Ken Preston
Biographic Data
| ID | 93066 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ken Preston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ken |
| FAMILY NAME | Preston |
| SIGNATURE | PRESTON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0198-123X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Far, Moderate or in Between? The Ties That Shape Canadian Right‐Wing Youth Activism
Canadian right-wing youth social movement actors are not a monolith. In this paper, I analyze 45 interviews and notes from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with a population of Canadian right-wing youth activists between 2023 and 2024. While these youth activists are part of the same right-wing organizations, some espouse far-right ideas, others are more moderately right-wing, and some are in between. For this sample of right-wing youth, differen…
An Emotional Endeavor: Researcher Positionality and Bad Feelings Studying the Canadian Far Right
From Screens to Campuses: The Role of YouTube in Shaping Far-Right Activism Among University Students in North America
Although recent studies have suggested that social media sites play a crucial role in amplifying far-right ideas, the exact mechanisms by which this process occurs remain unclear. To address this gap, I utilize data from life history interviews with 55 far-right youth activists involved in right-wing campus organizations in a major city in central Canada and another in the Midwestern United States. I found that, during interviews, far-right parti…
Incels and gender inequality: Changing Tides in Defining the Far Right
Scholars have debated how to define far-right groups. Literature has suggested that far-right groups are exclusionary, nativist, xenophobic, anti-democratic and that they do not believe in equality. However, how do we define groups that have ambiguous political affiliations, such as incels, who still hold extreme exclusionary beliefs? We analyze 9062 comments on the Incels.is forum during a three-month period in 2019. We found that incels challen…
A soldier and a victim: Masculinity, violence, and incels celebration of December 6th
In 1989, Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at L'École Polytechnique de Montréal. We demonstrate how involuntarily celibate ("incel") men celebrate Lépine and claim him as a member of their community. Our analysis draws on 637 comments made on incels.is, the main English-language incel forum, that explicitly mentions Marc Lépine. We argue that incels use Lépine to situate themselves in relation to masculinity and to justify violence against women. Fir…
Justifying contentious social and political claims using mundane language: An analysis of Canadian right-wing extremism
There has been a lack of research examining how right-wing extremist groups justify their key claims online to reach a broader audience. This question is even more worrisome when considering a Canadian context, given Canada's state policies on multiculturalism and intolerance of hateful rhetoric. My research draws on the gaps within the literature of right-wing extremism, online spaces, and justification of discourse by conducting a content analy…
Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men
This article uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate (“incel”) community. We analyzed every comment ( N = 3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms…
The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men
Involuntary celibates, or 'incels,' are people who identify themselves by their inability to establish sexual partnerships. In this article, we use analytic abduction to qualitatively analyze 9,062 comments on a popular incel forum for heterosexual men that is characterized by extensive misogyny. Incels argue that emerging technologies reveal and compound the gender practices that produce involuntarily celibate men. First, incels argue that women…
Davies, William, Nervous States: How feeling took over the world
Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality
We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning natio…
The Use of Basketry in The Hulls of Vietnamese Seagoing Boats. The Status as of 2015 and The Question of The Future
Vietnam has a long tradition of building various sorts of boats for seagoing work that are either purely bamboo basketry, or a composite structure consisting of the bamboo basketry supported by greater or lesser amounts of wooden structure. Numerous authors have commented that these boats are more resistant to shipworm than wooden boats and that they are more flexible, better able to survive work in the surf zone. The extremely pragmatic Vietname…
Context-Specific Measurement of Individualism-Collectivism on the Individual Level: The Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory
Cross-cultural research would be greatly aided by the availability of psychometrically sound measures of meaningful cultural dimensions of variability on the individual level. We report six studies that establish the validity and reliability of an individual-based assessment inventory of individualistic versus collectivistic tendencies in four social relationships (the Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory-ICIAI). The resu…
Context-Specific Measurement of Individualism-Collectivism on the Individual Level: The Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory
Cross-cultural research would be greatly aided by the availability of psychometrically sound measures of meaningful cultural dimensions of variability on the individual level. We report six studies that establish the validity and reliability of an individual-based assessment inventory of individualistic versus collectivistic tendencies in four social relationships (the Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory-ICIAI). The resu…
The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men
Involuntary celibates, or 'incels,' are people who identify themselves by their inability to establish sexual partnerships. In this article, we use analytic abduction to qualitatively analyze 9,062 comments on a popular incel forum for heterosexual men that is characterized by extensive misogyny. Incels argue that emerging technologies reveal and compound the gender practices that produce involuntarily celibate men. First, incels argue that women…
Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men
