Jasmin Mujanović
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Asymmetric Warfare: Social Media for Academics

11/6/2014

9 Comments

 
Picturevia xkcd.
Friends and colleagues alike frequently ask me how I manage to find the time to remain so engaged with social media, to write for various blogs, and give media interviews at the same time. Doesn't my academic work take a hit, they wonder, aren't I behind on my dissertation? It occurred to me at some point that my answer could and should be a "teaching moment." Not because I am some paragon of knowledge but because I know too many brilliant people, toiling in virtual obscurity, to not share what I've learnt about engaged scholarship, for lack of a better term. The short answer though is "I find the time" because I consider media, social or otherwise, to be simply part of my job requirements. It just so happens that I really enjoy my job, granted. 

Face facts: as far as less-than-ideal life choices are concerned, "a career in academia" increasingly ranks up there with indentured servitude, at least as far as some of the contemporary job market data would seem to suggest. For junior scholars, the prospects of obtaining stable, tenure-track employment, a comparative norm among our predecessors, are few and far between. As the academic labor market increasingly begins to resemble the precarious economy more broadly, with low-paid, part-time appointments drowning out fixed, well-paid positions, remaining sequestered in the proverbial ivory tower is for most only a guarantee of remaining working-poor.

For those of us still invested in the idea of at least trying to make a living in the academy, the task is to stand and be recognized. Establishing an academic profile as a young scholar or graduate student, however, is difficult. Making your work known to the reading public is difficult when your only means of publicity are paywall journals, obscure academic tomes, or overcrowded conferences. When confronted by overwhelming odds, the solution is simple, however: asymmetric warfare. For our purposes, this means harnessing the incredible potential of social media such as Twitter (and Facebook, to a lesser extent) to establish that much vaunted and necessary profile.

A basic primer then on social media for academics.

Specialize & Professionalize

If you're reading this, you've likely already got a Facebook profile though you may not necessarily have a Twitter account. Facebook, for all its popularity, is not a very good medium for gaining exposure. Your network is likely closed to your friends and acquaintances and, at the very most, numbers a few hundred people who run the gamut from high school friends to that one aunt in Virginia. In short, this is not your ideal audience. Twitter, on the other hand, when used properly is a truly dynamic marketplace of ideas and yet just minimalist enough to avoid Facebook's overload of information (and sheer noise).

Consider this: the Twitter account of Princeton University's Political Science program has (as of this writing) just under 1,900 followers. I have somewhere around 2,100. The Princeton account is part of a multi-billion dollar institution. I, on the other hand, am not. Yet our social media reach, in this respect, is very similar. This is significant.

I think of my Twitter account as an interactive business card. Over the past two years, especially, I have increasingly professionalized and specialized my account to more accurately reflect my academic interests. Where once I used to tweet about anything and everything I found vaguely interesting (essentially, a personality-driven profile), I now focus almost exclusively on a small number of professional interests (in other words, a knowledge-driven profile). In my case, this is mostly the former Yugoslavia, specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, though I occasionally venture into international affairs more broadly.

Nevertheless, for most of my followers I am "the Bosnia guy." Call it the theory of comparative advantage, if you will, and it works. Princeton has the funds and labor power to be a literal department worth of experts and expertise. You or I cannot compete with that. But by specializing, you can become a trusted source of analysis in a very specific field, a luxury brand, as it were. Don't think of yourself as the Mom 'n Pop shop being squeezed out by the Wal-Marts of the world. Think of yourself as Ferrari: custom-made.

If the urge to share all the weird things you find online nevertheless compels you, keep it to your closed Facebook account. As a general rule, however, your social media profile, from Twitter to Facebook to your (forthcoming) blogs should be consistent. You're building a brand and it's not helpful to the growth of your brand if in one breath you're a serious post-colonial theorist and in the next there's cats, so many, many pictures of cats.    

