Stephen A Robert
Biographic Data
| ID | 100235 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen A Robert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen A |
| FAMILY NAME | Robert |
| SIGNATURE | ROBERT S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3628-5808 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 261 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
From Compliance to Stewardship
Universities internationally are entering a new phase in their response to gender-based violence, shaped by shifting regulatory expectations and the growing influence of digitally-mediated misogyny among students. This commentary suggests the rise of the ‘manosphere’ (loosely connected online networks promoting misogynistic ideas) has reconfigured the conditions under which gendered harm emerges on campus, creating a mismatch between institutiona…
The limits of ‘backlash’ masculinity
This paper proposes a reconsideration of backlash as the dominant frame for analysing resistance to gender equality. Widely used to describe reactionary responses to feminist progress, the term often under-theorizes the strategic, organized and structural dimensions of contemporary masculinist mobilization. Building on feminist accounts of patriarchal adaptation, we foreground masculinity as a coordinated and politically organized project, well b…
Conceptualising school-level responses to sexual harassment of women teachers as institutional gaslighting
Public service sentiment in Australian digital communities on Reddit and Whirlpool during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper explores the role of digitally networked local communities on the platforms Reddit and Whirlpool in helping citizens navigate and understand Australian public services during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study incorporates an analysis of six location-based Australian subreddits and nine discussion forums on the platform Whirlpool. An inductive content analysis on a dataset of 14,000 posts and comments collected across Fe…
Manfluencers’, masculinities and the practice of misogyny in educational settings
You can't trust the mainstream media
Alternative news media, which opposes mainstream news media, has been utilised by the far right to proliferate their ideology. This study explores how the scale of discussion, and negative framing, of different groups that are commonly targeted by the far right changes over time. Taking 7089 articles published by a prominent Australian far-right alternative news media outlet over a 7.5-year period, and a corpus of 311 keywords, a keyword frequenc…
Caring Masculinities in Theory and Practice
This article intends to stimulate conversation and critical thinking about the concept of 'caring masculinities' and its ongoing relevance to the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM). Caring masculinities is subject to debate around its theoretical premises, its potential as a feminist concept, and the limits of the empirical evidence base that underpins the concept and its associated implications. We respond to some of these…
Exploring alcohol cultures and homosocial relationships in women's amateur AFL teams
Young women's risky drinking cultures are pertinent to the world of amateur Australian Football League, yet they have received limited research attention. Drawing on surveys, focus groups, and semi-structured ‘scroll-back’ interviews, this study provides an in-depth investigation of negotiations of gender and risky drinking in such cultures. A range of intersecting socio-cultural themes were identified, summarised into four overarching elements: …
Using Program Design and Delivery to Support Participant Engagement in Programs Challenging Problematic Gender Norms Amongst Australian Men and Boys
This article explores how the design and delivery of programs challenging gendered norms amongst men and boys can support attitude and behaviour change through more conscious and deliberate engagement with program content. Sixty-seven past participants of programs delivered by five Australian organisations completed an online survey based on their experiences. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) was used to explore participants' perspectives r…
Balancing generosity and critique
Feminist research methodologies have challenged power imbalances in qualitative interviews and gendered inequalities more broadly. We explore the methodological and ethical complexities of, and implications for, doing feminist research with young men. We draw on two studies in which narrative interviews with young men were conducted: one in 2014 and 2015 with 28 middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 31 living in Australia and Germany; and o…
One Small Step for Man
While recent scholarship has documented a growth of same-sex, nonsexual kissing among young men in Western societies, this may reflect a weakening, rather than complete transformation, of hegemonic gender structures. Critically engaging with current theorizing of 'inclusive masculinities,' this article reports the findings from a study of young Australian men's views on what constitutes acceptable forms of homosocial intimacy and how they attach …
Reifying difference
This article contributes to the study of contemporary lesbian communities by examining the management of internal diversity on a lesbian ‘subreddit’ (i.e. a sub-section of the popular social news media website Reddit) in relation to the parallel conceptual categories of ‘post-gay’ and ‘post-lesbian’. Drawing on data obtained via virtual ethnography of this subreddit, it argues that contemporary lesbian communities have diverged significantly from…
The currency of images
This paper examines contemporary gender relations among young people by taking young men’s experiences with and understandings of “sexting” as a case in point. Based on a focus group study with university undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse what is seen as having value and what is seen as constituting a risk when engaging in sexting, and how this is perceived as different for men and women. We demonstrate how value and risk are …
Domestic labour, masculinity and social change
Drawing on a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study in England, this paper presents evidence of how engagement with housework and childcare is regular and normalized for contemporary working-class young adult men. I explain this development with reference to inclusive masculinity theory, but supplement this by incorporating Mannheim’s concept of social generation, as recently adopted by scholars of youth sociology. The paper thus further augme…
Exploring constructions of masculinity on a men's body-positivity blog
Men's experiences with digital media and social networking sites remain relatively underexplored. Here, we analyse the complex ways that men construct, represent and perform masculinity on a men's body-positivity Tumblr blog called Body Positivity for Guys. Drawing on both hegemonic masculinity theory and inclusive masculinity theory' we contribute to current theoretical discussions within the academic literature on masculinities, while extending…
‘Mmm … I love it, bro!’
