Digital Design

lit_review

Lil’ Miquela: Constellating Feminist Technoscience, CGI, and the Influencer Industry

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Lil’ Miquela, the virtual instagram influencer and self-proclaimed “change-seeking robot with the drip,” is a figure (or site?) of immense and timely intrigue. The CGI avatar came online right before the election of Trump and currently is posting about and commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic with the rest of the world. As the virus continues to force many into uncharted digital territory during quarantine, how to move major parts of life online is a pressing question. But how our tech is being made, and who is profiting from it and in what ways, should also be an area of major concern. 

AI is not a cyborg. And Miquela is not even AI. But Donna Harraway’s 1991 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” is a canonical feminist work referenced often by various academics focusing on technology’s ever-transforming impact on society. It is a dense piece of theoretical work and has been used and critiqued for a myriad of purposes since its publication. The manifesto is an apt touchstone for thinking about technologies in the COVID-19 age as it was a result of a historical moment that feels particularly aligned to our current one. David Bell argues that the manifesto was “zeitgeisty” because it was published at a time “when lots of humanities academics were starting to experience computers in their working lives and were starting to feel a bit like cyborgs themselves” (Bell 97). Harraway’s manifesto offers a theoretical lens through which to view Miquela and the company that creates her and aids in producing an analytic that moves beyond simplistic representational politics. Dovetailing this framework is important scholarship on the technology of Lil Miquela through CGI and how she fits into the internet influencer economy more broadly. 

Harraway theorized the core of her seminal manifesto during the splintering feminist movement and technological upheaval of the 1980’s. Holding on to tenets of socialist-feminist politics while following theorists like Chela Sandoval in critiquing totalizing identity politics, Harraway articulates the symbol of the cyborg through a methodology of “irony,” or refusing to theorize contradictions “into a larger whole” (5). Through six provocative sections, Harraway identifies technology as a product of “militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” but asks how we can develop a resistant feminist use of tech rather than ineffectively dismissing or demonizing it (7). She then charts how emerging technoscience is and will transform structures of oppression, arguing that work will become increasingly feminized and precarious. Throughout the manifesto, Harraway also calls attention to the material labor of technological production. She concludes with a call to take power in the inevitability of technological advancement, because “the machine is us” (55). 

“The Cyborg Manifesto” is very challenging in both content and form. It invites readers to move beyond potential initial understandings of Miquela as problematic or unethical and instead ask how the virtual influencer might be understood, like the cyborg, as “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (9). How can Miquela practice fractured identities when influencer culture is based so heavily on a “brand?” Most importantly, Harraway’s focus on labor and what it means that “machines are eminently portable, mobile- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore,” is a key question regarding Miquela (9). Created by Brud, a mysterious LA start-up that is backed by big funders in Silicon Valley, Miquela is not AI or a robot, but a CGI avatar whose speech is written out by the company. Finding out that Miquela does not exist in a physical space and is not creating her own speech is almost disappointing to learn as people who follow and interact with her attempt to figure out her identity. But CGI is an interesting technology in and of itself and it is important to consider the labor that is going behind every one of Miquela’s posts and videos. 

In his chapter for the volume Reading Modernism with Machines, scholar Eusong Kim interrogates the representational digital “monster” created by CGI within modern Korean and American cinema and discussed by scholar Joseph Jeon. Although parts of the chapter are beyond the scope of my focus, Kim offers important insight on CGI and its production. Primarily, he builds off the extensive analysis of the fallacy of photography as objective and documental and extends it to CGI. He writes: “Rather than analyzing what we see and recognize, we should read the digital landscape as algorithmic, and therefore often fully contaminated” and that “surface readings of digital objects are not possible” (267, 280). In today’s world many of us are aware of the artificiality of social media, but less aware about how these photoshopping technologies are being produced and what data is being mined from them. To this end, Kim analyses the HBO show John Adams to illustrate the complexity and intensive labor of CGI. He points out how even the “monsters” and completely artificial background extras are composed from human forms, and how the “human” figures themselves are always digitally altered (268). Similar to the racist history of color-correcting in photography, Kim is interested in whose bodies are being used behind CGI and how the form is legislating against all types of human bodies. Miquela, who we are told is Brazilian-American, is not made out of complete internet ether, but is dependent upon a model or images of biracial women who may, but probably are not, profiting off her celebrity. More transparency regarding who exactly is in the boardroom at Brud creating Miquela is critical in answering Kim’s call to make visible militarization and visualization technologies that “often work to remain hidden structurally” and to develop resistant tech techniques a la Harraway (273).  

“Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness” by Crystal Abidin is the final work I will be using to ground an analysis of Lil Miquela. Unlike Kim’s focus on the technology and labor of CGI, Abidin observes the practices of influencers through a six year ethnographic study on real-life Singaporean influencers. Abidin argues that there are four primary areas in which influencers need to be successful: intimacy (followers feel close to the influencer), accessibility (influencers respond to followers frequently), authenticity (comparable to intimacy, the idea that influencers are showing their “real” selves), and emulable (to what degree followers can relate to the influencers life). This taxonomy is useful in differentiating how Miquela operates online in contrast to her not-completely-virtual peers. Although Miquela does practice a type of disclosive intimacy with her followers, she rarely responds to commentary on her posts and videos. Further, the notion of “authenticity” and “emulable” take on completely new meanings with a CGI avatar. Miquela, and other virtual influencers, also pose an ethical question in regards to advertising as they physically cannot experience or test any of the products they hype. Does the clarity of Miquela as “not real” call attention to the artificiality of real-life influencers and their recommendations? Or does it not matter to human followers, who may be more interested in the idea of AI and robots than what they are selling? 

