Digital Alchemy

Moya Bailey 0:02
ICA presents

Hello, and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Sarah J Jackson to join me in discussing friendship and collaboration, how the two can help cultivate exceptional scholarly works in the academic world, and how to maintain a space of respect as colleagues (and as friends). And though she’s not on to speak with us today, we must shout-out Brooke Foucault Welles, whose friendship, scholarship, and collaboration are integral to this conversation between Sarah and I today, which will become clear imminently…

Sarah J. Jackson 0:57
Thanks for having me Moya. It's fun to get to chat with you about this. Brooke and I were hired as assistant professors at the same time. Our offices were next door to each other, but our work (at least we thought) wasn't very similar. We liked each other, we were new colleagues, and we would chit-chat in the hallway. It wasn't until the #myNYPDcase that I walked over there and said, “Hey, I'm watching this thing happen on Twitter, I totally want to write about this, here's my framework, code, et cetera, et cetera." She was like, “I don't know about that, but what you need is network science." I was like, “I don't know about that." Basically, we handed each other books from our own bookshelves to read about what we were doing and what our framework was.

Moya Bailey 2:53
Oh wow.

Sarah J. Jackson 2:54
That started not only us being inspired to collaborate on answering these questions with multiple methods and approaches, but really a friendship. We're both junior women faculty; we're both navigating the ins and outs of what that means. And it means a lot. I had started a junior feminist faculty writing group that Brooke joined, and later you joined, and we built our friendship from there. It's interesting, because it wasn't like we went into it, “Oh, we're going to become good friends." We became good friends in part because both of us, in the process of collaboration and in the process of being colleagues, found that we actually really liked the other person, and that we had values in common.

Moya Bailey 3:55
I love that. I feel so blessed to come into the partnership and connection through that feminist faculty writing group that you started. As I recall, it was us talking about our different work on Twitter hashtags that got us thinking about the #HashtagActivism book. Do you remember how that came together?

Sarah J. Jackson 2:54
I obviously knew who you were because black feminist scholars knew Moya Bailey before everybody else knew Moya Bailey, let's put it that way. And we were affiliated with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the time – and you were as well. We invited you to the group, and that group was great because we didn't just get together as a writing group and do check-ins around our projects. We also were very careful about curating it so that it was a safe space for queer feminist faculty and women-identifying and non-binary-identifying people to come and vent about some of the things that they were experiencing that weren't about their research. Sometimes they were venting about things related to research, but sometimes it was about something problematic that a colleague said, something that a student did that was hurtful, or other things. We had a “Vegas rules” policy that what happens in a feminist faculty writing group stays there, and we enforced that. We were excited to have you in the group, and part of that was that because we found out that you were working on stuff around #GirlsLikeUs, which was exciting. It wasn't just that we figured out we were working on some similar questions, or we had some similar interests. We got to know you by being in the group, hearing about what you were working on, and discovering you're a lovely person who we love. I've been surprised by how often I get asked a question about, “How would you collaborate? How can we write a book together?”, and I found that sometimes people get stumped about how to build these collaborations this natural collaboration evolves. You, I and Brooke’s case wasn't that we cold-emailed each other; It had nothing to do with what I would say is sort of the capitalist idea of networking. It actually had to do with community building, where we cared about each other and learned about each other, and knew about the hard things in each other's lives. We also discovered that we had similar intellectual interests and questions and grew to respect one another's work, and what each of us could offer to a project. Maybe it doesn't work this way for other people, but I try to always tell people if you really want to be a collaborative scholar, and you really want to work with other people, build community first. Build this basis where community can thrive. Be a person that your colleagues can trust. first. I think collaboration goes a lot easier than if the person you're collaborating with doesn't know you, or doesn't know anything about your caretaking responsibilities, or your personal journey.

Such a good point. I wonder if you have any significant collaboration stories before the unique moment at Northeastern that made this collaboration possible?

Well, I have to shout out my graduate school advisor, Catherine R. Squires, who I worked with in graduate school. She set a really good model for me on collaboration. She's a wonderful, generous scholar. I started working with her at Michigan; I moved with her to Minnesota during my PhD process, and I had obviously worked with her in the capacity of advisee research assistant, and teaching assistant, et cetera. But we did collaborate on a paper around the 2008 election, and she really showed me what collaboration looked like. In that case, I wasn't just her assistant being given tasks to do; We were really meeting, talking through ideas, and exchanging concepts. She really encouraged me to have a voice and challenge things that she thought we should write. Catherine is also a person who very much models this “building of community” that I'm talking about in academia. That was the main collaboration I had that came before. Part of what had prompted me when I was at Northeastern to start that feminist faculty writing group was that I was missing a feeling of collegiality, and of camaraderie, and of relationship building that's part of my politics in the world: building community and lifting as I climb, so to speak. We should be in this together. I did what you sometimes have to do, which is figure out how to create that for myself, and I'm really grateful that I did, because then it turned into our collaboration.

