Would you publish your dissertation on Substack?

Why? Why not?

I read some articles recently Recently I saw some TikToks where people were sharing some of their uni essays and dissertations on Substack, and I was immediately like,SIGN ME UP. I love a passion, I love a deepdive, and I love information and data in a world that seems more and more convinced it’s superfluous 🫠

For my undergrad, I opted not to do a dissertation, choosing instead 2 exam-based modules, because I just couldn’t fathom caring about anything in the degree enough to write 8,000 words on it. (By this point, I had tried to drop out 2 or 3 times: I was well aware it had been the wrong decision for me.)

So for my MA, a course I’d chosen after realising that I didn’t hate learning, I’d just been burnt out from my terrible undergrad experience, I was excited but nervous: how does one go about their 15,000-word magnum opus?

The answer is, as it turned out, pretty simple, or at least it was for me: choose something you’re interested in, and it won’t feel like a chore — which is why I did my dissertation on the treatment of fangirls in the British media.

Spoiler alert, besties: it wasn’t good! (My official title ended up being: Pathologised, Patronised, and Hypersexualised: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of how MailOnline presented female fans of One Direction, 2011-2015)

At the moment, my FB memories are flooded with reminders of writing it 3 years ago: the copious white Magnums that spurred me on, the arduous Overground-and-bus journeys to New Cross, where the uni & library was, the periodic reminders to clients that I had reduced capacity as I finished it off. My MA was sociocultural linguistics, and my dissertation was corpus-based, which meant I spent weeks trawling through 400+ articles on a right-wing tabloid newspaper here in the UK, all of which were just a tad more soul-crushing than the last (I knew I was cooked when I found a headline that compared fangirls to Jihadi brides, and my immediate thought was “Bad for feminism, great for my dissertation”, lol).

I loved really sinking my teeth into a topic, coming up with something concrete, and feeling like I was fighting for something: for fangirls, and feminism, and enthusiasm.

And that’s why I’ve decided that in the coming weeks I’m going to post it on here, at least in part, because what it covers is still as relevant now as it was then, when it was still as relevant as it had been the century preceding it. I need to shuffle around the structure a little bit, and make sure I’m not gonna get sued for copyright as it’s corpus-based, but it’s some of the work I’m proudest of and I can’t wait to share it.

In the meantime, if you did one: what did you do your dissertation on? Why did you choose it? Did you love it? What did you argue? I genuinely, desperately want to know - please and thank you!