Miquela produces a matrix of pressing questions regarding AI, labor practices, the influencer industry, and celebrity more broadly, that will continue to emerge as technology advances. How can we lead virtual lives with recognition and resistance to big data and the painful materiality of tech production? Despite being a product of Silicon Valley venture capitalists with questionable politics, Miquela may be a provocative place to start thinking about these questions and honor Harraway’s imagination and the possibility of escaping unkind origins. 

Works Cited 

Abidin, Crystal. “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, no. 8, 2015, doi:10.7264/NMW2FFG. 

Harraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Harraway. U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 5-90. 


Kim, Eusong. “CGI Monstrosities: Modernist Surfaces, the Composite and the Making of the Human Form.” Reading Modernism with Machines, edited by S. Ross & J. O’Sullivan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 265-289.

Ballroom-and-SSRs

Queer Coding: A Literature Review

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Most of the literature about digital influencers, such as the self identifying queer robot, Lil Miquela, remains confined to journalistic sources that do not necessarily connect her to a broader scholarly dialogue about aritificial intelligence, queer identity, and crafted cyborg personas. However, since the earliest days of science fiction, scholars have analyzed the robot as a conduit for exploring the intersection between humans and machines and the fictional narratives that shape identity. In this literature review, I will examine three sources that bring their own understandings of digital queerness, artificial life, and the gap between fiction and reality. Scholars like Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles attempt to understand artificial life as a central idea of post-humanism, using the cyborg and narratives of artificial life to remagine concepts of self and agency, altering the lense through which scholars should examine feminist and queer theory. Other scholars, like Bonnie Ruberg, explore the natural intersection between queerness and technology, providing a backdrop for post-humanism that focuses on queering the presentation of stories and ideas online. By centering research on cyborgs and artificial life, these scholars create links between personhood and technology that have the potential to reframe conversations about identity and queerness as well as how these conversations take place. 

Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto is one of the most comprehensive and well known work exploring the intersections of feminist theory, queer theory, and posthumanism. Published in 1985 in the Socialist Review, the essay uses the cyborg as a central metaphor for breaking down rigid boundaries. In particular, Haraway examines the boundaries between human and animal, human and machine, and the physical and the non-physical. Learning to think in the space between these distinctions, she argues, helps reshape our ideas about personhood and identity, which then leads to a new, queerer, understanding of feminism. If we understand gender as something constructed rather than a natural predisposition for certain traits, then we can also think of gender as something that can be reconstructed. Haraway thinks of people as nodes in an interconnected web of people and technology. Even if we are not science-fiction creations of part metal, part flesh, we are still technological beings, manufactured to perform a certain way by the world around us. This concept extends past queerness. By thinking of everything in our lives as constructions rather than immovable nature, we are then free to question and reshape everything from our relationship to the natural environment, to the oppressive structures of our societies. This kind of techno-feminist thinking remains crucial to our current world as we face the social and natural threat of climate change. As Hari Kunzru wrote in his profile of Haraway, “Maybe humans are biologically destined to fight wars and trash the environment. Maybe we’re not.”

After establishing the binaries she intends to break down, Haraway talks about problems with Western concepts of humanity and identity, which she claims are deeply rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. She wants to combat “essentialism,” which is the idea that a certain set of characteristics define an identity or a subject and critiques western feminism’s tendency to center identity politics. When Haraway talks about the cyborg, she acknowledges it as both a metaphor and an actual piece of technology, with the understanding that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Although this long predates the problem of a digital influncer inhabiting a queer identity and writing her own identity narrative, it captures the complicated implications of Lil Miquela’s existence. She poses herself as a self-aware robot with a physical form and sexual agency, but in reality this is just a fiction created by CGI animators and a team of writers. Haraway looks at the physical and non-physical as intertwined, understanding fictional narrative as something that both reacts to and affects reality. This piece of literature helps broaden our understanding of Lil Miquela. Rather than thinking of her as either a being with agency or a problematic fictional character appropriating identities for profit. 

Haraway used the cyborg to revolutionize feminist conversation, centering queerness and elevating the (new at the time) idea that gender is something maleable and fluid. Her scholarship is a widely cited cornerstone of feminst, post-humanist, queer, and socialist scholarship, but it’s also over thirty years old, written long before anyone had dreamed up the concept of a queer robot social media influencer. Haraway paved the road for other cyborg scholars to respond to and challenge her work, aware that the advent of new technologies would change the way we thought about human identities. Since writing the manifesto, she has stayed active in the field, focusing her recent scholarship on the immediate issue of climate change and the relationship between humans and animals. She has always taken a collective approach to research and writing, making sure to cite the expertise of others and invite new voices into the conversation. 

A Cyborg Manifesto gave a name to a generation of feminists who view Haraway’s work as central to their understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality. The term Cyberfeminism, which Haraway herself has never used, emerged in the early 1990s and refers to a group of feminists who believed in a utopian future in which the rise of the internet would bridge sex and gender divisions, centering marginalized voices. The movement was characterized by bold, explosive language and art that delivered non-linear and unconventional narratives, captured well by the 1991 A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. This includes memorable, zine-like quotes such as, “We are the virus of the new world disorder” and “The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” which formed a narrative of radical hope that the internet might be an equalizing force, amplifying the voices of the marginalized and revolutionizing the way we think about the self. The rapid rise of the internet around the turn of the century saw this movement dwindle, or perhaps outgrow itself and adapt into something else. Rather than bringing about a utopian era of equality or elevating feminist thought, the internet brought about its own problems — programs built to suppress the marginalized, threats of harassment on unprecedented scales, and a digital world controlled by the powerful. 