Despite being ubiquitous and embedded in everyday life, ‘the centrality of the Internet is still under-theorized in much masculinities research’. Contributing to the knowledge base in this area, here we place under the microscope the performance of hetero-masculinities undertaken by the three most popular YouTube gaming vloggers in 2015–2016: PewDiePie, VanossGaming and Sky Does Minecraft. The focus of this article thus sits at the intersection o…
Capital limits
Youth unemployment figures include large numbers of full-time students, yet student joblessness receives very little academic attention, especially at a qualitative level. Despite being relatively less deleterious than youth unemployment more broadly, we show that student unemployment remains an important site for the practice and reinforcement of social inequality. Using a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with 27 undergraduate studen…
Impact of economic cycles on mortality
On the door-step of equality
In this semi-structured interview research, we investigate the attitudes of 22 academy-level association football (soccer) players who are potentially on the verge of becoming professional athletes. We find that, as a result of these men belonging to a generation holding inclusive attitudes towards homosexuality, independent of whether they maintain contact with gay men, they are unanimously supportive of gay men coming out on their team. Thus, t…
The problem of social generations
Over the previous seven years the application of a social generation paradigm or ‘theory’ has gained increasing currency as a method in analysing young people's relationship with the life course. Whilst not a new concept or approach its resurgence and reconfiguration to ‘new’ times has seen some writers positioning it as a ‘new orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ within youth studies. In this it is seen as providing a conceptual framework that better helps…
Youth Studies, Housing Transitions and the 'Missing Middle
A recent but growing trend in studies of young people's lives has been to highlight that there is a 'missing middle' in the youth studies research agenda. It has been argued that much youth research focuses on either successful or very troubled transitions to adulthood, with the lives of those who might simply be 'getting by' representing an empirical absence. Building on previous work that has addressed how such a missing middle can add to our u…
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online
Research in the field of youth studies has produced many important insights and has been influential in critiquing, shaping, and changing our understandings of, and social policies in respect of, young people's lives. The social scientific focus has, rightly so, oftentimes been on those young people more obviously situated on the margins of society and possibly at risk of becoming excluded or disconnected from it. There has been some occasional a…
One step forward, one step Beck
In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to consider continuities as well as change. Building on an earlier paper, this article provides a rejoin…
The New Zealand OE as governance through freedom
Against the backdrop of social, economic, and demographic changes of recent times, Arnett has proposed his theory of ‘emerging adulthood’, essentially a new stage of the life-course between adolescence and adulthood. Arnett sees emerging adulthood as a distinct, historically unprecedented period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations. Furthermore, he claims that this time typically involves independence and represent…
Beyond ‘Neet’ and ‘tidy’ pathways
Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the ‘fast and slow lanes to adulthood’ espoused by Bynner et al. (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase. The primary purpose of this article is to develop the argument for the inclusion of detailed documentation and analysis of t…
Beyond ‘Neet’ and ‘tidy’ pathways
Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the ‘fast and slow lanes to adulthood’ espoused by Bynner et al. (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase. The primary purpose of this article is to develop the argument for the inclusion of detailed documentation and analysis of t…
Misrepresenting ‘choice biographies’
This paper provides a reply to Woodman's (2009) recent argument that youth studies often incorrectly attribute the concept of ‘choice biographies’ to the work of Ulrich Beck. Drawing heavily on Beck's own words, this paper contends that youth researchers might not be making this association unduly. Consideration is paid to some conceptual issues outlined by Will Atkinson, which Woodman has not appeared to consider, that challenge Beck's rejection…
On the door-step of equality
In this semi-structured interview research, we investigate the attitudes of 22 academy-level association football (soccer) players who are potentially on the verge of becoming professional athletes. We find that, as a result of these men belonging to a generation holding inclusive attitudes towards homosexuality, independent of whether they maintain contact with gay men, they are unanimously supportive of gay men coming out on their team. Thus, t…