Share your Knowledge

Now that your Twitter profile is all set-up and you're letting everyone know about how important the finer points of Hungarian tax law are (as an example interest) it's time to transition from short-form to long-form writing. Think of it as the transition from undergraduate to graduate school.

When I began seriously blogging, I did so with a terrific little outfit called Politics, Re-Spun. I was so eager for the opportunity to have someone (anyone) read my writing that I produced the equivalent of free verse prose. As it turns out, there is something to be said for editorial constraints after all.

Nevertheless, the blog was a launching pad and as my focus increasingly sharpened on the Balkans, so did the attention I received, in turn. Suffice it to say, from there I moved on to more region-specific blogs which, in time, eventually led to some general interest publications.

In the process, I met wonderful people doing all kinds of wonderful things or otherwise just became aware of wonderful projects. For instance, one of my favorite Twitter accounts is @Medievalists. They have nearly 30,000 followers and tweet exclusively about the Middle Ages. On the face of it, an account dealing entirely with events from the 5th to the 15th centuries shouldn't be one of the most popular on Twitter but it is. Why?

Because the architects of @Medievalists care about their subject, they care about their field. They think it's the most important, coolest thing in the world. Presumably you, young academic, feel the same way about your field. Otherwise you wouldn't have spent the best years of your life in dimly lit libraries. You think what you do matters. But the only way it matters to other people is if they know about it. So, start writing.

Ideally, you'll jump on board with an existing venture, as I did with Politics, Re-Spun, but you can also start your own website--as I have since then--and make it a destination for everyone interested in your field. You're already writing, you're working on articles and chapters all the time. Why not share some of your work with the world? At worst, you may need to make the material marginally more accessible for a general audience, a valuable exercise in and of itself. At best, you're sitting at a conference and a tenured professor approaches you, telling you how they like your stuff. Or you get an email from a major news outlet asking you to write an op-ed for them on the subject at hand. Or a major news outlet asks you to do a TV spot or radio. And suddenly you're no longer a nameless commodity; you're an expert, an analyst, a scholar with name-recognition.

A final point on this subject bears repeating: keep at it. As with anything, success is unlikely to be immediate. But the odds are that there is an audience for whatever you're researching and sooner or later it's going to become topical--even if you're a Medievalist. You want to be ready for that moment. As a political scientist working specifically on the politics of participation and protest in southeastern Europe, for me that moment was the February protests in BiH. But crucial to seizing that opportunity was years of tweeting, blogging, and writing about BiH when, by comparison, hardly anyone in the English-language world cared about the country or the region. That's when you start.   

General Advice

With all that having been said, let's talk general principles, especially as it concerns Twitter.

-        Write, just do it. Do it every day. Twitter is great for floating those first few atoms of an idea. Then you develop these into a blog. Then the blog becomes the basis for a journal article. That's the pipeline but it begins with that first, timid injection of energy and effort at the beginning. Start today. 

-        The medium is the message. Whenever possible, make your tweets coherent and simple and therefore attractive to read. Refrain from unnecessary abbreviations. If you still have four characters left, change that "u" to "you."

-        Become a resource. Odds are, once you build a significant following (a few hundred followers), there'll be a few journalists in the bunch. These hardworking souls are your main audience as an academic attempting to broaden your impact. They need raw data, they need contacts, and they need insights. You can provide all three of those things for them. In turn, they can provide you with venues for your writing and likewise valuable media contacts. At its best, this is and ought to be a symbiotic relationship. Likewise, cut them some slack. I've spent an hour talking to some journalists only to have my name not even appear in the final article. That’s the nature of the game, there’s a pecking order. Your task is to hustle hard and make sure that the next reporter you talk to will think you important enough for inclusion. Simple.  

-        Learn the format. You learned the difference between APA and Chicago style citation at some point, now it's time to learn proper hashtag use. Think of hashtags as article keywords. As such, #thedecliningpopulationofBengaltigers is not a hashtag. #BengalTigers and #Tigers, however, is. As is #India and #conservation. Proper use of hashtags can mean the difference between four and four hundred people reading your article--and I won't even get into what it could mean for the tigers.    