Haraway’s scholarship opened the dialogue that led to Cyberfeminism, but her work also continued to attract the attention and responses of other post-humanist and feminist writers of the nineties. N. Katherine Hayles, a postmodern literary critic, heavily cites Haraway in her 1999 essay, The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman, which is included as a book chapter in Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark. The entire book relies heavily on Haraway’s initial claims about humans as cyborgs and the breakdown of rigid categories in a digital world. Hayles piece, in particular, brings her understanding of literature and narrative into the field of post-human feminist thought. Like Haraway, she isn’t yet thinking of the possibility of real cyborgs, half metal, but instead using the term more abstractly to refer to the ways in which the body and the self are a machine. Understanding human identity as part machinery, she argues, is key to programming a world with fewer essentialist distinctions. She also talks about the cyborg figure through a literary lense, examining the half-human half-machine created lifeforms that have for centuries been a fictional tool for interrogating the constructions of life. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein famously asks questions about what it means to be created and what happens when someone is made rather than born. Hayles recognizes that a recurring problem of the fictional cyborg is that it challenges the stages of life that characterize someone who is born and experiences linear growth. Rather than framing human and machine as opposing categories, she attempts to analyze what these natural life cycle stages look like for the cyborg, using three main stages (adolescence, sexual maturity, and reproductive phase) to illustrate her point. She pairs these phases with corresponding “disassembly zones” that challenge the constructs and limitations of linear human growth. For example, in the adolescent phase, the body becomes the object of the subject’s attention, causing us to fixate on physical awareness. To disassemble this idea, Hayles talks about “unmaking” the body at a micro-level: thinking about where joints connect to bones and the intricate details of how people are made. Without a grounding real-world example of these cyborg deconstructions, Hayles uses 20th century fiction such as Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo to illustrate the concept of adolescence for a post-human life. 

Modern responses to Haraway’s scholarship expand upon her ideas in a world where the digital is an even more relevant part of our lives and the challenges of the internet world have opened cyborg possibilities that no one could have predicted in 1985. British activist and scholar Sophie Lewis is a modern pioneer of family abolitionism, an emerging philosophical, socialist, and feminist perspective that thinks dissovling the nuclear family will lead to a more just, anti-capitalist world in which care is universal rather than personal. Her book Full Surrogacy Now makes the case for bringing care outside of the contained family unit and treating each other as nodes in a human network, similar to Haraway’s concept of interconnectedness. In fact, Lewis considers Haraway to be her academic and feminist hero, and sites A Cyborg Manifesto in her 2018 essay Cyborg Uterine Geography: Complicating ‘Care’ and Social Reproduction. This essay builds upon Hayles attempt to break down reproduction and birth as defining characteristics of humanity and uses this deconstruction to argue against social constructions of capitalism, violence, and land disputes. 

She uses the term “uterine geography” to describe more than just childbirth. It refers to the uterus as a “site of doing and undoing,” which doesn’t exclusively take place in a mother’s body but also in pseudo-familial relationships, creations of narratives, and conceptions of the self. According to Lewis’s ideas, Lil Miquela, although she was never born and lacks a physical body, was still virtually born as part technology, part fictional narrative. Her existence is entirely digital, but dwells on the idea of the physical — she’s always seen on her social media hanging out with real celebrities and discussing the ways in which her robot “body” affects her interactions with the world. In this sense, perhaps Miquela isn’t an “other” kind of life form, nor is she entirely artificial. Like any modern human, she has built a narrative of identity in the digital world that doesn’t match up to her reality. 

Works Cited: 

Evans, Claire L. “’We Are the Future Cunt’: CyberFeminism in the 90s.” Vice, 20 Nov. 2014.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, pp. 117–158., doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “THE LIFE CYCLE OF CYBORGS: WRITING THE POSTHUMAN.” Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 157–173.

Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg.” Wired, Conde Nast, 15 Dec. 2017.

Lewis, Sophie. “Cyborg Uterine Geography.” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018, pp. 300–316.

Solis, Marie. “We Can’t Have A Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family.” Vice, 21 Feb. 2020.

The Maxwell Mystery: Literature Review

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Maura Tangum

ENG 406

13 April 2020

Lit Review: The Maxwell Mystery

Contextualizing Maxwell Shieff

Maxwell Shieff’s place in fashion history has remained undetermined for the past half-century. Since his death in 1977, the innovation, artistry, and remarkable sartorial prescience he demonstrated during his career has been completely overlooked. Overshadowed by the Diors, the Balenciagas, and the Balmains, the name “Maxwell Shieff” became buried within a metaphorical fashion-Pompeii of once-famous midcentury designers. Objects which are buried, however, have an uncanny way of coming back to the surface. 

Some entities gently resurface with the passage of time while others are dug up, dusted off, and forced back into the sunlight. Maxwell Shieff came back by both means—a fossil of fate and fortune. Characteristically elegant, Shieff reemerged in swooping cursive script not into sunlight but rather into rain. I found Maxwell Shieff’s name inscribed within a book in my college’s library on a rainy October day during my freshman year in 2016. This discovery marked the beginning of a research project which would span the rest of my collegiate career. Now nearing the end of my senior year, I have uncovered more information than I ever imagined possible regarding the man behind the mysterious signature. This literature review is part of a larger project intended to tell the untold story of the career and historical importance of Maxwell Shieff. The project is additionally about how upon opening a book and googling a name I, a twenty-one-year-old student from Georgia, stumbled into becoming the primary historian and biographer of a Canadian man who died exactly twenty-one years before I was born. It is important to add here that Maxwell Shieff was a numerologist[1] and dabbled in “the study of the occult or hidden meanings of numbers.”[2] I think he would find the “twenty-one” thing going on here quite interesting. 

The only number which matters at this particular moment, however, is one. This is because Maxwell Shieff was first and foremost one thing—a fashion designer. 

