Partner Projects

The main aim of my doctoral project is to increase knowledge on intimate partner violence and contribute to the empirical knowledge on fathers and fathering, particularly focusing on men who have been violent against an intimate female partner. Focusing on men as fathers but also as violent partners in intimate relationships will contribute further, both empirically and theoretically, to child and youth studies, masculinity studies and feminist post-structural studies. In this research I seek to describe and analyse men ‘s experience of violence against their intimate female partners with focus on fathering, masculinity and prevention. In an attempt to shed an encompassing light on fathers that have been violent in intimate partner relationships I divide the research into four projects or work packages.  

In the first project, I will start by mapping the dominant discourses on fathering in selected Icelandic mass media. In this project I intend to focus on dominant discourses and identities around fathering. I will look into which discourses around fathering are present in the mass media coverage, how they appear in the newspaper articles about fathers and what that tells us about different fathering identities.  

The second project will focus on analyzing experiences of fathers that have been violent in intimate relationships, lingering on how men perform and construct their fathering identity in their narratives. I will pay close attention to their self-work, what characterizes it and the role it plays in their identity. And furthermore, I intend to explore how they narrate their self in relation to masculinity and fathering discourses. 

I will in the third project draw on and reanalyse pre-existing data set on children’s experiences of domestic violence collected previously by in a project of one of my supervisors (Guðrún Kristinsdóttir). With that data, I aim to map the nuances in children ‘s experiences of their fathers and their violence. By getting insight into the experiences of children that have lived with violence at home I hope to gain a better understanding of fathers that have been violent in intimate partner relationships, the power dynamics, their fathering practises, identities and relationships with their children. 

The fourth project focuses on prevention and interventions against IPV from the perspective of fathers that have been violent. By analysing the experience of fathers that have been violent in intimate partner relationships of self-work and psychological treatment for perpetrators I aim to explore what can be done and make theoretical suggestions for prevention and interventions. Thus, I will convey theoretical and practical implications to readership in Iceland and transnationally.