional accounts of leadership, the work of leadership was recognised as labour and community members spoke frankly of the sacrifices required to offer this kind of care:

Although men may seem like the current beneficiaries of masculinist models of leadership, patriarchal ideologies are oppressive of everybody. The rigid gender binary, assumptions of cis- and heteronormativity, gender hierarchy and gender norms constrain the full humanities of people of all genders and sexual identities. As a producer of cultural meanings, patriarchal ideologies have shaped leadership in ways that valorise individual competition and domination. Mobilising knowledge towards feminist scholarly activism has the potential to promote liberatory leadership within and beyond the academy.

The feminist values underlying this effort of knowledge mobilisation served to distinguish the website from other higher education resources. Teaching guides and academic advice are abundant on the internet, but the information shared on institutional websites typically recite institutional policies and processes in formal and sterile tones. University resources rarely acknowledge the barriers in academia for marginalised staff and students or provide strategies for navigating them. Community members often became advocates of the website, circulating these resources around their institutions and posting links on staff forums.

For some, circulating links to the website was an act of resistance. Whether they subtly linked to a reading list of feminist books or shared a blog post on harassment and bullying in the academy, community members signalled to problems in their institutions while maintaining a certain distance from the critique as they were sharing resources from someone else’s website.

The website and its associated activities co-created in community was a knowledge mobilisation project that sought to make an impact through a scholarly activist ethic. This article has relied on the authors’ records and recollections of community members’ unsolicited testimonies. Had the identification and measurement of impact been a more deliberate element of project design, many more sources of data would have been collected and tracked across the life of the project, where it may have been valuable if member feedback was systematically captured through formal surveys with website visitors, newsletter subscribers and workshop participants.

That said, the organic nature of this project also enriched the processes of community-building and kept the website and its activities protected from a neoliberal logic of evaluation. The community formed in part as a salve against the dehumanising tendencies of the academy and it is possible that formal measurement would have altered the community dynamics.

The emails and messages from the community suggested that the website offered a container through which they could reimagine themselves as “leaders” – scholar-activists with the knowledge and skills to transform interlocking systems of oppression (Combahee River Collective, 1983) in the academy and beyond. The website contributed to the sociopolitical redefinition of what counts as “leadership” and who gets to be a “leader”. It addressed the ways marginalised people felt excluded from this title and sought to empower them to reclaim their voice and direct it towards creating a more just world.

At an institutional level, the website offered its members the tools to develop leadership capability through both individual and collective scholarship, writing and publishing. Academics formed reading and writing groups in their universities and directed the resources from the website towards individual and organisational professional development.

As a PhD candidate and community member, Helen experienced the impacts of undertaking scholarly activism within and beyond her institution in different ways. The pushback she experienced manifested in her own hesitation; while her university didn’t communicate any explicit limitations to the scope of her work, a sense of caution developed around her project’s focus on race and class. Advice about theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches was framed as well-intentioned, but steered her back to more conventional qualitative methods, less “uncomfortable” theory. While Helen proceeded with her research, her caution then found her limiting when and with who she spoke about the website and the online community that had bolstered this determination, often choosing not to mention this experience that had become so central to her development as a scholar. The importance of speaking truth to power was tempered by a strategic need for safety. Online, she used Instagram and Twitter to amplify marginalised voices, to connect with and encourage her friends and family towards social justice.

Many community members developed a parasocial relationship with Helena, detailing candid stories of their experiences with sexism, racism, disability and trauma, while also sharing their recent publications and drafts-in-progress for feedback. Helena often got the sense that this was the first time members were confiding their experiences with violence and bullying outside their family and friends. There were rarely any explicit requests with these testimonies, but they seemed laden with a yearning for another to bear witness and Helena sought to respond to all of them. At the height of community involvement when the newsletters drew in around 1,000 active readers each month, she spent 4–5 h weekly reading and responding to emails and messages. The care labour of attending to communications with members became increasingly untenable.

In retrospect, Helena had begun to burn out running the website. The website, newsletter and social media accounts centred around her. The community that developed comprised primarily of one-on-one connections with Helena, and as such, might only be considered a limited form of “community”. The two workshops enabled community members to meet and interact with one another, forming relationships beyond Helena, but only when members participated live and actively contributed through the video and text chats. To a lesser extent, social media enabled members to connect with one another through the comment threads, and every so often, one member would contact another when Helena promoted their work on her website and in her newsletters. It is possible other interactions between members occurred beyond the scope of this autoethnographic reflection.

