A Few Reflections on my #ScholarSunday Threads
Ahead of tomorrow's 200th thread!
Tomorrow I’ll be dropping my 200th (!) #ScholarSunday thread. I want to keep that thread itself focused on what the threads are always about—all the voices & work I’m sharing. But it’s also a pretty striking anniversary, so today I wanted to complement that thread & offer a few reflections on these four+ years of compiling & sharing the #ScholarSunday threads.
First, a reminder that since my 100th thread I’ve been collecting all the threads (past, present, & future) on a Google Doc, so you can always dip back into them if you just can’t get enough public scholarly goodness (& who can blame you?!):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cmXo7uNRbXusD74-6ul4B6LxlnweEdVUoAfwjVpNKy4/edit?usp=sharing
In many ways, these threads represent a logical endpoint to one of my longest-term professional goals: creating a sense of solidarity & community around what can too often feel individual & isolated, our scholarly work. I’ve tried to do that with my grad school colleagues, in my 20 years at Fitchburg State, on my blog (where Guest Posts are my favorite thing—reach out if you’d like to contribute one!), through my role as Boston Chapter Co-Leader for the Scholars Strategy Network, & certainly through my social media presence as well.
As a pretty early member of the #twitterstorians community (I started on the platform in the Before Times of 2010, the same moment I started my blog), I’d like to think I did my part to help create that sense of solidarity & community in that space. But as both that platform & the quantity of public scholarly work grew exponentially, I was finding it harder & harder to even see, much less engage & share, even a fraction of that good work.
Plus, y’know, Covid isolation. Don’t imagine I need to say too much more about that moment.
So for all those reasons & more, the #ScholarSunday threads were a logical next step. As the stop-and-start nature of the first few threads makes clear (see the aforementioned Google Doc if ye doubt the claim), I didn’t really know what I was doing or how I wanted to do it. I just knew it felt good to connect with other public scholars, & even more so to feel like I was helping other folks find & read & hear & engage with some of that growing body of work.
By the time Twitter began to implode, an orchestrated self-destruction engineered by the incoming Dipshit Czar, it had become a lot harder both for me to find things for the threads &, even more frustratingly, for other folks to see the threads at all, much less to read & engage with them. But if I had ever doubted how meaningful these threads had become to me, I knew better when I started contemplating stopping this work. That felt really crappy & wrong.
Hence this newsletter, which I started solely as a space to share the #ScholarSunday threads. It has obviously morphed into a place where I share other work of mine too, especially my recent podcast which I very much hope you will check out if you haven’t had the chance:
https://americanstudier.podbean.com/
But this will always first & foremost be the place I share my threads, as long as I can keep finding & assembling work for them. Moving to Bluesky has helped me achieve that goal a bit more easily once again, & if we haven’t connected over there I hope we can:
https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social
I’m still gonna need y’all if the threads are gonna continue to be full of great work, though, & ultimately if they’re gonna continue at all. Email will remain a great way to contribute to the threads (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), but so will be reaching out in any of those aforementioned places, from the blog to Bluesky to this newsletter.
I’m out of the prediction business, so I won’t pretend to know what the future holds for these threads. I just know that I still love compiling & sharing them, & that they seem to mean a lot to other folks as well. So for now, I’ll see you tomorrow for the 200th #ScholarSunday thread, & (after a week off for Thanksgiving) down the road for the next couple hundred!