IKO research Seminar with Stinne Bach Nielsen

Stinne Bach Nielsen, PhD at Aarhus University.

Abstract:

"I have largely stepped back from focusing on racism": How researchers navigate harassing experiences of reputational damage through their academic work

A fundamental part of academic work is engaging in public outreach to inform democratic discussions (Carrigan, 2022). Yet public engagement increasingly exposes researchers to digital harassment (Lenhart et al., 2016; Marwick, 2021), with much existing research highlighting that it is the more severe and threatening forms, such as digital death threats or ‘abstract’ hate speech, that academics experience as particularly harmful (Ferber, 2017; Gosse et al., 2021; Savigny, 2020; Celuch et al., 2022). Studies further suggest that researchers largely rely on personal resources to cope with such experiences due to limited institutional support (Ketchum, 2020; Veletsianos et al., 2018; Wright et al., 2022), which often leads them to self-censor by withdrawing from public engagement (Carter Olson & LaPoe, 2018; Houlden et al., 2022; O’Meara et al., 2025; Veletsianos et al., 2018).

Drawing on interviews with 28 Danish researchers across seven academic fields about their experiences with and handling of digital harassment, this paper provides new insights into what academics experience as most harmful and difficult to navigate when facing digital harassment. Surprisingly, the most consequential experiences were not severe or explicitly threatening attacks, but the loss of reputational control resulting from digital rumors questioning researchers’ integrity and portraying them as politically aligned in public media and on social media platforms.

Taking these experiences as a point of departure, the presentation examines how reputation-threatening experiences of digital harassment shape and are handled through the researchers’ daily academic work, at both individual and institutional levels. Building on previous research suggesting that self-censorship may extend beyond public dis/engagement into academic work (e.g., withdrawal from particular research areas) (Eslen-Ziya et al., 2025), the paper first explores how researchers navigate and respond to experiences of digital rumor formation through their academic practices and research interests. The second part examines how researchers experience university support when facing reputational damage, and how this support, or lack thereof, generally influences how they handle such experiences through their academic work. Together, the paper brings new attention to the micro- and meso-level dimensions of coping with less severe yet highly consequential forms of digital harassment in academia.