Narratives of varied everyday lives and linked approaches (NOVELLA), UCL Institute of Education London

Joe Winter

Postgraduate researcher attached to Parenting and Identities and Practices project

Joe's research interest is in the relationship between wider discourses of parenting and mothers' and fathers' everyday identities and narratives, including those forged via the internet, focusing on constructions of parenting and social support; narratives of everyday parenting identities and practices in online and face-to-face contexts.

The substantive aim of his PhD is to provide insight into popular online social support for parents; in particular how it is made available to and experienced by mothers and fathers within the parenting websites Mumsnet and Netmums, and what cultural and political narratives of 'parenting' these online spaces may produce and reproduce.

Methodologically, Joe's project brings together different kinds of data – canonical narratives regarding both parenting and everyday practices and identities. Narrative data created in different contexts will be compared and contrasted; both synchronous spoken interviews and asynchronous online interviews with managers and moderators at Mumsnet and Netmums as well as with the same parent participants of each forum, online participant observation, as well as data created through multimodal discourse analysis of website homepages.

Joe has an academic background in Psychology, having completed his MSc. in Child Development at the Institute of Education in 2011. His previous research explored fathers' understandings and experiences of their role as parents in the context of a fathers-only parenting course. Joe has also spent several years working within family support services in both social care and universal children and young people settings.  He also has a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths.