Writing a book on language and masculinities

Hi everyone,

Ok, so this is probably going to be a bit of a weird introduction, but I hope you bear with me!

My name is Robert Lawson and I'm currently working on a book about language and masculinities in contemporary culture (you can see some of my publications on my Google Scholar profile here - https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=evlvkl8AAAAJ&hl=en, and my institution profile is here - https://www.bcu.ac.uk/english/staff/robert-lawson). One of the chapters I'll be writing for the book concerns fatherhood and masculinities, and I'll be using linguistic methods to explore fatherhood in online contexts.

As some of you may have discovered, there aren't that many forums dedicated to fathers and fatherhood, so when I stumbled across this site, I got in touch with Fegans (the organisation which runs this forum) to ask for permission to carry out research on this community, looking at a subset of the posts that have been submitted to the site over the years. After some back and forth via email and on the phone with Ian Soars (the CEO of Fegans - https://www.fegans.org.uk/meet-the-team), he and Fegens agreed to support the project, and I've had ethical approval from my home institution as well (Birmingham City University).

At the moment, the plan is to use corpus linguistic methods to collect and analyse forum data, going back as far as I can through to the present day. Since this data is anonymised, and I won't be collecting user name data anyway, the project doesn't fall foul of GDPR requirements. This has also been discussed at length with Fegens and Ian and they're happy with how I'm approaching this (GDPR and ethics is an area of some debate among policy makers, researchers, and academics; I've got a whole chapter about this in the book if anyone's interested). I don't know what I'll find in terms of language use, since corpus linguistics starts from the data rather than imposing any preconceived notions of what will be 'important', so this part of the project is kind of exploratory in a way. Results from this analysis will be reported in the aggregate, so no verbatim quotes etc. That way, it's impossible to trace back to an individual user by searching for individual words.

But rather than just look at the forum data from a kind of disembodied approach, I also wanted to do a sort of 'mini-ethnography' and talk to forum users about fatherhood, masculinity, role models, relationships, partners, gender, and so on, for those who might be interested in actually talking with me about these things. If you do want to be involved in that regard (whether that's a discussion here, or via DM, or in another forum post), then normal ethical approval applies if I want to cite you or talk about something we discuss - so this would involve you signing a confidentiality form (which I'd send via private message, if it allows attachments!), being informed that you can withdraw at any time and have your data deleted, how your data will be protected, how I can use your data, how you will be anonymised, and so on. If you've said something that's particularly interesting that I think would be a useful addition to the book, and I'd like to cite it verbatim but we've never talked, I'll get in touch to see if you'd be willing to give me permission.

At the core of all of this is my desire to not put anyone in harm's way (very broadly defined), nor to jeopardise the point of this forum, which is to offer support to fathers who may well be going through a really tough time. This is something that Ian and I took a lot of time discussing and I'm keen to ensure that this is maintained at all times. If anyone is interested, a similar study about MumsNet was done by Dr Jai McKenzie ( https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315146805); I'm drawing on a lot of the same approaches in this project, so there is precedent for what I'm doing.

So yeah, the whole point of this post is to introduce myself and to let you know that I'll be knocking around on the forums and so on. I look forward to getting to know some of you better over the course of the next few months.

Best,

Dr_Bob

EDIT: Sorry, I don't know how to do line breaks on the forum; if there's a special character I need to type, please let me know!