Moya Bailey 7:20
Yes! What's so interesting about your story with Catherine is that it's a collaboration that is across different hierarchies that people normally assume are insurmountable in the academy. I'll say for myself I was a little intimidated, initially, working with you and Brooke, because you all were more advanced and closer to tenure than I was. When I met you all, I was just transitioning from postdoc to the tenure track and I never felt from you all this sense that I was not “up here”, and that was a really wonderful way to enter that collaboration.

Sarah J. Jackson 8:00
Thanks for saying that. I'm glad you felt that way. I think this is a touchy thing to navigate and is why the community building aspect is important. There are rank status hierarchy differences built into, for better or worse, the way the academy works. I do think that I tend to approach all professional relationships in a more casual, “we're all on the same level” sort of way. For example, I learn so much from my graduate students every semester. They are reading (for the first time) something that I've read ten times, but they see something I've never thought of before. I love that. I love learning from them. But you can't escape the fact that I'm grading them; There is a hierarchy. But I do think relationship and trust building makes it much easier to see the way that is a constucted idea...

Moya Bailey 8:50
Do you have a favorite moment from our collaboration?

Sarah J. Jackson 8:54
I have so many favorite moments. The gift that you, I, and Brooke have is that we were all at the same institution. We got to actually sit in the same room and write together. The relationships mattered. In a different professional setting, if someone who I didn't know really cared about me, loved me, and was my friend was like, “Oh, you're grumpy, you need food,” I would be extremely offended, and it would be very unprofessional. I think that story is a micro-example of the ways in which you can actually build community and friendship while you're doing the work.

Moya Bailey 9:28
I think one of my favorites is from our one and only public event, where we got to celebrate our book. Just being in that space together, and seeing us inadvertently match in terms of our sartorial decisions, the care we took in terms of seeing our people show up for us, I thought was just a lovely representation. Even though this was an academic text, it was clear to me (by who we brought, and who was in the audience), that we understood the work to be existing and possible because of our community relations. It was bigger than just our academic endeavor.

Sarah J. Jackson 10:14
We had organizers and activists in the audience, including Genie Lauren who contributed to the book. We had folks who are friends and community outside of academia and other professions. That's such a lovely memory… You can tell we've spent a lot of time actually in conversation with each other about these topics, and when COVID first hit, the transition to virtual wasn't easy. We actually had all these wonderful book talks in community spaces that had been planned in various cities, and they were all cancelled.

Moya Bailey 10:45
But we might get to do it again. I wonder if you'll share the good news with the people?

Sarah J. Jackson 10:52
Brooke, Moya, and I are going to write another book together! We're going to write a book called, How to Write Together. What we have found in the aftermath of this successful collaboration, is that a lot of people want to collaborate. There's a lot of mixed messages in the academy, we've heard folks say to us privately, “I heard if you co-author then it doesn't really count”, or “I've heard these horror stories about co-authoring with senior scholars”, or “I have this horrible experience where, as a graduate student, I was taken advantage of by another scholar." We are like, “Actually, it's
totally possible." It's possible through building relationships. Yes, there are best practices, there are do's and don'ts, but the three of us have decided that we're here for collaboration. I think we all three really strongly believe that the collaborations that we've done together were because of all three of us. We simply could not have produced the level of ethical, innovative, new, and important scholarship that we produce together without each other.

Moya Bailey 12:05
Absolutely.

Sarah J. Jackson 12:07
Each of us was perfectly capable of studying online, hashtag for discourse, politics or network. We each had our niche, and we each could have written our own book called #HashtagActivism. But the thing that we discovered is that we were able to study these hashtags, and these topics, through collaborative methods in a way that we think is more complete, than if we had done it on our own. I think often about the fact that there are so many questions in the world that are important to answer that would be better answered through more collaboration, and people thinking together.

Moya Bailey 12:45
Thank you so much for taking the time, Sarah. it was such a pleasure to talk to you.

Sarah J. Jackson 12:49
Yes, absolutely. Thanks so much.

Moya Bailey 12:53
Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast
Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. This episode was produced by Daniel Christain and Jo Lampert. Our executive producers are DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guest, and Digital Alchemy overall. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai