Publications by Mark McGlashan
The Routledge Handbook of English Language and the Digital Humanities, 2020
Discourse & Society, 2019
Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practice... more Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practices like hashtags can enable identity construction and affiliation with a wider community of users. Practices such as mentioning and retweeting have also been discussed in the literature but the practice of following as a discourse practice is underexplored. This article presents a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach to the study of collective identity on Twitter that focuses on the relationships between following and language use and details a study conducted on the language used by followers of the Football Lads Alliance – a protest group who say they are ‘against all extremism’. This approach was fruitful in identifying correlations between salient discourses in follower profile descriptions and their tweets and suggests that a portion of the followership constructs identity in relation to radical right-wing and populist discourse specifically concerning Islam/Muslims.
This paper examines representations of heteronormativity (and its influence) across several kinds... more This paper examines representations of heteronormativity (and its influence) across several kinds of literature aimed at a child (and sometimes adult) audience, and does so by examining relationships between language and sexuality. The study firstly focuses on the study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks, giving an overview of research from the literature. The authors look at heteronormativity in these overtly pedagogical texts and consider some implications for textbook writers and analysts when challenging predominantly heteronormative representations of sexu-ality in these texts. The authors then consider representations of sexuality in children's fiction. The prevalence of heteronormativity in the Harry Potter series is considered in relation to broad aspects of identity (gender, sexuality, class). Heteronormativity vis à vis homonormativity is then discussed in relation to the analysis of a large collection of picturebooks featuring same-sex parents, the results of which suggest that, although gay and lesbian parents feature as central characters, the manner of representation largely reflects heteronormative relationships and parenting discourses. The paper concludes by identifying challenges, in particular for EFL textbook writers and publishers. Producers of these texts have to consider a global audience part of whom is likely to reject material that offers alternatives to heteronormativity. The authors suggest strategies that could be used to offer representations of heteronormativity of a 'lesser' degree (such as same-sex friend scenes) that allow for alternative readings.
On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez's petition to the Bank of England to... more On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez's petition to the Bank of England to have Elizabeth Fry's image on the UK's £5 note replaced with the image of another woman was successful. The petition challenged the Bank of England's original plan to replace Fry with Winston Churchill, which would have meant that no woman aside from the Queen would be represented on any UK banknote. Following this, Criado-Perez was subjected to ongoing misogynistic abuse on Twitter, a microblogging social network, including threats of rape and death. This paper investigates this increasingly prominent phenomenon of rape threats made via social networks. Specifically, we investigate the sustained period of abuse directed towards the Twitter account of feminist campaigner and journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez. We then turn our attention to the formation of online discourse communities as they respond to and participate in forms of extreme online misogyny on Twitter. We take a corpus of 76,275 tweets collected during a three month period in which the events occurred (July to September 2013), which comprises 912,901 words. We then employ an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of language in the context of this social network. Our approach combines quantitative approaches from the fields of corpus linguistics to detect emerging discourse communities, and then qualitative approaches from discourse analysis to analyse how these communities construct their identities.
In July 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned to have a woman appear on an English ... more In July 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned to have a woman appear on an English banknote, and was subsequently inundated with extreme misogynistic abuse on Twitter. Over the following days, this escalated, and more prominent women were sent death and bomb threats. Whilst legislative bodies came under intense pressure to handle the issue, there is a lack of research into such behaviour, making evidence-based solutions difficult. As a result of an ESRC urgency grant dedicated to investigating this case, this presentation outlines the project and some findings with regards to the methodological background to finding rape threat trolls and identifying the networks that they form, as well as some suggestions for future directions and projects.
