Digital Alchemy - Sarah J. Jackson-FNT

SONIC Northwestern13min

Moya Bailey

00:02

ICA presents

Moya Bailey

00:11

Hello, and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Sarah J Jackson to join me in discussing friendship and collaboration, how the two can help cultivate exceptional scholarly works in the academic world, and how to maintain a space of respect as colleagues (and as friends). And though she’s not on to speak with us today, we must shout-out Brooke Foucault Welles, whose friendship, scholarship, and collaboration are integral to this conversation between Sarah and I today, which will become clear imminently…

Sarah J. Jackson

00:57

Thanks for having me Moya. It's fun to get to chat with you about this. Brooke and I were hired as assistant professors at the same time. Our offices were next door to each other, but our work (at least we thought) wasn't very similar. We liked each other, we were new colleagues, and we would chit-chat in the hallway. It wasn't until the #myNYPDcase that I walked over there and said, “Hey, I'm watching this thing happen on Twitter, I totally want to write about this, here's my framework, code, et cetera, et cetera." She was like, “I don't know about that, but what you need is network science." I was like, “I don't know about that." Basically, we handed each other books from our own bookshelves to read about what we were doing and what our framework was.

Moya Bailey

02:53

Oh wow.

Sarah J. Jackson

02:54

That started not only us being inspired to collaborate on answering these questions with multiple methods and approaches, but really a friendship. We're both junior women faculty; we're both navigating the ins and outs of what that means. And it means a lot. I had started a junior feminist faculty writing group that Brooke joined, and later you joined, and we built our friendship from there. It's interesting, because it wasn't like we went into it, “Oh, we're going to become good friends." We became good friends in part because both of us, in the process of collaboration and in the process of being colleagues, found that we actually really liked the other person, and that we had values in common.

Moya Bailey

03:55

I love that. I feel so blessed to come into the partnership and connection through that feminist faculty writing group that you started. As I recall, it was us talking about our different work on Twitter hashtags that got us thinking about the #HashtagActivism book. Do you remember how that came together?

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