The problem of social generations
Over the previous seven years the application of a social generation paradigm or ‘theory’ has gained increasing currency as a method in analysing young people's relationship with the life course. Whilst not a new concept or approach its resurgence and reconfiguration to ‘new’ times has seen some writers positioning it as a ‘new orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ within youth studies. In this it is seen as providing a conceptual framework that better helps…
One step forward, one step Beck
In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to consider continuities as well as change. Building on an earlier paper, this article provides a rejoin…
Domestic labour, masculinity and social change
Drawing on a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study in England, this paper presents evidence of how engagement with housework and childcare is regular and normalized for contemporary working-class young adult men. I explain this development with reference to inclusive masculinity theory, but supplement this by incorporating Mannheim’s concept of social generation, as recently adopted by scholars of youth sociology. The paper thus further augme…
The currency of images
This paper examines contemporary gender relations among young people by taking young men’s experiences with and understandings of “sexting” as a case in point. Based on a focus group study with university undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse what is seen as having value and what is seen as constituting a risk when engaging in sexting, and how this is perceived as different for men and women. We demonstrate how value and risk are …
Conceptualising school-level responses to sexual harassment of women teachers as institutional gaslighting
The New Zealand OE as governance through freedom
Against the backdrop of social, economic, and demographic changes of recent times, Arnett has proposed his theory of ‘emerging adulthood’, essentially a new stage of the life-course between adolescence and adulthood. Arnett sees emerging adulthood as a distinct, historically unprecedented period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations. Furthermore, he claims that this time typically involves independence and represent…
One Small Step for Man
While recent scholarship has documented a growth of same-sex, nonsexual kissing among young men in Western societies, this may reflect a weakening, rather than complete transformation, of hegemonic gender structures. Critically engaging with current theorizing of 'inclusive masculinities,' this article reports the findings from a study of young Australian men's views on what constitutes acceptable forms of homosocial intimacy and how they attach …
Caring Masculinities in Theory and Practice
This article intends to stimulate conversation and critical thinking about the concept of 'caring masculinities' and its ongoing relevance to the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM). Caring masculinities is subject to debate around its theoretical premises, its potential as a feminist concept, and the limits of the empirical evidence base that underpins the concept and its associated implications. We respond to some of these…
Youth Studies, Housing Transitions and the 'Missing Middle
A recent but growing trend in studies of young people's lives has been to highlight that there is a 'missing middle' in the youth studies research agenda. It has been argued that much youth research focuses on either successful or very troubled transitions to adulthood, with the lives of those who might simply be 'getting by' representing an empirical absence. Building on previous work that has addressed how such a missing middle can add to our u…
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online
Research in the field of youth studies has produced many important insights and has been influential in critiquing, shaping, and changing our understandings of, and social policies in respect of, young people's lives. The social scientific focus has, rightly so, oftentimes been on those young people more obviously situated on the margins of society and possibly at risk of becoming excluded or disconnected from it. There has been some occasional a…
Balancing generosity and critique
Feminist research methodologies have challenged power imbalances in qualitative interviews and gendered inequalities more broadly. We explore the methodological and ethical complexities of, and implications for, doing feminist research with young men. We draw on two studies in which narrative interviews with young men were conducted: one in 2014 and 2015 with 28 middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 31 living in Australia and Germany; and o…
Exploring constructions of masculinity on a men's body-positivity blog
Men's experiences with digital media and social networking sites remain relatively underexplored. Here, we analyse the complex ways that men construct, represent and perform masculinity on a men's body-positivity Tumblr blog called Body Positivity for Guys. Drawing on both hegemonic masculinity theory and inclusive masculinity theory' we contribute to current theoretical discussions within the academic literature on masculinities, while extending…
