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In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability. These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants. In doing so, they pave the way for attuning research work to the complex interplay of difference and sameness as it unfolds and surfaces in the process of researching gendered vulnerabilities. By presenting a piece of poetic writing that engages with research encounters within a project on sexual harassment and young people, I tap into the troubled affect, the constant interplay of difference, shifting alignments, and ultimate entwinements between the researcher, the phenomenon of sexual harassment, and the research participants and other involved actors. Based on my inquiry, I propose attending to vulnerability through affect theory as an encompassing and dynamic state of being affected and affecting others, both in violent ways and in ways that aim to build solidarity and empathy.

Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) is a gendered phenomenon or not is a question that continuously arouses debate both among scholars and the general public. This article analyses meaning-making around IPV and gender in online discussions that focus on IPV committed by women. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology, and identifies ideological dilemmas, interpretative repertoires and subject positions related in the discussions to the relevance of gender, on the one hand, and gender equality, on the other. The ideological dilemmas focused on the relevance of gender revolve around a gender-neutral repertoire and a gendered difference repertoire, while those focused on gender equality centre on the opposing repertoires of gender equality as a commonplace value and gender equality gone wrong. A more detailed examination of how these repertoires are constructed, negotiated, and used in the discussions reveals a pattern where discursive devices such as factualisation techniques are employed in combination with an affectively emphatic style of expression in ways that, for the most part, work to discredit the value of feminist understandings of links between IPV, gender, and power, while, instead, valorising seeming gender neutrality.

Discussions about men's victimization by their female intimate partners have gained increased visibility in the last two decades. These discussions put victim positions on offer for men that stand in stark contrast to more widespread associations between masculinity and perpetration of violence. This article examines how these contradictory positionings play out and are discursively negotiated in Finnish online discussions of female-inflicted intimate partner violence (IPV). Two recurring types of positioning of men were identified in the analysis: neglected victims and naturally superior perpetrators. The analysis illustrates how gendered differences between men and women in relation to violence are both reiterated and denied in the processes of enacting, balancing, and rhetorically employing these positionings. Thereby, light is shed on the multiplicity of complex and fluid ways in which masculinities are constructed and customized in the context of meaning-making surrounding the issue of IPV.

This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative repertoires of violence were identified. The first constructs violence as originating from interactional or relationship problems, while the second relies upon characterizations of the perpetrators as pathological or deviant to explain violence. The analysis accords particular attention to the ways in which the ideal of gender-neutrality that is prevalent in Finnish society is drawn upon in these repertoires, and how this ideal entwines with the circulation of gender-specific assumptions. The analysis also illustrates how categorizations often work in the reports to preserve the normality of men as perpetrators of lethal intimate partner violence while attaching deviance and moral questionability to women both as victims and as perpetrators, thus maintaining the taken-for-grantedness of gendered differences in relation to violence.

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan suomalaisten iltapäivälehtien väkivaltarikosuutisointia kysyen, millä tavoin siinä näkyy ja tuottuu väkivallan tekijöiden ja uhrien sukupuoli. Aineistona ovat vuonna 2009 Iltalehdessä ja Ilta-Sanomissa ilmestyneet naisten ja miesten tekemästä väkivallasta kertovat rikosuutisartikkelit ja niiden otsikot. Lähtökohtana on konstruktionistinen näkemys rikosuutisissa tuotettujen esitysten, kulttuurisen tiedon ja todellisuuden yhteen kietoutumisesta. Rikosuutisointia lähestytään uutisarvon käsitettä hyödyntäen ja pohditaan, millaista sukupuolten ja väkivallan välistä suhteutumista uutisoinnissa rakennetaan. Otsikoiden analyysissa keskitytään siihen, millä lailla väkivallan tekijöiden ja uhrien sukupuolet ovat niissä esillä. Naisten sukupuoli niin väkivallan tekijöinä kuin uhreina on uutisoinnissa korostuneemmin esillä kuin miesten. Miesten ja naisten erilainen suhteutuminen väkivaltaan jäsentää uutisointia moniulotteisesti ja osin paradoksaalisilla mutta sukupuolistunutta sosiaalista järjestystä ylläpitävillä tavoilla.

AbstractIn this article, we demonstrate how international social‐media discussions offer a platform for taking a stance on the war in Ukraine, redrawing national boundaries and legitimising their defence. We do so by analysing data that consist of comments triggered by a viral YouTube video depicting an encounter between an ageing civilian woman, labelled 'Babushka Z', and a Ukrainian soldier. Using a critical discursive psychological framework, we identify five interpretative repertoires: vulnerability, incapacity, national continuity, masculinised warriorship and righteousness. Our analysis illuminates how these repertoires draw on and reproduce intersecting categorisations based on gender, age and ethnic heritage. With the help of these categorisations, the repertoires build competing images of the actions of the figures in the video, which come to symbolise in various ways both patriotism and treason, heroism and cowardice. By aligning with competing historical‐national narratives, the commentors use these images to (de)legitimise the war and its actors.

Participatory approaches and co-research are increasingly employed in the current moment for exploring barriers to equality. Co-research treats research participants as experts in their own lives and as equal research partners. Research conducted with this orientation is based on research problems drafted by the research participants themselves from their aspirations regarding the research process and an active partnership that considers the interests of all parties involved. Participatory methods are used in co-research, particularly for the purpose of deepening the contextualisation of research knowledge about structurally vulnerable or subordinated groups and to challenge the power positions associated with traditional research designs. In co-research, the role of the people involved in the research is more central than in more traditional research. One of the key principles of co-research is that co-investigators (a) can participate in various roles, (b) have the opportunity to participate in different phases of the research according to their own interests and resources, and (c) co-investigators' participation can take many forms, including differences in intensity. The idea is to provide more people with opportunities to contribute to the knowledge production about themselves and their communities from their respective perspectives and interests. Co-research is also seen as an opportunity to improve the relevance and usefulness of scientific knowledge. It aims to genuinely increase interaction and openness and extend science's societal responsibility. In this book, we approach co-research as a means to promote social justice, as an action with a societal impact contributor to social impact and as a means to promote the societal responsibility of science. We discuss and evaluate the ideals of the co-research process concerning the everyday challenges and practices in research. Above all, we offer the knowledge and experience generated by our own projects to support those planning or already implementing co-research projects.