Writing and Researching Differently through Fictocriticism

A Methods North West Lunchtime Seminar, with Mark Gatto (Northumbria University).

Research on gender, work and organisation owes a great debt to founding scholarship, yet the majority of writing continues to reproduce the norms of an academia that is dominated by a masculine sensibility for convention. The field of gender studies is often understood through lenses of identity, power, and systems. Yet, though we can stand on the foundations of sophisticated scholarly theorising, we do not see corollary advances in societal attitudes and outcomes. This is particularly true for parents and carers.

In recent years, more scholarship has turned to embodied writing, embracing messiness and blurring lines between empirical and personal data. This session will provide one such personal narrative of undertaking and pursuing a form of research/writing that aspires to a critical and boundary blurring writing, grounded in masculinities theory and empirical data, while also developing a style that aligns with fictions that move and inspire us. The session will include the use of the Dystopian fiction genre to undertake unconventional research through empirical data generated with parents about their experiences and expectations of parenthood at work. I will outline how I used dystopian fiction to inform my Critical Discourse Analysis. I will share how I plotted and planned the writing of a Fictocriticism in the style of the dystopian genre to subvert the persistence of patriarchal norms for parents at work. Finally, I will share how the resistance embedded in the genre inspired my ongoing work with parents and carers networks.