The project was carried out at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University. First, a corpus of social media data was created, consisting of 27 blogs (textual material) and ca. 600 YouTube videos (multimodal material). In the first months of the project, ethical considerations turned out to be of central significance, leading to the division of the project into four separate phases, each using different data, methodologies and ways of engaging with research participants and thus requiring separate ethics reviews. This ensured that ethics formed an inherent component of the entire research process, and resulted in an article for Qualitative Sociology Review (currently in print).
Next, a study of the use and functions of multilingual practices was conducted on the basis of the corpus. A classification system of these practices was created, discussed at length in an article submitted to the journal Multilingual Margins. These practices were found to fill lexical gaps, fulfil expressive and stylistic functions, mark a speaker’s individual style, and ultimately help YouTube creators reconcile the “global LGBT sociolect” with the language legible to their audiences as they made sense of their identities and experiences for themselves and translated/explained them to others.
Next, a multimodal analysis of selected YouTube videos was undertaken (article accepted for publication in Communication, Culture & Critique), focusing on the strategies of localizing transnational narratives within the Polish socio-cultural context. Polish YouTubers were found to prioritize the collective building of knowledge and providing information on available transition pathways. It was shown how the archiving function of YouTube was employed to document subtle changes they went through over time. Multimodal and multilingual resources were shown to frame the collectively produced knowledge in more individualized ways, and travelling narratives that require the labour of translation/localization were teased apart from stories that might have developed locally.
The third research article, currently in print in the journal Zeszyty Łużyckie, explored the history of Polish online gender transition discourses, conceptualized in terms of two main stages – “Transnet 1.0” of anonymous, text-based blogs documenting individual experiences and “Transnet 2.0” of YouTube videos created by openly trans activists. This phase of the project traced this discursive history against the background of Poland’s own transition from a (nominally) socialist state to a modern democracy, which has not followed a simple, straight-forward path to progress allegedly exemplified by the “West”. The history of attitudes towards the transgender community throughout Poland’s democratic transition and its traces in contemporary online discourses paint a more complex picture.
A vital component of this project was collaboration with academic and non-academic partners and stakeholders. Networks were established and maintained and collaborative activities undertaken with colleagues at Cardiff University, as well as colleagues at the University of Bremen, Groningen, universities in Poznań and Gdańsk and Stony Brook University in New York.
A Facebook page was set up communicate the project to, and keep in touch with, transgender activist networks, mostly in Poland. Collaboration with these networks included exploratory fieldtrips to Poland, online meetings, in-person workshops, participation in an LGBT film festival, and participation in a scientific panel discussion during a public transgender visibility event in Poznań. A full-length project report will be published in Polish in an open-access queer studies journal and disseminated across activist networks involved in these activities.