This paper presents a selection of findings from an eighteen-month ESRC-funded project, entitled ... more This paper presents a selection of findings from an eighteen-month ESRC-funded project, entitled “Twitter rape threats and the discourse of online misogyny”. This project was instigated by the events of summer 2013, when feminist campaigner and journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez was targeted with a sustained campaign of extreme, misogynistic abuse on Twitter. The abuse was triggered by CriadoPerez's petition challenging the Bank of England's decision to remove the image of Elizabeth Fry from the £5 note and replace it with that of Winston Churchill. The premise of the petition was to maintain the representation of influential women on British currency, since the appearance of men only could be deemed a "damaging message that no woman has done anything important enough to appear [on our banknotes]" (Criado-Perez, 2013). The petition was successful and the Bank of England announced on the 24th of July 2013 that author Jane Austen's image will appear on the new £10 note issued in 2016. Following this announcement, Criado-Perez began receiving abuse through her Twitter account (@CCriadoPerez), including rape, death, and bomb threats. These threats broadened out to encompass several notable women, and were malicious and numerous enough to eventually warrant the prosecution of three individuals under §127 of the UK Communications Act (CPS, 2013). This case, which featured prominently in the news for several weeks, placed investigative bodies, policy makers, and legislators under intense media scrutiny. Politicians, journalists, and targets alike called for improvements across the board, from site report-abuse functions to the prosecution of offenders. However, given the little empirical research into behaviours such as sending rape threats on Twitter, making evidenced, balanced, long-term management, policy, and legislation decisions is difficult.
Picturebooks featuring gay parents, although growing in number, remain underexplored. In this art... more Picturebooks featuring gay parents, although growing in number, remain underexplored. In this article, the authors look at the covers of four such picturebooks, in particular at the representation of the co-parents and the multimodal workings of image and text. They ask: ‘How can the multimodal relationship between image and written text (the title) on the covers of picturebooks featuring gay parents best be described and explained?’ This study is timely in that the image–text relationship is a contested one. Drawing on the notions of modal affordance and epistemological commitment and the Hallidayan functional grammar category of enhancement, the authors use Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008, 1996, 1995) Social Actors frameworks, in particular the Visual Representation frameworks, to show that image and text (the title) are not commensurate in the meanings they communicate. Further, rather than one mode being merely supportive of the other, image and text, here, are ‘mutually enhancing’ (see Unsworth and Cléirigh’s contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by Carey Jewitt, 2011). In these picturebooks, gay identities and practices can – and indeed need – to be read through an appreciation of this mutual enhancement, rather than through image or text (title) alone or in parallel. The authors pro- pose that mutual enhancement may be characteristic of a sometime transgressive genre such as picturebooks featuring gay parents.
Gender representation in children’s literature is an established area of research, and the repres... more Gender representation in children’s literature is an established area of research, and the representation of sexuality increasingly so. Less established, however, is work on sexuality in picturebooks, in particular (a) the representation of gay co-parents, and (b) work with a linguistic or multimodal focus. Using a dataset of 25 picturebooks featuring two-Mum and two- Dad families, and focusing on ‘explicitness’ about their sexuality, we explore differences in the representation of the gay Mums and gay Dads. We look first at the book titles and co-parents’ names, using Van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network (1996, 2008) categories of Nomination and Categorization. Secondly, we look at the indexing of gay sexuality through the linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of physical contact, starting with Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Visual Social Actor Network. Although the co-parents’ sexuality was shown in positive and diverse ways, Mums were more frequently constructed than Dads as co-parents, and Dads more frequently constructed than Mums as partners. Gender appears to interact with sexuality to produce these gendered representations of the gay Mums and Dads.
Talks by Mark McGlashan
This paper investigates (collective) identity/identities and methods of investigating an online p... more This paper investigates (collective) identity/identities and methods of investigating an online protest movement as a site for ambient affiliation, “where […] individuals do not necessarily have to interact directly, but may engage in mass practices such as hashtagging in order to participate in particular kinds of ‘belonging’” (Zappavigna 2017: 216). Specifically, this paper is interested in how followers of the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) Twitter account linguistically signal, construct and aggregate around various identities and how these identities relate to discourses of marginalisation and social inequity, and draws on methods from corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies/Critical Discourse Analysis (CDS/CDA) to do so.
The paper will begin by introducing the FLA, a self-described anti-extremist ‘movement’ or ‘family’ created in response to terrorist incidents in the UK such as the Manchester Arena Bombing and the London Bridge Attack, which associates itself with football culture and operates predominantly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised several protest marches in London and Newcastle.
Following this, methods of corpus-based CDS will be briefly explored alongside methods of data collection from Twitter using the R programming language. An overview of the types of data (user biographies, tweets, retweets) and its scale (including 15,114 users, 624,816 tweets, and 526,608 retweets) will be given.
The analysis will explore discourses in twitter followers’ tweets and biographies, and will consider how language, alongside the functionalities of Twitter, are used to signal identities and create forms of belonging as well as exclusion.
