ABSTRACT
The key questions we address in this chapter are what is lad culture, and where and how is it manifest in higher education in England? To address these questions we analyse university staff narratives about the different forms that lad culture, or laddish behaviour, can take. Drawing on our interviews with a diverse range of staff across six institutions in England, we explore how lad culture is characterised. We argue that lad culture encompasses a range of practices that we regard as underpinned by gender-based harassment and abuse. However, the discourses that staff draw on to describe, explain, and at times rationalise lad culture reveal clearly stratified understandings of who is a lad and what laddish behaviour encompasses. We analyse the ways in which harassment and abuse are invisibilised through such stratified conceptualisations, and argue for a fuller characterisation of lad culture – including the spaces in which it is enacted – in order to clearly identify and challenge harassment and abuse when it occurs. This analysis has implications for the ways in which laddism and lad culture are represented and problematised (or not) in educational (and other) discourse.
