Beyond visibility

In today’s academic landscape, scholars are increasingly dependent on digital platforms to sustain their careers, enhance visibility, and meet institutional demands for public engagement. While the digitalization of academic work offers significant opportunities for dissemination and collaboration, it also generates new forms of precarity and exposure. Higher Education’s 2020 study has shown that digital harassment targeting those who critique dominant structures, such as white, middle-class, or male supremacy, has become routine, revealing the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of this phenomenon. In this chapter, we aim to employ an intersectional approach to understand and explore online academic harassment, drawing on a critical literature review of research concerning online academic harassment within precarious and highly digitalized academia. Our examination posits that online academic harassment is not simply interpersonal but is also a socio-technical mechanism of governance that exploits digital affordances and neoliberal academic logic to enforce power hierarchies and marginalize dissenting or vulnerable voices.