References:
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.
n 2014, self-proclaimed ‘pick-up artist’ (PUA hereafter) Julien Blanc was denied entry to the UK ... more n 2014, self-proclaimed ‘pick-up artist’ (PUA hereafter) Julien Blanc was denied entry to the UK following a campaign against his promotion of sexual violence and assault against women (Travis 2014). This intervention was one of the first occasions where the strategies of the PUA community shifted away from the confines of private online settings and into the media limelight.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves as ‘self-help’ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these communities, including how women are represented, discussed and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language, gender and sexualities research (although see Jones and Merrison 2012; Dayter and Rüdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based study of the online PUA community ‘The Red Pill’, a Reddit board (‘subreddit’) with ~200,000 subscribers are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions, totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant (i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation and practices that are part of the construction of online masculine identities. This work contributes to current debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015), and highlights potential research directions in terms of ‘alt-right’ masculine identities.
While there exists a considerable body of work on gender representation in children’s literature ... more While there exists a considerable body of work on gender representation in children’s literature broadly, including that with a linguistic focus (see e.g. Wharton (2005)), there has been virtually no academic work on the language or visuals of children’s books which feature gay parents, some 50 of which now exist. The linguistic and visual representation of gender in these books, as well as sexuality, is however clearly of interest, i.e. whether gay Mums are represented differently from gay Dads. We report the results of a study of 25 picturebooks featuring gay parents. We look firstly at the visual and linguistic representation of physical contact between the parents, in part through a multimodal analysis of four book covers. Secondly, we look at naming of the parents (in the book titles, reference and address), using van Leeuwen’s (2008) categories of ‘Nomination’ and ‘Categorization’. While the gay Mums were represented much more explicitly as co-parents, the gay Dads were represented rather as partners. The study provides empirical, textual evidence for the nature of the relationship between gender and sexuality, i.e. how each can only be understood in terms of the other. On the basis of this study, we will also propose further explorations of this underexplored sub-genre of children’s fiction,
References:
van Leeuwen, Theo (2008) Discourse and Practice: new tools for critical discourse analysis. OUP.
Wharton, Sue (2005) ‘Invisible females, incapable males: gender construction in a children’s reading scheme’. Language and Education 3: 238-51.
Other by Mark McGlashan
A spreadsheet giving some facts and figures about picturebooks featuring same-sex parents. It det... more A spreadsheet giving some facts and figures about picturebooks featuring same-sex parents. It details:
- publication date
- publisher (incl. independent/if known)
- publisher location (if known)
- sex of the parents
This info is free to use but please let me know if/when/where you use it.
Conference Presentations by Mark McGlashan
This paper investigates (collective) identity/identities and methods of investigating an online p... more This paper investigates (collective) identity/identities and methods of investigating an online protest movement as a site for ambient affiliation, “where […] individuals do not necessarily have to interact directly, but may engage in mass practices such as hashtagging in order to participate in particular kinds of ‘belonging’” (Zappavigna 2017: 216). More specifically, this paper focuses on the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) Twitter account and its followers and examines the dialectical relationship between how the FLA defines itself and the self-reported identities evident in the biographical data of its online followers. The paper will first introduce and contextualise the FLA before exploring methods of data collection/analysis and presenting findings from the research.
The FLA was founded on 4th June 2017 – the day after the London Bridge Attack – by John Meighan who has a conviction for football-related violence. The group exists and operates mainly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised and held two marches through central London. The first being on 24th June 2017 at London Bridge, the site of the London Bridge Attack, and the second on 7th October 2017. The FLA identifies as an anti-extremism protest movement, the focus of which is briefly summarised in the group’s Twitter biography as “Uniting the Football Family Against Extremism”, a sentiment also found in the FLA facebook group ‘About’ page, which says, “We are a new movement with a new purpose to fight extremism, we in no way condone racist behaviours. Enough is enough, it is time to stand up. Disclaimer – Comments made on our posts are not monitored and DO NOT represent the views of the FLA.” However, the group’s aims and ambitions are evolving as is suggested by a more detailed manifesto given on FLA’s website , which outlines a range of beliefs (“a safer environment […] for all of our children and grandchildren”, cultural inclusivity, political accountability) and aims (“greater restrictions placed on known terror suspects”, review of terrorism legislation, community cohesion, greater support for veterans and victims of terrorism). Despite the group’s numerous explicit claims of cultural inclusivity and rejection of racism, sexism, bigotry, etc., some of the FLA’s behaviours suggest discursive links with individuals and groups that do espouse extremist ideological positions (specifically, islamophobia). Toni Bugle , founder of Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (MARIAs) and member of the nationalist English Democrats party, spoke at the first FLA march. Meighan has also given one of his few interviews to the blog Shy Society, which features posts on topics like race, free speech, and membership of the European Union, and has also interviewed Anne Marie Waters , leader of For Britain, a far-right offshoot of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), founding member of Sharia Watch UK , and co-leader of the anti-Islam Pegida UK .
