Using Twitter to tackle peripherality? Facilitating networked scholarship for part-time doctoral students within and beyond the university

Feeling part of a community has previously been found to be a motivating factor for part-time doctoral students as well as speeding up doctoral progress. Separately, it has also been suggested that social media usage (specifically Twitter) can encourage the development of interactive academic networks to establish social relations with relevant people beyond the doctoral supervisory team. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s theory of legitimate peripheral participation, and building particularly on the work of Teeuwsen et al. (2014), this paper suggests that the use of social media in doctoral education can be one way for part-time doctoral students to migrate from a position of academic peripherality to one of legitimate peripheral participation in a wider research community. This paper investigates the use of social media for academic purposes by three different groups of part-time doctoral students. It explores the ways in which Twitter might be used to help part-time doctoral students feel part of the research community both within a University and the wider research community beyond. It also identifies some of the barriers and limitations to achieving this. Finally, the paper raises questions about the roles and responsibilities of supervisors and other faculty members in relation to using social media to support the learning of part-time doctoral students.