Capital limits
Youth unemployment figures include large numbers of full-time students, yet student joblessness receives very little academic attention, especially at a qualitative level. Despite being relatively less deleterious than youth unemployment more broadly, we show that student unemployment remains an important site for the practice and reinforcement of social inequality. Using a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with 27 undergraduate studen…
Manfluencers’, masculinities and the practice of misogyny in educational settings
You can't trust the mainstream media
Alternative news media, which opposes mainstream news media, has been utilised by the far right to proliferate their ideology. This study explores how the scale of discussion, and negative framing, of different groups that are commonly targeted by the far right changes over time. Taking 7089 articles published by a prominent Australian far-right alternative news media outlet over a 7.5-year period, and a corpus of 311 keywords, a keyword frequenc…
Impact of economic cycles on mortality
From Aquatics
Beyond ‘Neet’ and ‘tidy’ pathways
Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the ‘fast and slow lanes to adulthood’ espoused by Bynner et al. (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase. The primary purpose of this article is to develop the argument for the inclusion of detailed documentation and analysis of t…
Misrepresenting ‘choice biographies’
This paper provides a reply to Woodman's (2009) recent argument that youth studies often incorrectly attribute the concept of ‘choice biographies’ to the work of Ulrich Beck. Drawing heavily on Beck's own words, this paper contends that youth researchers might not be making this association unduly. Consideration is paid to some conceptual issues outlined by Will Atkinson, which Woodman has not appeared to consider, that challenge Beck's rejection…
The New Zealand OE as governance through freedom
Against the backdrop of social, economic, and demographic changes of recent times, Arnett has proposed his theory of ‘emerging adulthood’, essentially a new stage of the life-course between adolescence and adulthood. Arnett sees emerging adulthood as a distinct, historically unprecedented period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations. Furthermore, he claims that this time typically involves independence and represent…
One step forward, one step Beck
In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to consider continuities as well as change. Building on an earlier paper, this article provides a rejoin…
Youth Studies, Housing Transitions and the 'Missing Middle
A recent but growing trend in studies of young people's lives has been to highlight that there is a 'missing middle' in the youth studies research agenda. It has been argued that much youth research focuses on either successful or very troubled transitions to adulthood, with the lives of those who might simply be 'getting by' representing an empirical absence. Building on previous work that has addressed how such a missing middle can add to our u…
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online
Research in the field of youth studies has produced many important insights and has been influential in critiquing, shaping, and changing our understandings of, and social policies in respect of, young people's lives. The social scientific focus has, rightly so, oftentimes been on those young people more obviously situated on the margins of society and possibly at risk of becoming excluded or disconnected from it. There has been some occasional a…
The problem of social generations
Over the previous seven years the application of a social generation paradigm or ‘theory’ has gained increasing currency as a method in analysing young people's relationship with the life course. Whilst not a new concept or approach its resurgence and reconfiguration to ‘new’ times has seen some writers positioning it as a ‘new orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ within youth studies. In this it is seen as providing a conceptual framework that better helps…
Impact of economic cycles on mortality
On the door-step of equality
In this semi-structured interview research, we investigate the attitudes of 22 academy-level association football (soccer) players who are potentially on the verge of becoming professional athletes. We find that, as a result of these men belonging to a generation holding inclusive attitudes towards homosexuality, independent of whether they maintain contact with gay men, they are unanimously supportive of gay men coming out on their team. Thus, t…
Capital limits
Youth unemployment figures include large numbers of full-time students, yet student joblessness receives very little academic attention, especially at a qualitative level. Despite being relatively less deleterious than youth unemployment more broadly, we show that student unemployment remains an important site for the practice and reinforcement of social inequality. Using a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with 27 undergraduate studen…
‘Mmm … I love it, bro!’