-        Engage with your audience but pick your battles. Field genuine questions and critiques. Friendship and opportunity may lie at the other end--and certainly a publication. But refrain from feeding the trolls. Make ready use of the block button and move on with your life.

-        Be civil. Twitter is a remarkable tool for interacting with the "celebrities" of your field. Occasionally, these are people whose policies or writing you may really object to. Nevertheless, diplomacy is an art form to be practiced daily. A mean-spirited put-down may feel great the moment you write it—but will it change the thinking or behavior of your interlocutor? And remember, you're performing for an audience. So while a well-composed critique may not convince your opponent, it's the crowd you're trying to sway, above all.

-        People love pictures. If you're promoting a piece of writing, embed a picture with the tweet. It makes a significant difference to the amount of people sharing and re-tweeting the text in question. By the same token, if you come across a neat picture somehow related to your field, share it. Things you find interesting and are related to your discipline always make for terrific content, whether they're news articles, videos, or photographs. 

-        Be humble. Those first few opportunities to share your writing that come along may not be the high-profile platforms you were hoping for but they're only the first step. Credibility is something you can help to build, after all. Even the most upstart publication is a space, put your foot in that door, and ask if you can have a moment of your audience's time. Then show them that really incredible archival photograph you discovered and tweeted out moments earlier.

-        Be generous and help your friends (and soon to be friends). Over the past few months, I've been approached by several media outlets asking me for a quote or a blog on a given subject. Either because I didn't have the time or because I really didn't think I was the best person for the job, I passed. But I always make an effort to respond by offering alternatives. Often, these alternatives are friends of mine. Sometimes they're just people I know from Twitter, who I barely interact with at all. But I've read their writing, I think they're smart, I know they're capable, so I pass their info along. Maybe one day they return the favor, maybe they don't. Regardless, pay it forward.    

So, that's that. Hopefully some of this advice will prove useful to you. If it does, share it with your friends and if you have questions, let me know in the comments below. Now, go on, show us what you've been working on—I bet it's awesome. 

9 Comments

March & April Review

5/7/2014

2 Comments

 
The blog has not been updated in a few weeks but it's not been for lack of activity on my part, rest assured. There's been plenty of conferences, panels and talks that have kept me quite busy. 

The site has also expanded, with a new media section where folks can check out some of my recent commentaries and the journo crowd can also get a sense of where my commentary has appeared previously when thinking about contacting me.

In this vein, I'd like to draw your attention especially to the pieces on openDemocracy--a great network that has been kind enough to publish a lot of my recent writing. And my thanks especially to Heather McRobie who runs the terrific 50.50 blog over on openDemocracy and who has been my primary interlocutor there. 

For those who may have missed some the recent analyses, here's a quick review:

- Democracy blooming at the margins: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine and Taiwan 

- Elections and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina

- The evolution of Bosnia’s protest movement: an interview with Jasmin Mujanović

I've also posted some new strictly academic writing over on my Academia.edu profile where the Princip, Valter, Pejić and the Raja text has proven especially popular. 

In addition, the Emerging Democracies blog has also been garnering attention. My recent interview with Josip Glaurdic on the "Yugoslavian dimensions" of the crisis in Ukraine has proven to be popular and the EDI events schedule is also frequently refreshed.

For day to day analyses, of course, you can always grab a hold of me on Twitter. In the meantime, thanks for all your feedback, support, and shares. Ciao! 

2 Comments

An Alternative Reading List on the Balkans & Yugoslavia

9/29/2013

11 Comments

 

As I regularly blog and tweet about the Balkans (aside from writing about the region in a scholarly fashion), I often field questions about the literature and perspectives that have shaped my own views on the space, its histories and its peoples. I thought then that this personal blog might be an appropriate place to begin compiling this information in a slightly more systematic fashion.  

