Ontario college faculty are currently on strike. I know this because much of my social media feed has been filled with tweets and FB posts updating us on the strike issues and working on getting accurate information out to the public (and questioning the other side of the bargaining table).
One of the main issues that faculty are striking over is the treatment of part-time/contingent/partial-load faculty (and kudos for the tenured, full-time faculty standing with their colleagues), an issue near and dear to my heart. I have been particularly struck by how social media has been used as a form of digital picketing.
I reached out to a few of the anonymous twitter handles, and one of the administrators was willing to speak to me on the condition of anonymity, as they are a partial-load faculty member whose job is at risk. In particular, digital picketing was seen as being important “because so much of instruction now is being moved online, to hybrid and fully online courses” thus making physical picket lines difficult, “so just as the college is moving its functions online, we are moving our picket lines online as well.”
This form of digital activism is also important because of points of contention is intellectual property; part-time faculty are only paid to teach, but any content they create belongs to the institution. So not only does the college not pay for the time spent preparing, it declares ownership on those same uncompensated materials.
Interesting as well is the use of hashtags to interrupt and inform the debate taking place online:
“we are interrupting conversations around hashtags (college-specific, like #StartAtSeneca and #Amazing50, and college-adjacent like #OCIF2017) as well as having conversations directly with students who are tweeting about the #collegestrike. Several faculty are also tweeting (e.g. @standwithfac, @collegeonstrike, @altfacultyON, @PLatSeneca); some are run by one faculty member, some by several collaboratively, but we’re all using the same profile photo, as if it were a picket sign and we’re coalescing around hashtags. We’re finding that it’s doing an interesting job, we’re finding that it’s actually shifting the mainstream media conversation.”
As much as we’ve seen Twitter being used for disinformation, digital picketing is showing itself to be a powerful tool to ensure that accurate information is being shared with the larger public, including and especially students.
Image from OPSEU College Faculty website