This article uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate (“incel”) community. We analyzed every comment ( N = 3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms…
A soldier and a victim: Masculinity, violence, and incels celebration of December 6th
In 1989, Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at L'École Polytechnique de Montréal. We demonstrate how involuntarily celibate ("incel") men celebrate Lépine and claim him as a member of their community. Our analysis draws on 637 comments made on incels.is, the main English-language incel forum, that explicitly mentions Marc Lépine. We argue that incels use Lépine to situate themselves in relation to masculinity and to justify violence against women. Fir…
Justifying contentious social and political claims using mundane language: An analysis of Canadian right-wing extremism
There has been a lack of research examining how right-wing extremist groups justify their key claims online to reach a broader audience. This question is even more worrisome when considering a Canadian context, given Canada's state policies on multiculturalism and intolerance of hateful rhetoric. My research draws on the gaps within the literature of right-wing extremism, online spaces, and justification of discourse by conducting a content analy…
Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality
We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning natio…
Context-Specific Measurement of Individualism-Collectivism on the Individual Level: The Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory
Cross-cultural research would be greatly aided by the availability of psychometrically sound measures of meaningful cultural dimensions of variability on the individual level. We report six studies that establish the validity and reliability of an individual-based assessment inventory of individualistic versus collectivistic tendencies in four social relationships (the Individualism-Collectivism Interpersonal Assessment Inventory-ICIAI). The resu…
The Use of Basketry in The Hulls of Vietnamese Seagoing Boats. The Status as of 2015 and The Question of The Future
Vietnam has a long tradition of building various sorts of boats for seagoing work that are either purely bamboo basketry, or a composite structure consisting of the bamboo basketry supported by greater or lesser amounts of wooden structure. Numerous authors have commented that these boats are more resistant to shipworm than wooden boats and that they are more flexible, better able to survive work in the surf zone. The extremely pragmatic Vietname…
Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality
We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning natio…
Davies, William, Nervous States: How feeling took over the world
The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men
Involuntary celibates, or 'incels,' are people who identify themselves by their inability to establish sexual partnerships. In this article, we use analytic abduction to qualitatively analyze 9,062 comments on a popular incel forum for heterosexual men that is characterized by extensive misogyny. Incels argue that emerging technologies reveal and compound the gender practices that produce involuntarily celibate men. First, incels argue that women…
Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men
This article uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate (“incel”) community. We analyzed every comment ( N = 3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms…
A soldier and a victim: Masculinity, violence, and incels celebration of December 6th
In 1989, Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at L'École Polytechnique de Montréal. We demonstrate how involuntarily celibate ("incel") men celebrate Lépine and claim him as a member of their community. Our analysis draws on 637 comments made on incels.is, the main English-language incel forum, that explicitly mentions Marc Lépine. We argue that incels use Lépine to situate themselves in relation to masculinity and to justify violence against women. Fir…
Justifying contentious social and political claims using mundane language: An analysis of Canadian right-wing extremism
There has been a lack of research examining how right-wing extremist groups justify their key claims online to reach a broader audience. This question is even more worrisome when considering a Canadian context, given Canada's state policies on multiculturalism and intolerance of hateful rhetoric. My research draws on the gaps within the literature of right-wing extremism, online spaces, and justification of discourse by conducting a content analy…
Incels and gender inequality: Changing Tides in Defining the Far Right
Scholars have debated how to define far-right groups. Literature has suggested that far-right groups are exclusionary, nativist, xenophobic, anti-democratic and that they do not believe in equality. However, how do we define groups that have ambiguous political affiliations, such as incels, who still hold extreme exclusionary beliefs? We analyze 9062 comments on the Incels.is forum during a three-month period in 2019. We found that incels challen…
Far, Moderate or in Between? The Ties That Shape Canadian Right‐Wing Youth Activism
Canadian right-wing youth social movement actors are not a monolith. In this paper, I analyze 45 interviews and notes from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with a population of Canadian right-wing youth activists between 2023 and 2024. While these youth activists are part of the same right-wing organizations, some espouse far-right ideas, others are more moderately right-wing, and some are in between. For this sample of right-wing youth, differen…
An Emotional Endeavor: Researcher Positionality and Bad Feelings Studying the Canadian Far Right
From Screens to Campuses: The Role of YouTube in Shaping Far-Right Activism Among University Students in North America
Although recent studies have suggested that social media sites play a crucial role in amplifying far-right ideas, the exact mechanisms by which this process occurs remain unclear. To address this gap, I utilize data from life history interviews with 55 far-right youth activists involved in right-wing campus organizations in a major city in central Canada and another in the Midwestern United States. I found that, during interviews, far-right parti…
Sociology (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Masculinity (3 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Feeling (2 works)