Hating the Humanities

Some Consequences of Context Collapse

The Miguel de Cervantes Memorial, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, vandalised during the June 2020 protests. Photo credit: AP

On 23 March 2024, the conservative British journalist Charlotte Gill posted on X the headline of a Daily Telegraph story she had just written. “Shakespeare made theatre too ‘white, male and cisgender’, tax-payer funded study finds,” she wrote, going on to inform her X readers that the three-year funded project, “Diverse Alarums: Centering Marginalised Communities in the Contemporary Performance of Early Modern Plays,” had received over £800,000 in funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Quoting the project’s abstract, Gill reported that its investigators sought to challenge “the disproportionate representation of William Shakespeare in scholarship and performance.”¹ Their means of doing so would be to stage a radical new production of Galatea, a play by Shakespeare’s now-neglected dramatic contemporary, John Lyly, which had not had a full public performance since 1588.

Pitching Galatea’s contemporary relevance and attractiveness to the AHRC in unabashedly presentist terms, the investigators had represented it as “an extraordinarily important early modern English play” that:

offers contemporary performers and audiences an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives in a cast of characters that includes very few cisgender adult males, and it builds towards the celebration of a queer and trans marriage.

Indexed under the subject headings “William Shakespeare” and “Woke,” on the other hand, Gill’s Telegraph story was never likely to respond to these scholarly provocations in the spirit in which they were offered. Instead, following a by-now familiar structural formula for writing a “culture war” story for the right-wing British press, Gill solicited quotes from a group of non-academic commentators—the writer Lionel Shriver, the author and comedian Andrew Doyle, and the Tory Party MP and Culture, Media and Sport committee member Jane Stevenson. Each of these “lay experts” duly dunked on the project—and the research agenda it represented—in predictable (though colourful) terms, variously dismissing it as “a freakish comical footnote in theatrical history,” “conformist and insipid propaganda,” and hyper-reductive “cultural click-bait.”

Encouraged by the traction her initial post about Shakespeare and Lyly gained on X, over the next few days Gill posted screenshots of other funded projects she had evidently found by entering keywords like “decolonising,” “queer,” and “identity” into the UK Research and Innovation’s open-access Gateway to Research database. These included a project on “Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education, and Community Engagement” and another entitled “Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Trans and Queer Archives.” Assuming her followers would agree that these projects were transparently worthless based on their titles alone, Gill likened them to “pseudoscience” and crystal healing. “Why does the taxpayer want to fund any of this?”, she asked. “Paying for students to learn medicine or something the economy needs, maybe/sure. But taxpayers will be amazed at what their money is going towards!” Leaning in to her self-appointed identity as whistleblower and guardian of the public purse-strings, she added that “we have to audit this nonsense,” and in doing so “we can pressure the Government to defund it.”

Inevitably, Gill’s threads soon went viral on academic Twitter. In a context where government funding for the performing and creative arts continues to be cut, no fewer than 45 British universities have announced redundancy schemes for academic staff, and many Arts and Humanities departments are shrinking, merging, or facing outright closure, the suggestion that the humanities in Britain were both winning the culture wars and wallowing in unearned cash seemed like a broadcast from an alternate reality.² As the political scientist Glen O’Hara has recently written, British universities are not merely cash-strapped:

They are living through something of a crisis of confidence, even of trust and faith. More and more, I find myself, and my colleagues, unsure of what we’re supposed to be doing any more, and certainly unclear on why we’re doing it.³

Collectively responding to (and mocking) Gill’s avowedly uninformed takes on higher education research provided academics with an opportunity to tell their side of the story, and, perhaps, to work through some of those feelings of “crisis,” “trust,” and “faith.” Andy Kesson, the principal investigator on the “Diverse Alarums” project, called Gill’s story “laughably inaccurate” and joked that the worst part of it (as a Lyly specialist) was the insinuation that he had somehow been doing Shakespeare research instead. However, Kesson’s seemingly glib response also had a serious dimension, suggesting that the Telegraph’s attention was both unwelcome and damaging. He wouldn’t be responding to Gill directly, he wrote, because on social media “direct response simply escalates the damage you are trying to oppose.” UCL scientist Adam Rutherford mockingly quote-tweeted one of Gill’s posts with:

We in academia sometimes can’t actually do research cos the piles of cash get in the way of the pipettes and books. And we have so much time too cos grants are super easy to get. People just flinging wads of cash at us.

