A growing body of research reveals that some scholars face online harassment and that such harassment leads to a wide variety of adverse impacts. Drawing on data collected from an online survey of 182 scholars, we report on the factors and triggers involved in scholars’ experiences of online harassment; the environments where said experiences take place, and; the consequences it has for personal and professional relationships. We find that online harassment is heavily entwined with the work, identity, and in some cases, the requirements of being a scholar. The online harassment scholars experience is often compounded by other factors, such as gender and physical appearance. We build on prior research in this area to further argue that universities ought to widen their scope of what constitutes workplace harassment and workplace safety to include online spaces.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, in Learning, Media and Technology on September 2021, available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1878218
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/patrick_lowenthal/118/