Are there disciplinary differences in writing about pornography? A trialogue for two voices

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In 2016, Professors Alan McKee (a humanities researcher) and Roger Ingham (a psychology researcher) submitted a successful grant application for a project entitled ‘Pornography's Effects on Audiences: Explaining Contradictory Research Data’ (DP170100808). We were approached by Feona Attwood, who knew of the grant and asked whether we could provide a piece for this special issue that explored ‘writing about porn across disciplines’. The process of writing the grant application had already provided plenty of rich data about differences in disciplinary vocabularies and the ways in which various words implied different objects of study and different relationships to objects of study. Rather than trying to hide these differences we decided to make them the focus of the article. This piece presents three voices – Alan (AM), Roger (RI) and the original grant application (GA) – in trialogue, as a tentative beginning to the exploration of some potential differences between academic disciplines in conceptualizing, researching and writing about pornography.