X users who might have agreed with Gill’s initial comments about some of the more activistic projects she led with, meanwhile, began to object when she started absorbing more traditional and empirically based research projects, such as one on the economic history of the medieval English grain trade, into her “woke waste” category (apparently on the basis that she couldn’t personally see the value or interest in them). In fact, it was this post that seems to have made Gill go properly viral, perhaps because her seemingly arbitrary singling out of this very old-school project provided a convenient “quilting point” for academics to set their objections against. Gill began dismissively quote-tweeting academics who questioned her categories or judgement. When a paleoanthropologist asked Gill whether his AHRC-funded research project investigating the earliest human migrations into the Americas should have received the money, for instance, she responded in straightforward and unambiguous terms that “I think it should be cut.”

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Analysing what she called the new “networked publics” populating social media platforms at the start of the 2010s, the internet researcher dana boyd identified four main affordances that condition user experience in digital public space. Online content is, in boyd’s account, persistent—that is, it leaves a series of durable recorded traces that can be revisited and re-accessed at different points in time. It is replicable—in other words, it can be copied into new formats and contexts, or else further disseminated by other users via platform features like the X retweet/repost or Facebook share buttons. It is scalable—content that starts small can potentially be scaled up to much greater levels of visibility if enough users find it, or if a popular figure or large media outlet decides to share or feature it. Finally, online content is searchable—digital content itself (and the users who create it) can (in principle) be precisely located using the various search and browse features embedded within the platforms themselves.⁴

These affordances pose serious challenges to any online communities who want total control over how others view their profiles and content. Although feeds and follow lists can be curated according to a user’s interests, personal politics, or desire for privacy—creating in the process the illusion of dwelling online in an “epistemic bubble”—these bubbles are vulnerable to penetration from outside.⁵ Platform content is always in principle subject to the gaze of unwelcome strangers, who might use or interpret it in very different ways from what was originally intended. “Context collapse” occurs when (as on certain large platforms) multiple audiences or communities are flattened into the same context, leaving individual users unsure whose community norms hold or how to present themselves to such a broad and diverse range of gazes.⁶ Alternatively, a version of context collapse can occur very abruptly, when content produced for a small and familiar audience (whom a user knows and whose responses to posts they can usually predict) is suddenly broadcast to another, unknown and potentially much larger group of users, as when (via the replicability and scalability affordances) a small account’s tweet goes suddenly viral across the platform.

One of the replies to Gill’s “woke UKRI” threads jokingly compared what she was doing to Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok X account and Raichik’s posting strategies do vividly illustrate how the second form of context collapse works. Raichik takes TikTok videos (often from relatively small accounts) created for one set of (generally young and highly progressive) audiences and translates them into an entirely different platform context—that of her (generally very right-wing) 3 million X followers, who reply to them in predictably derisive ways and have been known to dox and harrass their original creators. Gill, similarly, took AHRC project descriptions created for one audience (the relatively small academic and administrative audiences who are the typical users of the Gateway to Research site) and broadcast them (via X and the Telegraph Online) to a much larger and very different audience, one which could not be counted on to view or interpret the projects in the way academics would.