This paper understands the FLA as a Community of Practice (CoP, Wenger 1998) or discourse community (Swales 1990: 21-32) and interprets the practice of ‘following’ as a form of ambient affiliation. As such, this paper investigates the relationships between the FLA and its followership, seeing the relationship(s) between the FLA and its followers as co-constructive and negotiated dialectically; the identities of both are negotiated in relation to one another. In order to investigate this relationship, this study focussed on data collected about Twitter accounts following the FLA’s official Twitter account (@lads_alliance). Data were collected during October 2017 through Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) which was accessed using the R twitteR package. Using twitteR, it was possible to generate a list of all @lads_alliance followers (n=15,114), which enabled the extraction of biographical data from all followers as well as tweets from any non-private followers (n=13,091).
Preliminary analyses of lexical terms in biographical descriptions suggests that followers predominantly identify with a football club (fan, football, season ticket, Spurs, Arsenal), but other identities also frequently feature, such as (gendered) relational identities (dad, husband, married, wife) and nationality (British, English, Englishman). Many profiles also contain reference to politics (brexit, politics, ukip), patriotism (patriot) and religion, specifically Islam. An examination of hashtag usage in biographical descriptions again highlights themes of football club identification (#lufc, #avfc, #millwall), politics (#brexit, #forbritain, #maga, #ukip, #bluehand, #voteleave), nationality (#england), religion (#athiest, #christian, #banislam) and patriotism (#patriot).
Methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis will be used to explore how these (collective) identities are signalled in FLA’s Twitter followership and will go on to analyse linguistic patterns in tweets sent by followers to investigate correlations between the language used in tweets and users’ biographies.
Keywords: Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Community, Community of Practice, Social Media, Twitter, R,
References:
Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.
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Publications by Mark McGlashan
Talks by Mark McGlashan
The paper will begin by introducing the FLA, a self-described anti-extremist ‘movement’ or ‘family’ created in response to terrorist incidents in the UK such as the Manchester Arena Bombing and the London Bridge Attack, which associates itself with football culture and operates predominantly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised several protest marches in London and Newcastle.
Following this, methods of corpus-based CDS will be briefly explored alongside methods of data collection from Twitter using the R programming language. An overview of the types of data (user biographies, tweets, retweets) and its scale (including 15,114 users, 624,816 tweets, and 526,608 retweets) will be given.
The analysis will explore discourses in twitter followers’ tweets and biographies, and will consider how language, alongside the functionalities of Twitter, are used to signal identities and create forms of belonging as well as exclusion.
References:
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves as ‘self-help’ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these communities, including how women are represented, discussed and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language, gender and sexualities research (although see Jones and Merrison 2012; Dayter and Rüdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based study of the online PUA community ‘The Red Pill’, a Reddit board (‘subreddit’) with ~200,000 subscribers are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions, totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant (i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation and practices that are part of the construction of online masculine identities. This work contributes to current debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015), and highlights potential research directions in terms of ‘alt-right’ masculine identities.
References:
van Leeuwen, Theo (2008) Discourse and Practice: new tools for critical discourse analysis. OUP.
Wharton, Sue (2005) ‘Invisible females, incapable males: gender construction in a children’s reading scheme’. Language and Education 3: 238-51.
Other by Mark McGlashan
- publication date
- publisher (incl. independent/if known)
- publisher location (if known)
- sex of the parents
This info is free to use but please let me know if/when/where you use it.