Despite being ubiquitous and embedded in everyday life, ‘the centrality of the Internet is still under-theorized in much masculinities research’. Contributing to the knowledge base in this area, here we place under the microscope the performance of hetero-masculinities undertaken by the three most popular YouTube gaming vloggers in 2015–2016: PewDiePie, VanossGaming and Sky Does Minecraft. The focus of this article thus sits at the intersection o…
Domestic labour, masculinity and social change
Drawing on a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study in England, this paper presents evidence of how engagement with housework and childcare is regular and normalized for contemporary working-class young adult men. I explain this development with reference to inclusive masculinity theory, but supplement this by incorporating Mannheim’s concept of social generation, as recently adopted by scholars of youth sociology. The paper thus further augme…
Exploring constructions of masculinity on a men's body-positivity blog
Men's experiences with digital media and social networking sites remain relatively underexplored. Here, we analyse the complex ways that men construct, represent and perform masculinity on a men's body-positivity Tumblr blog called Body Positivity for Guys. Drawing on both hegemonic masculinity theory and inclusive masculinity theory' we contribute to current theoretical discussions within the academic literature on masculinities, while extending…
Reifying difference
This article contributes to the study of contemporary lesbian communities by examining the management of internal diversity on a lesbian ‘subreddit’ (i.e. a sub-section of the popular social news media website Reddit) in relation to the parallel conceptual categories of ‘post-gay’ and ‘post-lesbian’. Drawing on data obtained via virtual ethnography of this subreddit, it argues that contemporary lesbian communities have diverged significantly from…
The currency of images
This paper examines contemporary gender relations among young people by taking young men’s experiences with and understandings of “sexting” as a case in point. Based on a focus group study with university undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse what is seen as having value and what is seen as constituting a risk when engaging in sexting, and how this is perceived as different for men and women. We demonstrate how value and risk are …
Balancing generosity and critique
Feminist research methodologies have challenged power imbalances in qualitative interviews and gendered inequalities more broadly. We explore the methodological and ethical complexities of, and implications for, doing feminist research with young men. We draw on two studies in which narrative interviews with young men were conducted: one in 2014 and 2015 with 28 middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 31 living in Australia and Germany; and o…
One Small Step for Man
While recent scholarship has documented a growth of same-sex, nonsexual kissing among young men in Western societies, this may reflect a weakening, rather than complete transformation, of hegemonic gender structures. Critically engaging with current theorizing of 'inclusive masculinities,' this article reports the findings from a study of young Australian men's views on what constitutes acceptable forms of homosocial intimacy and how they attach …
Exploring alcohol cultures and homosocial relationships in women's amateur AFL teams
Young women's risky drinking cultures are pertinent to the world of amateur Australian Football League, yet they have received limited research attention. Drawing on surveys, focus groups, and semi-structured ‘scroll-back’ interviews, this study provides an in-depth investigation of negotiations of gender and risky drinking in such cultures. A range of intersecting socio-cultural themes were identified, summarised into four overarching elements: …
Using Program Design and Delivery to Support Participant Engagement in Programs Challenging Problematic Gender Norms Amongst Australian Men and Boys
This article explores how the design and delivery of programs challenging gendered norms amongst men and boys can support attitude and behaviour change through more conscious and deliberate engagement with program content. Sixty-seven past participants of programs delivered by five Australian organisations completed an online survey based on their experiences. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) was used to explore participants' perspectives r…
Manfluencers’, masculinities and the practice of misogyny in educational settings
You can't trust the mainstream media
Alternative news media, which opposes mainstream news media, has been utilised by the far right to proliferate their ideology. This study explores how the scale of discussion, and negative framing, of different groups that are commonly targeted by the far right changes over time. Taking 7089 articles published by a prominent Australian far-right alternative news media outlet over a 7.5-year period, and a corpus of 311 keywords, a keyword frequenc…
Caring Masculinities in Theory and Practice
This article intends to stimulate conversation and critical thinking about the concept of 'caring masculinities' and its ongoing relevance to the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM). Caring masculinities is subject to debate around its theoretical premises, its potential as a feminist concept, and the limits of the empirical evidence base that underpins the concept and its associated implications. We respond to some of these…
Conceptualising school-level responses to sexual harassment of women teachers as institutional gaslighting
Public service sentiment in Australian digital communities on Reddit and Whirlpool during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper explores the role of digitally networked local communities on the platforms Reddit and Whirlpool in helping citizens navigate and understand Australian public services during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study incorporates an analysis of six location-based Australian subreddits and nine discussion forums on the platform Whirlpool. An inductive content analysis on a dataset of 14,000 posts and comments collected across Fe…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Social science (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (11 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (7 works)