PhD Studentship: Precarious Men's Engagements in the Manosphere: Examining Formative Conditions in the Online Construction of Toxic Masculinity

Introduction

Coventry University (CU) is inviting applications from suitably qualified graduates for a fully funded PhD studentship, where the successful applicant will be based in The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC).

Details of the project

Informed by a ‘critically empathetic’ approach, the aim of this project is to assess the appeal of toxic online spaces among ontologically at-risk men. The 2021 mass shooting in Plymouth, UK, by 22-year-old white male, Jake Davison, brought into stark relief the frightening implications of what an increasing number of scholars critically refer to as ‘toxic’ masculinity. In the framework of this project, Davison’s story is just one of the more extreme examples of a broader pattern of men acting out in response to a gendered sense of ontological insecurity, ‘of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach to the very roots of our coherent sense of being in the world’. Before his crime, Davison had sought emotional support in various online spaces notorious for radicalising discontented/aggrieved, and predominately white cis-hetero, men. However, to date, research into these ‘manosphere’ spaces and communities has narrowly focused on how they propagate toxic/hateful discourses, with little attention paid to why ontologically precarious men are drawn into them in the first place, or what they glean in terms of identity and belonging. The project has important implications for both scholarly understandings of contemporary masculinities, and how men’s health interventions can better target this at-risk group.

Candidate specification

A good knowledge of gender and masculinities theory is expected A good knowledge of scholarship on digital cultures and media is expected Online data collection skills and/or knowledge of computational methods are highly desired

Funding

Trailblazer: The Early Career Researcher and Doctoral Studentship Partnering Scheme

Summer Institute in Qualitative Research at Manchester Metropolitan University (end of Year one) - £500-1000