Libs of Tiktok-style context collapse doesn’t simply cause members of formerly disparate online communities to collide in unexpected ways. It also contributes (in many cases, quite deliberately) to affective polarization—the tendency of people to become more entrenched and extreme in their political views based on their ever-intensifying dislike of political opponents.⁷ Although the “classic” understanding of the digital “filter bubble” suggests that users online are typically shielded from opposing views by algorithmic customization processes and are “shown only those views that conform to” their own, in practice (on platforms like X and Facebook) partisan communities are served a great deal of content either produced by (or reflecting negatively on) their political opponents.⁸ It is the sheer familiarity of what “the other side” says and thinks—a state of familiarity generated by repeated exposure to mediatised snippets of content purporting to represent their point of view—that breeds contempt. The effect of a “ridicule aggregator” like the Libs of TikTok X account, or the current (increasingly partisan) iteration of newspapers like The Telegraph or The Guardian, is to serve up a stream of information presenting “the other side” in discrediting terms, an effect intensified by the deliberate selection of extreme examples.⁹ It is this serial exposure to ideological irritation (via the social media stream or the 24/7 news cycle) that generates the allergic response—the perpetual inflammation—of affective polarization.

In accordance with digital polarization logic, both sides of the “woke waste in AHRC funding” episode eventually retreated into their own mutually unreconcilable positions. Joking that academics were doing funded projects “on the queer anthology of the Latin hedgehog” and then complaining about anti-intellectualism, Gill began to complain to her followers in turn about the rough ride she was getting. Academic Twitter swarmed her threads with increasingly hostile and derisive quote-tweets and replies. When Gill observed that contemporary academic research seemed to her to be written in impenetrable “gobbledygook,” the X account of the University of Strathclyde’s UCU branch replied rather nastily, as though condescending to a failing student, “It’s OK, Charlotte. You can always resit.” Increasingly piled on, Gill wrote that “I have been receiving endlessly rude messages from the great minds of this nation.” All she had done, she complained, was to share information about “their taxpayer-funded projects. And they collectively hounded me. Such thin skin. What are they so worried about? Their whingefest spurs me on.”

Factions within the opposing academic side also began to double down. In a post that received over 2500 likes, one scholar suggested that Gill’s tweet threads were intrinsically problematic in singling out research projects involving PhD students:

Call me ‘woke’, but posting researchers’ names (esp. PhD students’) in very public tweets deriding and ridiculing their work and funding status feels quite astonishingly cruel and dangerous.

This line of defence implicitly placed the affair within a securitizing or compliance framework. The suggestion that there was a power differential involved, with Gill being dominant and the singled-out PhD students (presumably) marginalised and vulnerable, implied that Gill’s actions could be read as harmful and dangerous conduct, not legitimate critique.¹⁰

Posts like this one reveal some of the inherent tensions involved in the principles of digital transparency and open access. Devised in a (perhaps) more optimistic phase of the digital revolution, the UKRI’s Gateway to Research database is described on its about page as being “open and free for all to use” in order “to enable users to search for and analyse information about our funded research and innovation.” In a more pessimistic web environment, where the old digital optimism has by now been overtaken by a fear of surveillance and attack by partisan opponents, open-access principles perhaps no longer signify in quite the same way.¹¹ To have one’s name exposed to browse and search by tagging in the metadata of the UKRI’s databases is now, it seems, to be “tagged” in the worst way—to be opened up to unwelcome visibility and the potential for targeted harrassment. According to this line of argument, publicly funded academic research is perhaps not the general public’s business after all, but should be kept out of sight in order to protect the interests of academia’s most vulnerable members.

There is, perhaps, a kind of perverse politics of recognition operating in social media spats like the “woke UKRI” episode. If positive social recognition in the pre-digital world depended on “the receipt of approval … from other persons,” the attention economies of social media platforms instead seem to traffic in misrecognition—that nagging impression that positive engagements (likes, retweets, numbers of followers, virality itself) are accruing disproportionately to others’ accounts, but not so much to our own.¹² The experiences of being righteously piled on, meanwhile, or those of being made suddenly visible to a large and unexpected audience (as in the case of those subject to Daily Mail and Telegraph-style exposés) produce their own uniquely intense feelings of collective disapproval and individual self-exposure.