Conference Presentations by Mark McGlashan
The FLA was founded on 4th June 2017 – the day after the London Bridge Attack – by John Meighan who has a conviction for football-related violence. The group exists and operates mainly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised and held two marches through central London. The first being on 24th June 2017 at London Bridge, the site of the London Bridge Attack, and the second on 7th October 2017. The FLA identifies as an anti-extremism protest movement, the focus of which is briefly summarised in the group’s Twitter biography as “Uniting the Football Family Against Extremism”, a sentiment also found in the FLA facebook group ‘About’ page, which says, “We are a new movement with a new purpose to fight extremism, we in no way condone racist behaviours. Enough is enough, it is time to stand up. Disclaimer – Comments made on our posts are not monitored and DO NOT represent the views of the FLA.” However, the group’s aims and ambitions are evolving as is suggested by a more detailed manifesto given on FLA’s website , which outlines a range of beliefs (“a safer environment […] for all of our children and grandchildren”, cultural inclusivity, political accountability) and aims (“greater restrictions placed on known terror suspects”, review of terrorism legislation, community cohesion, greater support for veterans and victims of terrorism). Despite the group’s numerous explicit claims of cultural inclusivity and rejection of racism, sexism, bigotry, etc., some of the FLA’s behaviours suggest discursive links with individuals and groups that do espouse extremist ideological positions (specifically, islamophobia). Toni Bugle , founder of Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (MARIAs) and member of the nationalist English Democrats party, spoke at the first FLA march. Meighan has also given one of his few interviews to the blog Shy Society, which features posts on topics like race, free speech, and membership of the European Union, and has also interviewed Anne Marie Waters , leader of For Britain, a far-right offshoot of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), founding member of Sharia Watch UK , and co-leader of the anti-Islam Pegida UK .
This paper understands the FLA as a Community of Practice (CoP, Wenger 1998) or discourse community (Swales 1990: 21-32) and interprets the practice of ‘following’ as a form of ambient affiliation. As such, this paper investigates the relationships between the FLA and its followership, seeing the relationship(s) between the FLA and its followers as co-constructive and negotiated dialectically; the identities of both are negotiated in relation to one another. In order to investigate this relationship, this study focussed on data collected about Twitter accounts following the FLA’s official Twitter account (@lads_alliance). Data were collected during October 2017 through Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) which was accessed using the R twitteR package. Using twitteR, it was possible to generate a list of all @lads_alliance followers (n=15,114), which enabled the extraction of biographical data from all followers as well as tweets from any non-private followers (n=13,091).
Preliminary analyses of lexical terms in biographical descriptions suggests that followers predominantly identify with a football club (fan, football, season ticket, Spurs, Arsenal), but other identities also frequently feature, such as (gendered) relational identities (dad, husband, married, wife) and nationality (British, English, Englishman). Many profiles also contain reference to politics (brexit, politics, ukip), patriotism (patriot) and religion, specifically Islam. An examination of hashtag usage in biographical descriptions again highlights themes of football club identification (#lufc, #avfc, #millwall), politics (#brexit, #forbritain, #maga, #ukip, #bluehand, #voteleave), nationality (#england), religion (#athiest, #christian, #banislam) and patriotism (#patriot).
Methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis will be used to explore how these (collective) identities are signalled in FLA’s Twitter followership and will go on to analyse linguistic patterns in tweets sent by followers to investigate correlations between the language used in tweets and users’ biographies.
Keywords: Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Community, Community of Practice, Social Media, Twitter, R,
References:
Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.
The paper will begin by introducing the FLA, a self-described anti-extremist ‘movement’ or ‘family’ created in response to terrorist incidents in the UK such as the Manchester Arena Bombing and the London Bridge Attack, which associates itself with football culture and operates predominantly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised several protest marches in London and Newcastle.
Following this, methods of corpus-based CDS will be briefly explored alongside methods of data collection from Twitter using the R programming language. An overview of the types of data (user biographies, tweets, retweets) and its scale (including 15,114 users, 624,816 tweets, and 526,608 retweets) will be given.
The analysis will explore discourses in twitter followers’ tweets and biographies, and will consider how language, alongside the functionalities of Twitter, are used to signal identities and create forms of belonging as well as exclusion.
