#MedievalTwitter: A Land of Contrasts

In a 2014 blogpost, Dorothy Kim issued a "call to all medievalists out there" to assemble on Twitter, using #MedievalTwitter as something of a medieval(ist) bat signal. Usage of the hashtag, Kim asserted, could be(come) a signifier of medievalist resistance—"intellectually, politically, socially"—against oppression(s), as much as a practical means of finding one another online. Many medievalists answered Kim's call, and in the following years #MedievalTwitter arguably became the field's most prominent community on the social web. Most of our knowledge of the hashtag, and its community, came from first-person experience—or, put otherwise, vibes. In 2019, I launched an online survey (n=169) to begin to redress this gap, as part of research for my forthcoming monograph, Medieval Twitter. In the survey responses, a complex picture emerges of the hashtag, its politics, and its community. #MedievalTwitter was an affirmative space for many medievalists, especially those of us with marginalized identities—a margin that was decidedly medieval in its potential to disrupt the "master narrative" of the academic status quo. At the same time, the community was not as radically inclusive as it purported itself to be, nor—somewhat strikingly—was it a conduit for pedagogy. There were limitations to its intersectional ethics, including in the ways in which activity on the "open and inclusive" hashtag could, in fact, reflect and even further entrench existing oppressive hierarchies in the offline Academy. This paper presents the survey results for the very first time, allowing for productive reflections on where we, as medievalists, have been on social media as we find ourselves in the aftermath of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and the ongoing disintegration of the #MedievalTwitter community. Perhaps more importantly, this paper asks where we might go from here, what lessons we can learn and how we can do better in future on whatever social ecosystem we next call home. #MedievalTwitter is dead; long live #MedievalTwitter.