In this literature review, I seek to understand Maxwell Shieff’s identity as a fashion designer in relation to the careers of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. I aim to historically contextualize Maxwell Shieff and locate a place for him to exist where his legacy can be acknowledged, critically analyzed, and duly acclaimed within the history of twentieth century fashion. I provide such contextualization with the aid of four print sources courtesy of the Davidson College Library. 

Material culture experts Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye combine forces in Fashion since 1900, a comprehensive survey of fashion history since beginning of the twentieth century. In chapters five and six which detail emerging fashion trends from the end of the second World War to the end of the sixties, Mendes and de la Haye craft a narrative timeline of designers and trends which evolved in response to women’s shifting societal roles. Referencing the new aesthetic potential of the late 1940s, Mendes and de la Haye write, “the end of the war brought the gradual resumption of weekend activities and holidays[3]…designers understood the psychological need for change and were beginning to move away from the boxy wartime profile towards softer, longer lines. Two courtiers were dominant during this period: Christian Dior and Cristobel Balenciaga.”[4]  Mendes and de la Haye assert the magnitude of Dior’s debut, writing, “On February 12th 1947 he launched his first—and now legendary—Spring collection.”[5] Mendes and de la Haye offer a vivid description of the show’s exaggerated floral silhouettes: “shoulders were narrow, with gentle, sloping profiles, waists were tiny, pulled in by an undergarment known as a waspie or guepiêre, skirts were enormously full and reached low down the calves.”[6]

The earliest primary source artifact concerning Shieff’s career is a fifteen-minute-long color film recording of a fashion show which took place in Winnipeg in 1946, a year before Dior exhibited his legendary collection to the public. Though blurry, the footage depicts models walking down spot lit runway twirling back and forth in original Shieff-designed garments which bear striking similarities to the garments modelled in Dior’s Spring 1947 collection, which at the time of the Winnipeg show were not yet in existence. With the central goal of establishing a new style of women’s wear in mind, many designers during this period were likely experimenting with similar silhouettes without realizing it. While this is a plausible explanation for the similarities present between Shieff’s 1946 and Dior’s 1947 collections, Shieff’s conception and execution of many elements central to Dior’s “New Look” destabilizes the originality, innovation, and acclaim of Christian Dior and his label. Questions concerning integrity also come into play. 

In her essay, “Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in Fashion,” Nancy Troy examines the problem of dishonest reproduction which ran rampant in the fashion industry of the early twentieth century. While major fashion businesses were just beginning to take hold in North America, Paris maintained its status as the fashion capital of the world. Fashion designers and their assistants often functioned as liaisons of inspiration during this time and travelled back and forth between North America and Europe, attending fashion shows and recording notes, photographs, film footage and other bits of inspiration intended to boost their own businesses in their home countries. Hattie Carnegie, with whom Maxwell Shieff worked as an apprentice in New York City during the 1930’s[7], was one such liaison. According to Mendes and de la Haye, who offer a scant history on the elusive accessory-designer, Carnegie employed Norman Norell as an assistant in the late 1930’s, possibly at the same time at which she was working with Shieff. Norell traveled to Paris with Carnegie and gleaned a comprehensive knowledge of French haute couture before strategically leaving Carnegie in 1940 to start his own label.[8]

It is both likely that Norell and Shieff crossed paths while working for Carnegie in the 1930s and that Shieff, just as Norell had done, might have travelled with Carnegie to conduct fashion-research in Paris. While no travel records exist for verification, it is just as likely to consider the possibility that apprentices who worked for major Parisian labels likely travelled from France to North America for the purpose of gathering—pseudo-stealing—inspiration from smaller labels. Frenzied by the optimism of the postwar years, the desire to take inspiration without giving credit to victimized designers would have been pressurized by commercial escalation and the hope of economic prosperity. Thus, larger labels with bigger travel budgets had an upper hand in the stealing-process and were able to scour the world in search of easily replicable silhouettes to which they could quickly attach notoriety. 

A key question arises which cannot be ignored: was a Dior-scout sitting in the audience of Maxwell Shieff’s Winnipeg show in 1946, furiously sketching silhouettes to deliver to Christian Dior himself? 

Although this seems like a stretch, the question’s irrationality is undermined by its plausibility. One of the blurry-faced men and women sitting in the audience could very well be a Parisian liaison sent 4,000 miles across the sea to Winnipeg, the furthest thing from a fashion capital, to search for a silhouette born from the mind of a burgeoning yet generally unknown designer, which if stolen would presumably never be able to be tracked down—until now. The possibility is not only compelling, but also feasible and backed by visual evidence. Maxwell Shieff, the toupeed numerologist behind that silhouette, very likely spent his life knowing that he had invented the “New Look” at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers[9] approximately 365 days before it ever reached the Sienne. 

            Troy’s examination of Paul Poiret’s disillusionment with the dishonesty of the early-twentieth century fashion industry is especially notable given Shieff’s interest in Poirot early in his own career. The library book which hatched this research project and bears Shieff’s signature happens to be King of Fashion, the autobiography of Paul Poiret. As evidenced by the date scrawled below Shieff’s signature—1937—the book was in Shieff’s possession during the early part of his career. The location scrawled below the date—78 W 85th St.—indicates that Shieff read the book while working as a fabric cutter for Hattie Carnegie in New York City.[10] Born in 1911, Shieff was only twenty-six when he signed the book. The way in which Shieff carefully signed the book indicates that he thought of it not simply as just another piece of reading material, but rather as a cherished possession. Its tattered binding suggests that it had been regularly handled, its binding cracked open time after time, and its pages studied and scoured for inspiration. By penning his own name into the front page of the book, Maxwell Shieff writes himself into fashion history. Harnessing the dimming light of Paul Poiret, who would die in poverty eight years later, Shieff silently mobilizes his career through literature. He identifies himself within his predecessor. At the age of twenty-six, Shieff already found a clever way to ensure that his name, if lost, would come return to the world. What he never imagined when signing the book is that his name would not reemerge typed on a Met Museum placard nor listed in the index of the Smithsonian’s 500-page illustrated fashion encyclopedia, but rather shoved haphazardly in the Art section of a library in a tiny North Carolinian town. 