References:
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves as ‘self-help’ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these communities, including how women are represented, discussed and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language, gender and sexualities research (although see Jones and Merrison 2012; Dayter and Rüdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based study of the online PUA community ‘The Red Pill’, a Reddit board (‘subreddit’) with ~200,000 subscribers are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions, totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant (i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation and practices that are part of the construction of online masculine identities. This work contributes to current debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015), and highlights potential research directions in terms of ‘alt-right’ masculine identities.
References:
van Leeuwen, Theo (2008) Discourse and Practice: new tools for critical discourse analysis. OUP.
Wharton, Sue (2005) ‘Invisible females, incapable males: gender construction in a children’s reading scheme’. Language and Education 3: 238-51.
- publication date
- publisher (incl. independent/if known)
- publisher location (if known)
- sex of the parents
This info is free to use but please let me know if/when/where you use it.
The FLA was founded on 4th June 2017 – the day after the London Bridge Attack – by John Meighan who has a conviction for football-related violence. The group exists and operates mainly online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but has also organised and held two marches through central London. The first being on 24th June 2017 at London Bridge, the site of the London Bridge Attack, and the second on 7th October 2017. The FLA identifies as an anti-extremism protest movement, the focus of which is briefly summarised in the group’s Twitter biography as “Uniting the Football Family Against Extremism”, a sentiment also found in the FLA facebook group ‘About’ page, which says, “We are a new movement with a new purpose to fight extremism, we in no way condone racist behaviours. Enough is enough, it is time to stand up. Disclaimer – Comments made on our posts are not monitored and DO NOT represent the views of the FLA.” However, the group’s aims and ambitions are evolving as is suggested by a more detailed manifesto given on FLA’s website , which outlines a range of beliefs (“a safer environment […] for all of our children and grandchildren”, cultural inclusivity, political accountability) and aims (“greater restrictions placed on known terror suspects”, review of terrorism legislation, community cohesion, greater support for veterans and victims of terrorism). Despite the group’s numerous explicit claims of cultural inclusivity and rejection of racism, sexism, bigotry, etc., some of the FLA’s behaviours suggest discursive links with individuals and groups that do espouse extremist ideological positions (specifically, islamophobia). Toni Bugle , founder of Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (MARIAs) and member of the nationalist English Democrats party, spoke at the first FLA march. Meighan has also given one of his few interviews to the blog Shy Society, which features posts on topics like race, free speech, and membership of the European Union, and has also interviewed Anne Marie Waters , leader of For Britain, a far-right offshoot of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), founding member of Sharia Watch UK , and co-leader of the anti-Islam Pegida UK .
This paper understands the FLA as a Community of Practice (CoP, Wenger 1998) or discourse community (Swales 1990: 21-32) and interprets the practice of ‘following’ as a form of ambient affiliation. As such, this paper investigates the relationships between the FLA and its followership, seeing the relationship(s) between the FLA and its followers as co-constructive and negotiated dialectically; the identities of both are negotiated in relation to one another. In order to investigate this relationship, this study focussed on data collected about Twitter accounts following the FLA’s official Twitter account (@lads_alliance). Data were collected during October 2017 through Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) which was accessed using the R twitteR package. Using twitteR, it was possible to generate a list of all @lads_alliance followers (n=15,114), which enabled the extraction of biographical data from all followers as well as tweets from any non-private followers (n=13,091).
Preliminary analyses of lexical terms in biographical descriptions suggests that followers predominantly identify with a football club (fan, football, season ticket, Spurs, Arsenal), but other identities also frequently feature, such as (gendered) relational identities (dad, husband, married, wife) and nationality (British, English, Englishman). Many profiles also contain reference to politics (brexit, politics, ukip), patriotism (patriot) and religion, specifically Islam. An examination of hashtag usage in biographical descriptions again highlights themes of football club identification (#lufc, #avfc, #millwall), politics (#brexit, #forbritain, #maga, #ukip, #bluehand, #voteleave), nationality (#england), religion (#athiest, #christian, #banislam) and patriotism (#patriot).
Methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis will be used to explore how these (collective) identities are signalled in FLA’s Twitter followership and will go on to analyse linguistic patterns in tweets sent by followers to investigate correlations between the language used in tweets and users’ biographies.
Keywords: Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Community, Community of Practice, Social Media, Twitter, R,
References:
Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zappavigna, M. 2017. “Twitter”. In C. Hoffman and W. Bublitz (eds.) Pragmatics of Social Media. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 201-24.