In this environment, disapproval gains a new salience. For Gill, what she experiences as “hounding” and “whingefests” from academics evidently burnishes her own ideal self-image as a plain-spoken truth-teller battling against “woke waste” on behalf of the British taxpayer. (They wouldn’t be hounding me if I weren’t onto something!) A sense of collective identity operating via the mechanism of disapproval also arguably applies to the progressive activist stratum within academia. In being singled out as apparently important enough to be attacked in the right-wing press, the academic Left feels an unmistakeable sense of validation. In effect, by overestimating the Left’s power, the Right recognises the Left’s ego-ideal. The Telegraph-style hit-piece, although itself an act of misrecognition, “sees” the academic Left for what the academic Left sincerely wishes it were (a genuinely transformative threat to the status quo), giving temporary weight and substance to the Left’s fantasies of power and centrality.

As the political scientist Thomas Prosser writes in his own analysis of this episode, there is an unmistakable duality at work in this relationship:

Paradoxically, both sides need each other. For academics working in these areas, Gill’s anti-intellectualism makes it easier to dismiss all her charges and gives fields a common enemy. For conservative media, such material is ideal copy and the usual suspects have jumped on Gill’s story. Of course, the losers are those who desire well-funded universities which produce quality research.

In her X posts, Gill calls for the “auditing” and “defunding” of British humanities research, as though these things had never been applied to arts and humanities research in Britain before. However, the kind of attention-grabbing and overtly presentist or “woke” scholarship that Gill objects to is the inevitable product of the current regime of “relevance” in humanities scholarship—a regime that is the direct consequence of audit or “value for money” logic as applied to the humanities.

Over decades, and under a variety of policies, “exercises,” and “frameworks,” academics and public funding bodies have been tasked with distinguishing between the “useful” and the “useless” in British research, with funding being targeted only at the former.¹³ The Research Excellence Framework asks academics to devise research projects that can produce compelling “impact narratives” and to publish research outputs that are both “significant” and “world-leading.” Research consortia issue targeted calls for PhD scholarships stipulating that doctoral projects must specifically address particular societal challenges. In the current environment, then, humanities research projects that can plausibly narrate themselves as socially engaged and “relevant” to current crises and preoccupations are those with the best chances of attracting funding. In this regard, those who call for more auditing should be careful what they wish for. Audit culture and a “value for money” framework are in many cases precisely the causes of the cultural phenomena they decry.

1. Charlotte Gill, “Shakespeare made theatre too 'white, male and cisgender', tax-payer funded study finds,” Telegraph Online (23 March 2024). Gale OneFile: News.

2. For a recent example and wrap-up, see Tom Williams, “Portsmouth to cut jobs and merge faculties in ‘academic reset,’” Times Higher Education (27 March 2024). On the cuts to the creative arts and industries, see Richard Adams, “Creative arts courses at English universities face funding cut,” The Guardian (4 April 2024).

3. Glen O’Hara, “It’s Not Your Fault That Academic Life is Getting Harder,” Voices of Academia (5 April 2024).

4. danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” in A Networked Self: Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 46.

5. For a definition of “epistemic bubbles,” see C. Thi Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles,” Episteme, 17.2 (2020), p. 143.

6. Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Marika Lüders, “Time Collapse in Social Media: Extending the Context Collapse,” Social Media and Society, 4.1 (2018), p. 2.

7. Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science, 22 (2019), p. 130.

8. Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), p. 29; Jaime E. Settle, Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 16-21.

9. Iyengar, et al., “Origins and Consequences,” p. 134.

10. Cf. Robert Gressis, “The Social Justice Discourse Ethic: Contours and Causes,” in The Twenty-First Century and Its Discontents: How Changing Discourse Norms Are Changing Culture, edited by Jack Simmons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. 138-9.

11. For suggestive commentary on the “old” internet utopianism versus the “new” internet dystopianism, see Geoff Shullenberger, “The New Net Delusion,” The New Atlantis, 62 (2020), pp. 46-52.

12. Axel Honneth, “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory, 20.2 (1992), p. 188; Will Davies, “The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media,” New Left Review, 128 (2021), p. 98.

13. Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London: Verso, 2018), p. 233.