            “Poiret,” writes Troy, “appealed to the Romantic notion of the artist not as a mere artisan, or someone who had to hawk his own wares, but instead as a creator and a dreamer.”[11] Troy contends that Poiret thought of fashion as an art form and of himself as an artist. As such, Poiret “openly incorporated the visual arts…into his efforts to sell expensive dresses.”[12] Shieff similarly assumed the role of an artist during his career and “was always sketching”[13] on scrap paper and on the backs of photographs.[14] Troy describes the way in which Poiret payed special attention to the setting surrounding the garments he exhibited to the public by turning his own home, which he called his “hôtel de couture,” into a fashion-show-space—a domestic runway of sorts—to ensure that he would maintain maximum control over the presentation of his collections. It “was a business setting that often functioned more like a domestic space, as it did when he hosted extravagant costume parties where his wife circulated like a mannequin and his friends tried out his latest Orientalist styles, thus insuring that the difference between commercial and private activities would always be ambiguous.”[15] Likely inspired by this unique exhibition method, Shieff used his own Beverly Hills home as a fashion-show-space during the pinnacle of his career in the 1950s and 60s.[16] Photos from the Shieff family archives show smiling models strutting down corridors and posing in the backyard of Shieff’s Mies-van-der-Rohe-style home. In several photos Shieff appears confidently presenting a model to a cocktail-clasping audience of friends and potential customers. Shieff’s wife Ethel, cited as the brainy businesswoman and chief salesperson behind Shieff’s operation, also appears in a few of these photos looking proudly into the sunlight with squinted, discerning eyes as if tuning into a psychic glimpse of the label’s future. 

Poiret further cultivated his image as an artist by commending originality, a quality which he believed to be inherent within the artistry of his designs. Troy writes that Poiret once intoned, “’Women must wear something simple, but personal or individual…It can be personal without extravagance. Simple things prove most original.’”[17] In this way, Poiret describes his clothing as a simplified and refined artform. Shieff disclosed similar intonations via Dear-Abbey-like interviews within American and Canadian newspapers both as a method of advertising and as a manner of describing his latest collections as fresh, highly anticipated art exhibits. Shieff garnered more publicity by traveling across the country to meet clients and admirers and showcase his collections in various hotels and event venues.[18] So too did Paul Poiret, several decades prior. Troy describes Poiret’s short though imperative trips to America: “during those few short weeks of his stay in the United States, where he was the guest of one department-store magnate after the next, he…addressed thousands of potential clients…in hotel ballrooms and department store theaters.”[19] “Poiret’s spectacular marketing campaign,” writes Troy, “proved to be enormously effective.”[20] Poiret furthered his already successful marketing campaign by landing full-page advertisements and mentions in the most circulated women’s publications of the time—Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue.[21] Taking a cue from his most revered predecessor, Shieff followed suit and worked his way into full-page advertisements and citations within the same publications throughout the fifties and sixties.[22]

            Maureen Turim touches upon the proliferation and influence of women’s magazines during the golden age of Hollywood in her essay, “Fashion Shapes: Film, the Fashion Industry, and the Image of Women.” Shieff, who became a household name in Hollywood during late fifties and early sixties, functions as a unique lens through which to examine the relationship between women’s fashion-centric publications and fashion’s relationship with femininity in the film industry. Turim contends, “In the United States the fashion industry’s power to shape the image and self-images of women has been closely tied to the growth of the film industry and its use of fashion. Hollywood films, coupled with the wide distribution of women’s magazines, have colluded with the garment and advertising industries to mold who are and who we can become.”[23] Shieff employed both women’s magazines and his role as a Hollywood costume designer to establish a sizeable, off-set celebrity clientele over the span of two decades which ranged from Hitchcock-blondes (Psycho’s Janet Leigh) to Hungarian heiresses (Zsa Zsa Gabour and her socialite sisters).[24] On set, Shieff worked as a costumer for The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and was thus able to subtly advertise his designs on a television show which reached thousands of viewers throughout the nation. Turim offers analysis on the notion of fashion as a form of communication to which Shieff subscribed: “Fashion molds human beings into visual designs which communicate consciously and unconsciously specific attitudes, values, and desires.”[25] Turim argues that the American fashion industry grew as a direct result of growing visibility and degree of widespread visual communication which accompanied the rise of Hollywood during the beginning and middle of the century. Maxwell Shieff accordingly played a direct role in the growth of the American fashion industry. 

The film industry’s growth in turn marked the beginning of a midcentury economic swell accompanied by a shift in popular psychology similar to the post-WW2 shift described by Mendes and de la Haye.[26] Just as he responded to the postwar shift by crafting the original “New Look,” Shieff played upon the psychological shift induced by the Hollywood boom by participating in what Turim calls “the narrative of fashion.”[27] “This means more than the association of a style with a given story or fiction,” Turim argues, “it is a process that fuses the unconscious effects of film experience with the very lines and colors of clothing designs.”[28] Peering through microscope of feminism, Turim concludes that film-fashion ultimately “encourages women to displace their desires for self-hood onto the visual, onto images created through the use of commodities.”[29] Turim’s interpretation of fashion as a commodity evokes a degree of mass production characteristically absent from the practice of couture which upheld the slow, careful production of garments crafted by hand as made-to-order limited-edition pieces. 

