Structural Failures of Care: Institutional Disregard for Researcher Safety Online

Online harassment has become an almost ubiquitous, though often institutionally unacknowledged, reality for academics globally, whether they study the online milieu or use digital media to publicise their work. Furthermore, online harassment of academics is often conducted strategically using coordinated, networked practices of online abuse. Despite the systematic nature of online harassment and multiple cases in which academics, researchers and universities have been targeted, few institutions have published policies, practices, procedures or training for addressing this reality. This apathetic lack of awareness at administrative and policy levels is expressed through modes of institutional disregard, including lacking resources, institutional silence and selective support for researchers’ safety needs. Taking a feminist ethics of care approach and using the author’s own experiences as an American academic studying gender and digital cultures of extremism, this article maps the ways that institutional disregard constitutes a structural failure of care in relation to researcher safety online.