Interviewing Current and Former Incels: Experiences, Life Events, Worldviews

In this study, I interview both current and former incels to explore the ways they present their experiences and life events connected to becoming an incel, belonging in incel communities, and in the case of former incels, leaving these communities. Using discourse analysis, I look at the way the participants construct inceldom in their narrative, and what they see as leading to identifying as incels. I interview incels in Finnish and in English, to both gain an understanding of country specific experiences and, acknowledging the transnational nature of the phenomenon, to widen the scope of this research to include different backgrounds, cultures and areas. As there is currently a very limited amount of research using interview data to study incels, this research is explorative: using a wide set of interview questions in semi-structured interviews, I hope to capture the diversity of incel experiences and worldviews. This is among the first looks into how former incels construct and present their experiences in retrospect, and offers new insights into how disengagement happens and how, or if, their worldviews have changed. This study provides new knowledge on how incel ideology or worldview is adopted by individuals, and how incels understand the relationship between online posting and offline worldview. The findings can be applied in assessing the relationship between violent online content and physical offline violence, and in developing possible deradicalisation efforts. In this paper, I discuss early findings from interviews and present possible methodological and ethical approaches to researching an online community that arguably both attracts vulnerable, marginalised young men, and normalises misogynistic, violent extremist rhetoric.