Critical Resistance Analysis: Men’s Stories of Masculinity in Higher Education

This exemplar is provided by Dr Jennifer Wolgemuth, from the College of Education, University of South Florida and illustrates an approach to conducting Critical Resistance Analysis (CRA). This analysis identifies the subjects (e.g. man/woman, White/Black) people construct when they talk about who they are. A CRA examines how these subjects are constructed – the discourses that make them possible – and the extent to which they are resisted. The data in this exemplar comes from a narrative and transformative interview study conducted in 2006. The study explored how male graduate students talked about being men in their graduate programs, with particular reference to their teaching responsibilities. The dataset consists of an interview with Clark – a male graduate student in Media Studies.