On occasion, the expectation of knowledge dissemination would be transferred by some community members onto others. Helen had established bonds with other community members. While this was supportive and constructive overall, members’ expectations were sometimes challenging to manage. In one case, a member regularly sought information from Helen about the website, workshops and how best to connect with Helena for further development and possible professional opportunities. While Helen was also committed to providing care labour as well as broadly framed academic advice, this relationship became difficult to maintain. The uneven distribution of support in these exchanges served as a reminder of the care and reflection with which scholar activist community building should be undertaken.

Our experiences with the website suggest that knowledge can be co-created through a mobilisation project and its benefits shared, but the costs might not be evenly distributed. Some community members assumed that the website was funded by Helena’s institution or formally recognised as part of her role. Few also knew the size the community had grown to and presumed the community – and thus the labour involved in maintaining it – was smaller than what it had become. Without strong and formalised structures of co-ownership and shared responsibility, the labour of maintaining the community ultimately proved unsustainable.

Should we seek to build communities like this in the future, we would be inclined to distribute responsibilities more widely as well as seek resourcing for labour from the outset. A prevailing culture of paternalism in the academy also created unspoken expectations around free mentorship. The true costs of mentorship, both the economic costs of training and time and the emotional costs of providing trauma-informed care labour, needs to be accounted for in the academy to make scholarly activist impact more tenable and sustainable.

The website and associated social media accounts was retired in June 2023 when the web hosting account expired, though activities slowed down around six months earlier. While the blog continued to grow in organic visitors and downloads, Helena continued to receive emails from visitors about their experiences in the academy that were sometimes challenging to read. She decided she needed a greater separation from the website to focus on her postpartum recovery. The experience of running the website, hosting the workshops and facilitating the mentorship program revealed the tensions between traditional and feminist definitions of impact and institutional and community expectations for support and belonging.

Growing institutional demands for academics to demonstrate impact through their research are often understood through traditional, masculinist ideals. In the process of university pressures to maximise one’s impact and reporting said impact through quantifiable measures, academics are compelled to engage in the kinds of self-aggrandising identity work that reflect wider ideologies of patriarchy, imperialism, neoliberalism and capitalism.

In the co-creation of impact between Helena and the website’s community, the absence of one stakeholder – the university – was noticeably felt. As we previously discussed, the former and current academics in the community reported strikingly similar stories of burnout and bullying within academia. It then seemed as though the website became a surrogate institution, with many community members expecting not only support and belonging, but also psychoemotional healing from the community.

Despite their absence, universities benefited from the impact co-created through the website. The collaborative knowledge mobilisation labour by the community generated teaching resources, professional mentorship and development, care for health and well-being, and ultimately boosted research productivity. Helen credits the successful completion of her PhD in large part to the support and insights gained through her membership in this community. Traditional academic models lack opportunities for marginalised academics to voice experiences of navigating challenges, which can limit avenues for growth and constrain opportunities for development. Consistent engagement with this community throughout the project motivated Helen not only to deliver her doctoral dissertation, but to remain focused on the pursuit of an academic career with an ongoing commitment to furthering feminist impact in academia.

This experience raises questions about who bears the costs of impact. In this case, the labour of redressing harms caused by the lack of diversity and inclusion in academia were borne by marginalised academics – the very people harmed by the oppressive conditions in academia. The sustained labour of community-building demonstrated throughout this project was generally unrecognised and thus unrewarded by the members’ institutions. Many members participated in workshops outside business hours and contributed time beyond their contracted workloads. Helen experienced a further extension of this time, undertaking additional community-building work to engage regularly with other members via social media. Helena was ultimately unable to maintain the website alongside her full-time academic role and retired the website and its associated activities.

In our concluding reflections, we offer that this project and the groundswell of interest that emerged around it suggest that much of academia remains an inhospitable space for academics, particularly those with marginalised identities. Universities could play a more active role in co-creating (and co-sponsoring) interventions that can make a meaningful impact in empowering its workers to engage in knowledge mobilisation. Financial funding explicitly to support knowledge mobilisation efforts may be helpful, or expanded funding for research with a strategic knowledge mobilisation plan. Institutions could also recognise how the ways research impact is traditionally conceived and measured may marginalise academics who do not conform to white patriarchal norms. More broadly, cultures of harassment and bullying need to be accounted for in academic institutions as organisational violence may frustrate existing efforts to mobilise knowledge yet creating institutional environments where scholarly activist knowledge mobilisation is sorely needed.

While many universities do invest resources in the professional development and health and well-being of its staff, the experiences reported by the community members in this project suggest that this investment may not be consistent and tend to overlook more marginalised academics, such as precarious, disabled, women, LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC academics. Taking the development of all its knowledge mobilisers seriously, universities will be able to fulfil its purpose of generating diverse knowledge that have the potential to make positive changes in their community and the world.