The presence of the human hand becomes a crucial component in differentiating between couture (art according to Poiret and Shieff) and what is referenced in contemporary culture as “fast fashion.” In her analysis of the physicality of the fashion narrative Turim references “the very lines and colors and colors of clothing design” and neglects to acknowledge the moments in which the human hand plays a vital role in the production of a garment. In this way Turim’s analysis undercuts the notion of fashion design as art. While Turim is busy with the task of undercutting a concept, Italian art historian Germano Celant is blissfully fixated by the magnitude of the act of cutting a garment. In his essay, “To Cut is to Think,” Celant makes a case for the psychological importance of the act of cutting: “to cut is to think and to see.”[30]Celant offers a brief history on Cubist techniques of cutting various materials to create collages which formed “new relationships with the object seen and experienced.”[31] Celant writes, “the thinking spawned by the Cubist cut opened up an infinite universe…it ignores the world’s hardness and absoluteness so that it can make and unmake representation.”[32] The young Maxwell Shieff, in his occupation working as a cutter in post-Cubism New York, assumed the role of a Cubist artist of sorts. Each time he picked up a pair of scissors in the earliest days of his career, Shieff took advantage of the infinite universe created by the Cubists of yesteryear. In declaring the cut as an act of artmaking and the cutter an artist, Celant elevates Shieff’s seemingly humble origins. Celant writes about the seemingly mundane act of cutting with the same degree of romanticism Paul Poiret attached to his view of himself[33]:

“If the artistic process involves cleaving and delimiting appearances so that they may be read, then the cut is its soul. It becomes the intimate, sensitive interpreter that can concretely define reality. The cut is the soul of the clothing. It severs the endless thread of a garment as the simple container and portrait of the human figure and transforms it into a creative act, a language that builds on new objects.”[34]

Celant exhibits Neruda-like concern with the potency inherent within an ostensibly humdrum human act.[35] He goes so far as to invoke Greek mythology’s Clotho, the muse spinning the thread of life—“the endless thread of a garment”—to emphasize the longstanding historical tradition of the act of fabric-cutting. Celant heightens the act of cutting to supernatural extremes: “The magical instance of the cut that makes the garment…passed through all the various thresholds of artistic creativity…the stroke of the blade…on the cloth is a dialectic between space and energy.”[36]Enmeshed in the tumult of urban life and the engrossed in early professional experience, Shieff likely wasn’t interested in the metaphysicality of his job as one of the thousands of young cutters in New York City hoping to make a name for themselves in the beginning of the century.[37] Remarkably, Shieff would demonstrate a profound interested in the metaphysical and occult much later in his career during the years spanning the rise and eventual decline of his business in Beverly Hills.[38]

Maxwell Shieff was an original artist. He was a revolutionary fashion designer. He was a direct proponent of growth of the American film Industry. He is a resurfaced piece of forgotten history. Maxwell Shieff, whose other identities include numerologist, father, husband, entrepreneur, friend, and the grand title “coutourier to the stars,”[39]deserves long-overdue recognition and acclaim. Evident within this literature review is Shieff’s significance as a historical figure. Maxwell Shieff will be paid his belated acclaim. 

It’s written in the cursive. 

Works Cited

Celant, Germano. “To Cut is to Think.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth

Century to Today, edited by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 187-192.

Mendes, Valerie, and Amy De la Haye. “Chapter 5: 1946-1956 Femininity and

Conformity.” Fashion since 1900, second edition, Thames & Hudson, 1999, pp. 126-158.

Troy, Nancy. “Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in

Fashion.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth Century to Today, edited

by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 244-257.

Turim, Maureen. “Fashion Shapes: Film, the Fashion Industry, and the Image of

Women.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth Century to Today, edited

by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 149-162.

[1] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family. 

[2] Online Oxford English Dictionary

[3] Mendes 126

[4] Mendes 128

[5] Mendes 128

[6] Mendes 128

[7] Newspaper Database article which has been lost but is in the process of being digitally recovered.

[8] Mendes 149

[9] These famous Manitoban rivers merge in Winnipeg.

[10] Newspaper database article which is lost but is in the process of being digitally recovered.

[11] Troy 249

[12] Troy 243

[13] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.

[14] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.

[15] Troy 243

[16] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.

[17] Turim 248

[18] Proquest

[19] Troy 249

[20] Troy 250

[21] Troy 251

[22] Proquest

[23] Turim 150

[24] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.

[25] Turim 149

[26] Mendes 128

[27] Turim 154

[28] Turim 154

[29] Turim 154

[30] Celant 187

[31] Celant 187

[32] Celant 187

[33] Troy 249

[34] Celant 188

[35] Reference to the Spanish poet Pablo Neruda who became known for his use of sensual imagery.

[36] Celant 191, 192

[37] George Burns of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, with whom Shieff would later become a client and close friend was also working as a cutter in NYC during the 1930s. Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family. 

[38] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.

[39] Proquest

SSR’s and Ballroom Diagram:


Literature Review for Project: Token

·

Draft (2) of Literature Review | Composed 10 April 2020

The following scholarship  strengthens a theoretical framework for combating tokenism on college campuses through creative, community narrative projects. 

Keywords: racism; cultural psychology; social inequality; tokenism; social ecology; higher education; biographical narrative interviews’ narrative questioning; the healing effects of storytelling 

Table of Contents: 

  • I. Introduction
  • II. The Social Ecology of Tokenism
  • III. The Reproduction of Tokenism
  • IV. Combating Tokenism through Tokenism

I. Introduction

In a world riddled with increasingly more sophisticated forms of racism, i.e. microaggressions, the everyday onlooker may not notice the subtle violence. The culture of silent pain, created by the conscious or, commonly unconscious, disregard for such occurrences, leaves those inflicted by such violence without support or acknowledgment. Through the efforts of four students at Davidson College, Project: Token began with the objective of targeting a specific subtle violence: racial tokenism on college campuses (beginning at Davidson College). 

