This paper examines how midlife single fathers in Norway present themselves on dating apps and how these self-presentations are shaped by cultural expectations surrounding modern fatherhood and romantic desirability. Based on a multimethod qualitative design, including interviews with 12 single fathers, a walkthrough of Tinder’s interface, and qualitative content analysis of 100 Tinder profiles, the study explores how men navigate the tensions between care and autonomy in digital dating. While previous research has largely focused on young adults, particularly students, and on women seeking men or men seeking men (Diesen et al., 2025), this study shifts attention to an underexplored group. Given that heterosexual men represent the largest share of dating app users, and that these platforms are increasingly used by older adults (BusinessOfApps, 2025), focusing on single fathers in midlife offers new insight into digital self-presentation. Findings show that single fathers carefully manage how they present their parenting roles on dating apps, foregrounding responsibility while avoiding signs of constraint. Their bios and category selections reflect both internalized cultural norms and the structuring logic of the app interface. Dating apps emerge not simply as tools for connection, but as socially patterned arenas where desirability is classified and negotiated. Applying Bourdieu’s (1984, 1991) theoretical lens, the analysis introduces the concept of custodial capital to describe how 50% shared custody functions as a symbolically valued ideal. In this context, it is not divorce or single parenthood that is stigmatized, but failure to align with this culturally sanctioned mode of modern fatherhood.

References
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard Univ Pr.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.
BusinessOfApps. (2025). Tinder Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025). Soko Media. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/
Diesen, P. S., Pettersen, L., & Karlsen, F. (2025). The Overlooked and the Overstudied: A Scoping Review of Qualitative Research on Pursuing Sexual, Romantic, and Loving Relationships Through Online Dating. Behavioral Sciences, 15(3), 247.

In the post-secular public sphere, religion plays an important role in formulating and crystalizing opinions about family and gender. This paper presents the main results of the discourse analysis of Lithuanian and Latvian secular and religious media coverage of the Istanbul Convention (IC) and sexual education between 2011 and 2025. Both countries have signed the Convention in 2013 (Lithuania) and 2016 (Latvia) but only Latvia has ratified it at the end of 2023. The issue of the Convention ignited public debate around gender and family that has already started in connection with sexual education initiatives in both countries. Media play a central role in this debate by staging conflicts, presenting actors and offering platforms for arguments to be expressed. We applied Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and paid attention that actors linked to religious organisations entered the mass media discourse by presenting arguments against the ratification of the Convention and sexual education echoed in opinions expressed by conservative political actors. The perceived threat of what was called “gender ideology” to the future legal support of the traditional model of family, natural roles and rights of men and women, and traditional and Christian values in general. The media discourse is similar in both countries, but the discursive strategies of religious and political actors differ. In Lithuania, religious actors are more directly involved in the public debate than in Latvia. However, in both countries, the discourse on IC and sexual education contribute to the anti-genderist discourse emerging in the public sphere and the politicisation of religion.

The ways we discuss crises affect our understanding of major events and the world in general (Seeger & Sellnow, 2016); thus the study of evaluation in social media discourse is essential. In this presentation, we describe how the Covid-19 pandemic was evaluated on Finnish Twitter by addressing the following research questions: (1) What kind of discourse topics were discussed on Twitter during the pandemic, and how were these topics evaluated? and 2) How did discourse topics and evaluations intersect to form descriptive entities called evaluative images? We study a large corpus of 375,322 tweets from January 2020 to August 2021 with quantitative topic modelling (Blei et al., 2003) and the qualitative framework of evaluative parameters (Bednarek, 2010). The results show that the discourse topics are related to health, protective measures, briefings and support services. In addition, evaluative expressions of emotivity, mental state, importance and necessity are involved. Based on the analysis, two evaluative images emerge (1) a focus on consistent responsibility and emotional reactions and (2) support for the groups most affected by the pandemic.

Bednarek, M. (2010). Evaluation in the news. A methodological framework for analysing evaluative language in journalism. Australian Journal of Communication, 37(2), 15– 50.

Blei, D., Ng, A., & Jordan, M. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022.

Seeger, M. W. & Sellnow, T. L. (2016). Narratives of crisis: Telling stories of ruin and renewal. Stanford University Press.

Dogs using so-called “talking buttons” – i.e. plastic buttons that play pre-programmed words and phrases upon being pressed – in the communication with their human companions have become a viral hit on social media. A multitude of videos show pet-human interactions that appear as meaningful communication in which the animals express needs and desires, ask questions, or state observations and emotions. The “talking buttons” used in these videos are sold by a variety of companies promising their customers that they can teach their pets “how to talk” so that they “can express their needs and emotions more accurately than relying solely on body language and visual clues” (https://fluent.pet/en-eu/pages/talking-dog-buttons). The comments posted to “talking buttons” videos on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok further contribute to the idea of pets capable of using human language by praising their language acquisition and by discussing the extent of their linguistic competence.
This paper investigates the discursive and interactive practices involved in the construction of “talking pets” as a phenomenon prevalent in digital culture. It combines the analysis of dog-human interactions using “talking buttons” in videos posted on TikTok with an examination of these videos’ comment sections to shed light on the ways animals as speaking subjects are constructed in interaction and discourse. This will then be discussed as an example of changing human-animal relationships and evolving understandings of what language is.

Extensive conversation analytic research on decision-making has shown how participants negotiate their deontic stance in both determining the decision and advancing the activity. In addition to deontics, also epistemic positioning and, at times, management of affect may become relevant. While research demonstrates the centrality of deontic positioning and the potential complexity introduced by epistemic and affective orders in decision-making, studies have mostly focused on short sequences built around a proposal–acceptance/rejection adjacency pair.

This study examines decision-making in neurological outpatient visits where the decision-making process extends beyond a single adjacency pair, forming prolonged activities. These may involve extended negotiation of a single decision, interlinked decision sequences, or decision-making spread across multiple encounters. The data consist of 130 recorded consultations, analysed using conversation analysis.

Building on Linell’s (1998) concept of communicative projects, we show how patients and clinicians use different strategies to steer decision-making. Patients may challenge recommendations by bringing up their experiential knowledge on the specificities of their ailment, while clinicians manage complexity by segmenting decisions into stages, where broad choices (e.g., administration method, risk level) precede more specific ones.

Our findings suggest that for understanding the phenomenon of complex decision-making, it is necessary to transcend single sequences.

Reference:
Linell, P. (1998) Approaching dialogue. Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives. John Benjamins.