when niche research pays off

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In my second-to-last year of grad school, I was asked to give a research talk as part of my program’s prospective student day. My talk was representing the “educational technology” part of the program, and the incomparable Kristy Robinson gave a talk reresenting the “educational psychology” part (to this day, when I’m struggling with a bout of imposter syndrome, I still remind myself that my grad program let me present alongside someone of Kristy’s caliber, so I must have something going for me).

This experience was great for a lot of reasons, but one of the memories I treasure most was a comment that Josh Rosenberg made when introducing my talk. I was sharing a then-new paper that I’d written with my advisor documenting how teachers (and others) in France (and elsewhere) used the #educattentats Twitter hashtag to discuss how to respond to the November 2015 Paris attacks in the classroom. In introducing my talk, Josh quipped that this was the kind of paper that only I would write—not that I was the only one crazy enough to find the topic important, but the subject matter happened to fall at the perfect center of a Venn diagram of my interests: Twitter research, education, and France. As sad as the subject matter was, Josh was right—I had taken on the project because I had found it personally interesting along a number of dimensions, and I figured that was reason enough to do the work. It seems to have paid off, because this paper remains my most-cited by far.

When I left grad school and took a job in the School of Information Science here at UK (instead of in a College of Education, like I’d expected), I felt like I had even more freedom to pursue research that “only I would do.” Joined by colleagues here at UK—and Sarah Gretter at MSU, whose Francophonie had also been invaluable during the #educattentats paper—I’ve written another paper combining my interest in education, Twitter, and French. I’ve also gotten even more niche, though. Right now, I have two papers in press combining internet research and Mormon studies—again, the kind of thing that “only I would write” (though, of course, Josh’s kind comment has always been an exaggeration—I’m not the only one in the world who could do this work, even if studies like this seem perfectly fit for my interests). One of these papers looks at the history of the official domain names of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and how legitimacy in a religious sense interacts and conflicts with legitimacy as granted by sociotechnical systems). The other is a descriptive paper I wrote with the fantastic Amy Chapman on #DezNat, a reactionary Mormon Twitter movement that combines Latter-day Saint hyper-orthodoxy with the far-right and anti-feminism.

I’m happy to have written these two papers, and I found them both at the perfect center of my different personal and research interests. However, they are niche, and I’ve wondered if either would get enough traction to be worth the time that I’ve put into them. I was happy, then, to get an email from a grad student at another university last night, noting that our #DezNat paper was listed as “in press” on my CV and asking when it would be published. I said that we didn’t know, that we expected it to be soon, and that we’d be happy to share a preprint in the meantime. In the student’s response, she thanked us for the offer and noted:

I’m trying to find academic sources to explain Deznat and so far, all I can find are newspaper articles. Some of them referenced you and that is how I eventually found the title of your upcoming paper.

I don’t know that this work will ever be widely cited—it’s unlikely to make a big splash outside of Mormon Studies, and I don’t even know how interesting it will be within that field. However, one of my motivations for starting the project was to make sure that there was at least some academic documentation of the movement so that folks would have something to cite. Even if this student is the only person who ever wants to touch on DezNat in academic work, I think meeting that one person’s need is enough for me to say that this niche research has paid off.

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