Thread by @DrKillgrove

I'm not generally in the habit of writing tweet threads, but since the last one was so successful and taught so many people new things, here's a second, much more discipline-specific one about that Vesuvian date, public scholarship, and collegiality.

1/

In writing yesterday for Forbes, I posted a piece that was unlike my usual public outreach: it was a short news item followed by a short explanation of why the possibility of a changed Vesuvian date mattered to me as a scholar of Roman archaeology.

forbes.com/sites/kristina…

2/

The reason, I explained in a thread, is seasonality. Summer vs. fall matters for questions about diet and disease, as I laid out in a thread that's been retweeted hundreds of times.

3/

After a few hours of hearing from colleagues that they hadn't realized the significance of a change of seasons to my research into skeletons, I was happy with my outreach, and putting my kids to bed.

Then I was @'ed in this tweet thread.

4/

I responded, pointing to my Forbes post and my tweet thread, why the date matters. To me. To my research. To future understandings of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis.

That subsequent twitter thread went all over the place, as twitter threads tend to do.

5/

Problematic to me - a junior scholar who brings methods from a discipline outside classics to bear on questions about antiquity - was Prof. Beard's dismissal of my points. All of them. Her changing of the terms of her 'rolling over like a lamb.'

6/

Eventually, as more people joined in to express their support for my points about the importance of disease ecology, Prof. Beard felt inundated by the responses, not all of which were, I'll admit, completely civil.

7/

My renown is not nearly the same as Prof. Beard's is, but I get my fair share of hate-mail and people calling me horrible names, in public and via email, for my public writing at Forbes and elsewhere. I know what goes on in uncivil social media, though, and this was tame.

8/

What I saw as a rather strident disagreement among colleagues -- because I view Prof. Beard as a colleague -- she saw as a pile-on. I'm sorry she felt that way, but sometimes, when you dig in your heels and refuse to budge, a pile-on happens.

9/

I can imagine that Prof. Beard thinks that her intent was clear in our conversation -- that she didn't mean to denigrate my two decades of expertise in the topic under discussion -- but that's not how it felt. That's not how it was received by others either.

10/

I've been following Prof. Beard for years. Since I was an undergrad, honestly. But on social media, she tends to privilege authorial intent over audience reception. This, in my book, is a major misstep. Twitter doesn't care about intent -- only reception.

11/

When an idea, a news piece, research, etc., is received poorly, a clever scholar will ask why & will fix the issue. I've run into this with my public scholarship -- I've screwed up when writing for Forbes. But I've owned up & fixed it when new info or ideas were presented.

12/

This is all by way of saying, as an anthropologist who is trained to see multiple sides to any discussion, I was fully willing to put myself in Prof. Beard's shoes and consider authorial intent. But then... this:

the-tls.co.uk/when-did-vesuv…

13/

In this blog post, Prof. Beard both details her original thoughts about the Vesuvian inscription (that it doesn't change anything) but also brings in Neville Morley's blog post abt why seasonality matters in research into these sites, a post in which he prominently cites me.

14/

Prof. Beard, of course, does not cite me in her TLS blog post, instead choosing to cite a more senior male scholar, someone who has much more name recognition in her part of the field of classics than I do.

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This is not how senior scholars should deal with discussions, whether on Twitter or at a conference or in print. Since we're talking reception, a topic current in all subfields of classics, Prof. Beard's blog post, to anyone who read yesterday, is very poorly received.

16/

Erasure of a junior female scholar, of someone with direct expertise in the topic at hand, of someone who also navigates the utter dumpster fire that is social media most days in the hopes of educating people about the ancient world... this is shocking to me.

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It’s been interesting in the last 36 hours to see where I stand as a bioarchaeologist in the Roman world... and to see who supports my ideas openly, secretly, not at all... and only when a more senior man says it.

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Citing the work of others is important; we all learn that in school. But it's also political. I may have a nice blue twitter check mark and a platform at Forbes -- and thanks to those I can have this fight -- but I am nowhere close to politically important in this field.

19/

For a senior scholar with all the academic capital one could possibly imagine to retreat to her lofty position and ignore the storm created by her refusing to hear others and refusing to take responsibility for her words... I honestly have no words.

20/

A reason I got a PhD in anthropology rather than classics is because of issues like this, systemic when I was in undergrad and early grad school. Switching afforded me the opportunity to lift up junior scholars, women, people of color -- taught me that was important.

21/

My research program in Roman bioarchaeology for the past 15 years has been about this: uncovering the life histories of women, children, and slaves, people who weren't in the historical records. I can give them voices through studying their skeletons.

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I have no good conclusion here. Just that... it's been an interesting couple of days, seeing just how far this field has and hasn't come since I fell in love with the Grave Circles at Mycenae and wanted desperately to learn more about the bodies within them.

23/

The politics of academia are fraught -- of course they are -- but I'd mistakenly assumed that we were all generally looking out for one another, and making a more inclusive, interdisciplinary field. I'd like to hope that that is more true than not.

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PS - since subtweets are juvenile, I'll @ relevant people here at the end so they don't get inundated by the other posts in this thread and can read if they want. @wmarybeard @NevilleMorley