Some examples of what I have in mind already exist, of course. However, as far as I know, anything akin to comprehensive survey of critical scholarship on (the former) Yugoslavia does not exist. Since such a project could not possibly be complied by any one person, least of all a junior scholar, and since “critical” scholarship will mean different things to different people, I earnestly invite my colleagues to contribute their own suggestions. In the meantime, I will begin fleshing out ways to divide this list, by themes and regions, as necessary, and also to include texts of a theoretical nature that I have found indispensable to my own studies. The latter of these will follow at the end of the first "regional" list. Finally, I'll aim to include worthwhile online platforms for ongoing coverage of current events.  

If we find that the list grows, I would be happy to create a dedicated space for it on the main page of this site, rather than a mere blog post.

Finally, at no point should this list be taken as exhaustive, of debates, ideas or the contributions of individual authors, or indicative of anything other than my own personal sympathies and leanings. Though, of course, I hasten to add that I do not necessarily agree with the argument(s) of every text on this list in their entirety either. This perhaps somewhat eclectic collection is merely an introduction, I hope, into thinking about the Balkans and Yugoslavia, differently.  

The Balkans & Yugoslavia

Andreas, P. (2008). Blue Helmets, Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

Anscombe, F. F. (2012). The Balkan Revolutionary Age. The Journal of Modern History, 572-606.

Anzulović, B. (1999). Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. New York and London: New York University Press.

Arsenijević, D. (2007). Against Opportunistic Criticism. eipcp: institut européen pour des politiques culturelles en devenir: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0208/arsenijevic/en

Arsenijević, D. (2010). Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

Bakunin, M. (1848). Appeal to the Slavs. Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1848/pan-slavism.htm

Bakunin, M. (1873). Statism and Anarchy. Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm

Banac, I. (1988). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. London & Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Barkey, K. (1994). Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Biserko, S. (2011, October (Volume 6, No. 4). Perceptions of Serbia’s Elite in Relation to the Dayton Agreement. Spirit of Bosnia: An International, Interdisciplinary, Bilingual Online Journal: http://www.spiritofbosnia.org/current-issue/perceptions-of-serbia%E2%80%99s-elite-in-relation-to-the-dayton-agreement/

Biserko, S. (2012). Yugoslavia's Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism. Belgrade: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee.

Campbell, D. (1998 ). National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Campbell, D. (1999). Apartheid cartography: the Political Anthropology and Spatial Effects of International Diplomacy in Bosnia. Political Geography, 395-435.

Chandler, D. (2000). Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton. London: Pluto Press.

Chandler, D. (2001). Bosnia: The Democracy Paradox. Current History , 100(644), 114-119.

Chandler, D. (2006). Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Building in Bosnia. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, P. J. (1999). Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.

Djokić, D. (2003). Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918-1992. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Djokić, D. (2007). Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Donia, R. (2007, November 9). The Proximate Colony: Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian Rule. Kakanien Revisted: http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/RDonia1.pdf

Donia, R. J. (2006). Sarajevo: A Biography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Donia, R. J., & Fine Jr., J. V. (1994). Bosnia & Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gagnon, V. (2004). The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

Glaurdić, J. (2011). The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia. New Haven & London : Yale University Press.

Glenny, M. (2011). The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999. New York: Penguin Books.

Grubačić, A. (2011). Don't Mourn: Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia. Oakland: PM Press.

Hassiotis, L. (2011). The Ideal of Balkan Unity from a European Perspective (1789–1945). Balcanica, 209-229.

Hoare, M. A. (2004). How Bosnia Armed. London: Saqi Books.

Hoare, M. A. (2007). The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. London: Saqi Books.

Hromadzic, A. (2011). Bathroom Mixing: Youth Negotiate Democracy in Postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34(2), 268-289.

Kitromilides, P. M. (1989). 'Imagined Communities' and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans. European History Quarterly, 19, 149-194.