Before initiating community outreach, Project: Token sought credible definitions of both tokenism and the token. As a social phenomenon, tokenism can be located through the enactment of policies or practices in “only  a symbolic effort (as to desegregate) [or] to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly” (“Tokenism.”) Tokenism intentionally deceives onlookers with a false sense of equality, when in reality, disregarding the needs of minoritized populations. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her classic book on power dynamics in the workplace, Men and Women of the Corporation, provides an effective introductory definition of the token: 

Tokens are not merely deviants or people who are different from other group members along any one dimension. They are people identified by ascribed characteristics (master status such as sex, race…) or other characteristics that carry with them a set of assumptions about culture, status, and behavior highly salient for majority category members. They differ from dominants, not in ability to do a task or in acceptance or work norms, but in terms of secondary and informal assumptions. Tokens can never be just another organizational member while their category is so rare. […] In these contexts the word token reflects one’s distinctiveness in the context and status as a symbol of one’s kind (Kanter).

In other words, tokenism provides the minoritized with opportunities, unequal in comparison to the well-serviced majority, and built upon the aesthetics of inadequacy. As a result, the token, those impacted by tokenism, experience an array of exploitations, and social-psychological wounds, inflicted upon their identity (i.e. the terminology “token”) and psyche.  Project: Token relied on both definitions to begin supporting students of color, specifically Black students, largely minoritized on private, predominantly white colleges. 

Racial tokenism originated in the 1960s as a social phenomenon in response to desegregation laws that advocated for the integration of Blacks into schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and additional public and private spaces (“Tokenism”). The social and racial climates of many predominantly white colleges and universities, especially private institutions, reflected the historical anti-black sentiments of larger society. Such attitudes have persisted today in many higher education institutions, if not blatant, then embedded in the culture, or represented by the non-diverse student-faculty demographics. Tokenism itself can continuously manifest in a variety of ways. Two common examples of tokenism on college campuses include 

1) the selective acknowledgement of the “successful minorities,” who then become the “website mascot,” or another commodified statistic for the school’s diversity quota and 

2) a scarcity of curricular, or extracurricular, resources (in and out of the classroom) by school’s claiming to practice progessive diversity and inclusion methods. 

The lack of substantial support for students of color confounds with the distinct otherness felt by many minoritized populations. As a result, students of color can develop psychological ailments including, but not limited to, imposter syndromes, or inferiority complexes, both derived from acute feelings of alienation, and a lack of outlets for expressing such feelings. As recent research has shown, first generation students, for example, feel more discrimination, isolation, and loneliness. All these factors discourage belonging and social cohesion of the student body. On the other hand, students of color reporting higher levels of optimism, also report higher levels of satisfaction, which translates to improved performances in the classroom, extracurriculars, and social life. Project: Token acknowledges and grapples with the dichotomy, or metaphorically, “both sides of coin,” seeking ways to bolster the positive experiences while mitigating the negative. 

Project: Token centers around the lack of expression experienced by students of color and offers a space to break from tokenistic facades. By first recognizing how easily institutions can strip agency from minority voices, Project: Token attempts to reclaim narratives. Therefore, community outreach began through a series of oral narrative interviews with the inaugural leg of participants at Davidson College, called “the original 17,” who brought context to an array of experiences, for example, a dominant sense of otherness felt by students of color navigating private, predominantly white college campuses. Additionally, the original 17 narratives revealed levels of comfort coexisting in the tension of alienation. By building relationships one person at a time, the growing community helped stimulate conversation about tokenism, and the counter-narratives, while spotlighting students of color thriving in ill-designed social environments. 

Moving forward with a focus on curating dichotomous and representative stories, each interview occurred where each participant felt most comfortable on Davidson College’s campus. Alongside the oral narrative interviews, community outreach continued with photoshoots at the respective locations. 

After three months of interviews and photoshoots, Project: Token mounted the community, student voices of faces of color, onto an art installation: three shadow boxes collectively ten feet high by twenty-four feet wide (10’ x 24’). The art installation stood for a single month defamiliarizing (disrupting the common aesthetics) and deterritorializing (reclaiming predominantly white space for the minoritized) Davidson College’s campus. Spatializing photographs and narrative texts onto an art installation allowed for visual confirmation to the struggles, and similar triumphs, experienced by students of color, and often disregarding by the larger campus climate. Additionally, the space surrounding the art installation confronted onlookers with material evidence about racial tokenism. Onlookers could no longer consciously, or unconsciously, ignore minoritized truths, which helped jumpstart candid dialogue concerning racial tokenism. Ultimately, the emotional transparency of students of color sharing their narratives broadcasted a resounding message of resilience. 

II. The Social Ecology of Tokenism

Within the continued efforts for preserved and sustained dialogue, Project: Token has co-sponsored with various ethnic and artistic student organizations, and campus-wide inter-departmental projects, in the creation of narrative-based events. The objective has been to empower voices of color through additional visibility and acknowledgement. However, as the definition affirms, if tokenism relies on providing minoritized populations inequitable (access to) resources, within the aesthetic of false diversity, then Project: Token will require more effective social justice strategies to remove the scarcity, or help correct the inadequacy. In her article “The Social Ecology of Tokenism in Higher Education,” published in the Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Yolanda Flores Niemann argues that tokenism in higher education produces, and reproduces, itself through the interaction between student & faculty communities and social powers (including policies, discourses, aesthetics, and so on).  Niemann identifies institutional barriers that have widened and complicated Project: Token’s scope. The community outreach on Davidson College’s campus had largely occurred on the student level. The co-sponsored narrative based events had successfully brought students together in dialogue about racial tokenism. Project: Token had not yet developed a methodology for halting the production and reproduction of racial tokenism on an institutional scale (at the level of policy, campus-wide aesthetic, and so on). Whether by lack of legitimacy, scale, or opportunity, Project: Token’s efforts had been a bandaid on a larger institutional problem. 

