new publication: documenting a teacher group on far-right social media

I’m pleased to be able to finally share the publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology of an article that Dan Krutka and I have been working on for some time, which documents activity in a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform (which we intentionally don’t identify within the paper). Here’s a link to a full-text, read-only version of the article, and here’s the abstract as a preview:

The affinity space framework has proven useful for explaining and understanding teacher activity on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the ‘dark side’ of teacher affinity spaces by documenting a partisan teachers’ group on an alternative social media platform. We used a mix of a priori and emergent coding to analyse screenshots of posts and comments from a public teachers’ group and group administrators’ activity on the broader platform. Findings indicate that although the group administrators began with a focus on teachers, most participants were non-teachers with political (rather than professional) concerns about US education. Furthermore, administrators both freely engaged with political talking points in their activity outside the teachers’ group and allowed the broader platform culture—including conspiratorial thinking, explicit racism and out-group villainization—to seep in. We conclude by describing how these findings correspond with the key characteristics of an affinity space, including an overlapping of affinities, a lack of concern for professional qualifications, and influence from the broader platform. These findings provide an illustrative example of how teacher affinity spaces can drift from their stated intention within the larger platform context.

I first collected this data in early 2021, so this paper has been a long time in the making. I was glad when Dan agreed to come aboard—his critical perspectives on social media were helpful here, and having someone to be accountable to helped make sure that this actually became something rather than a collection of screenshots on my computer. It took a while to find a home for this paper, which is admittedly outside of the normal realm of educational technology research, even within the “sub realm” that focuses on teacher use of social media. The route we eventually took, as indicated by the title, was to investigate this in terms of James Paul Gee’s affinity space framework and to illustrate the ways in which the characteristics of affinity spaces are not always desirable. It still took some work to get this published—we had wonderful reviewers at BJET, but the journal expressed concerns late in the process about the potentially controversial nature of our findings, and that led to some frustrating delays right at the time that we thought we’d finally made it.

Although we found evidence of explicit conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, racism, and Islamophobia within the group (none of which seemingly went challenged by administrators or members), one of the more interesting findings is how banal a lot of the content was. I’m increasingly keen on using the affinity space framework to draw attention to areas of ambiguity and overlap, and I think that plays out nicely here. Within our data, we find clear evidence of far-right discourses, but there is also everyday teacher talk, and even some of the partisan discourses aren’t necessarily objectionable. I don’t want to understate the obvious red flags in the data, but I think it’s just as notable that there were cases where it was hard to draw lines between appropriate and inappropriate participation in a teacher group. The more that I study far-right-tinged groups on social media, the more that emerges as a problem in and of itself, and even though it wasn’t built for that, I appreciate the way that the affinity space framework can call scholarly attention to that sort of thing.

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