Lampe, J. R., & Jackson, M. R. (1982). Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lovrenović, I. (2001). Bosnia: A Cultural History. New York : New York University Press.

Magaš, B. (2003). On Bosnianess. Nations and Nationalism, 19-23.

Malcolm, N. (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. London: Macmillian London Limited.

Mazower, M. (2002). The Balkans: A Short History . New York: Modern Library.

Mazower, M. (2002). Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century . The American Historical Review, 1158-1178.

Meckfessel, S. (2009). Suffled How it Gush: A North American Anarchist in the Balkans. Oakland: AK Press.

Milojković-Djurić, J. (2000). Benjamin von Kállay’s Role in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1882–1903: Habsburg’s Policies in an Occupied Territory. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, 211-220.

Mišina, D. (2010). “Spit and Sing, My Yugoslavia”: New Partisans, social critique and Bosnian poetics of the patriotic. Nationalities Papers, 265-289.

Morton, T. (2006, February ). Manufacturing ancient hatreds. Griffith Review: http://griffithreview.com/edition-7-the-lure-of-fundamentalism/manufacturing-ancient-hatreds

Mueller, J. (2000). The Banality of "Ethnic War". International Security , 25(1), 42-70.

Mujkić, A. (2007). We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis . Constellations, 112-128.

Mujkić, A. (2008). We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis . Sarajevo: Centar za ljudska prava Univerziteta u Sarajevu.

 
Nixon, R. (1993). Of Balkans and Bantustans. Transitions, 60, 4-26. 

Ramet, S. P. (2005). Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Cambirdge : Cambridge University Press.

Roudometof, V. (2001). Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Schwartz, S. (1999). Beyond "Ancient Hatreds". Policy Review.

Sells, M. A. (1998). The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press.

Silber, L., & Little, A. (1996). Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation . New York: Penguin Books .

Simms, B. (2002). Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia. New York: Penguin Books.

Spaskovska, L. (2011). Stairway to Hell: The Yugoslav Rock Scene and Youth during the Crisis Decade of 1981–1991. East Central Europe, 355-372.

Stavrianos, L. S. (1942). Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement Toward Balkan Unity in Modern Times. Northampton, Massachusetts: Department of History of Smith College.

Toal, G., & Dhalman, C. T. (2011). Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Todorova, M. (2009). Imagining the Balkans: Updated Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Udovički, J., & Ridgeway, J. (2000). Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia. Durham: Duke University Press.

Vodovnik, Ž. (2013). Democracy as a Verb: New Mediations on the Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 14(4), 433-452.

Wilmer, F. (2002). The Social Construction of Man, the State and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia. New York: Routledge.


Woodward, S.L. (1995). Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington: The Brookings Institution.  

Zahra, T. (2010). Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis. Slavic Review, 93-119.

Theoretical & Thematic Texts

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origin of Nationalism . London; New York: Verso.

Anderson, P. (1974). Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: NLB.

Antonio, R. J. (2000). After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism. American Journal of Sociology, 40-87.


Bakunin, M. (1873). Statism and Anarchy. Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm

Clastres, P. (1989). Societies Against the State. New York: Zone Books.

Day, R. J. (2005). Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Toronto: Pluto Press & Between the Lines Books.

Ferguson, J. (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, And Bureaucratic Power In Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. (2013). The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau. 

Kropotkin, P. (1897). The State: Its Historic Role. Panarchy: http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1897.state.html

Manin, B. (1997). The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oppenheimer, F. (2007). The State. Montreal: Black Rose Books .

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Scott, J. C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, J. C. (2012). Two Cheers for Anarchism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Volkov, V. (2002). Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wolin, S. (1985). Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth. Social Research, 217-239.

Wolin, S. (1994). Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy. In J. P. Euben, J. Wallach, & J. Ober, Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy  (pp. 29-58). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wolin, S. (1996). Fugitive Democracy. In S. Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political  (pp. 31-45). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wolin, S. (2008). Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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