In helping reconfigure a tokenistic culture, Project: Token sought a better understanding of the forces that produce tokenism, and solutions for mitigating them. The field of social ecology, founded by the prominent 20th century ecologist Murray Bookchin, offers valuable insight into breaking down the hierarchical, authoritarian, power structures between human communities and nature to create a more sustainable environment (“What Is Social Ecology?”). Niemann relies on Bookchin’s societal views to diagnose the relationship between tokenism (as a community-bred social phenomenon) and the institution of higher education. 

The fundamental principles of social ecology position human beings equally within the larger global ecosystem, and identify dysfunctional human society and social issues, including racism, sexism, and classism, as damaging factors to all living organisms and the physical world we inhabit. The inextricable link between social issues and environmental damage demands more introspection and accountability from human societies. In healing environmental damage, social ecologists do not propose radical changes to human society. Rather, they seek to bolster communitarian approaches (the collective efforts between all organisms) within a firm practice of cooperation, collective action, and equality. (“What Is Social Ecology?”). 

The social ecology of tokenism, as Niemann proposes, posits Bookchin’s ideologies within the ecosystem of the academy or higher education institutions.  Niemann identifies human social issues (racism, sexism, classism, and so on) as the progenitors of tokenism, and as such, damaging to the minoritized populations who inhabit the academy. As previously stated in the introduction, the token, those impacted by tokenism, experience an array of social-psychological wounds inflicted upon their identity (i.e. the terminology “token”) and psyche. Detailing the breadth of the injury, Niemann discovers interconnected tenets produced from tokenism. Each tenet roughly summarized reads: 

  1. Tokenism destroys the token’s agency.
  2. Tokenism produces tokens from the low numbers of the minoritized population. 
  3. Tokenism creates a dynamic of “the perceived and the perceiver” between the token and the majority population.
  4. Tokenism ignores the valuable intersections of identity and reduces the token to the more exploitable racial classifiers.
  5. Tokenism lumps the token with other similar racial groups and ignores individual distinction.
  6. Tokenism thrives within the everyday conscious, subconscious, or unconscious biases of the majority population.
  7. Tokenism in higher education thrives through intentional hiring practices that benefit the majority group.
  8. Tokenism can be overcome by the intentional efforts of the majority group. 

Project: Token has achieved valuable insights about the experiences of students of color from the original 17 narratives and co-sponsored narrative-based events. However, what’s lacking by the small sample size can be supplemented with a diagnostic understanding of tokenism’s effects. For example, tenet #4 contains an intriguing insight that even students of color, when seeking mentors or racial guidance, can tokenize faculty of color. The reduction of an individual to their racial identity will have detrimental effects even when framed in positive intentions. Due to tenet #4, Project: Token recognizes that even tokenized students of color may not be able to lean on tokenized faculty of color for support. Such an odd double-bind shows the urgency of combating tokenism through meaningful dialogue building between the hierarchies in higher education. 

Project: Token will rely on Niemann’s interconnected tenets not only in further review of participant narratives, but also when synthesizing new voices of color into an understanding of racial tokenism. Though each tenet informs the other, and combating racial tokenism would requires addressing each one, the insights gained from tenets #2, #7, and #8 hint at the potential for targeting tokenism on the demographic level. In her research Niemann establishes that tokenism can exist most blatantly when the minoritized population does not exceed 15% of the entire population. If tokenism requires that numerical threshold of 15% or less (tenet #2), then reforming tokenistic hiring practices (tenet #7), which would require mobilizing the majority group (tenet #8), would remove tokenism’s sustenance. Project: Token can develop more actionable steps, through a closer examination of the interconnected tenets, and activate community narratives in pursuit of tokenism reform. 

Due to Niemann’s research centering around the experiences of faculty of color, Project: Token has to  identify parallels between the experiences of students of color. When seeking social reform in the inherent hierarchy of the academy, students deferring to faculty, faculty deferring to staff, Project: Token recognizes the value of Niemann’s and Bookchin’s communitarian approaches. Institutional change will first require clear dialogue between all participating members of the higher education ecosystem. Actionable steps to changing a tokenistic culture can begin after comprehending, then understanding, the social-psychological effects that tokenism inflicts on the entirety of the minoritized community. 

III. The Reproduction of Tokenism.

Project: Token deals specifically in combating racial tokenism as opposed to tokenism based on gender or sexuality. Such an intentional distinction allows the project to center around identifiable ethnic minority populations, without ignoring their intersectionalities (or any additional identity classifications), and to focus dialogue around racialized experiences. Furthermore, due to tokenism’s various manifestations, which result in an array of social-psychological wounds, Project: Token narrows its scope to the production, reproduction, and impact of racism. In the article “Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective,” Phia Salter, Glenn Adams, and Michael J. Perez, argue that racism persists in the dominant culture not because of overt racial animus, but through entrenched systems of white privilege that reproduce themselves, often unconsciously. While Niemann speaks from the perspective of a social ecologist, and articulates many social phenomena (racism, sexism, classism, and so on) that produce tokenism, and negatively impact the token, Salter et al strengthens an understanding of racism’s persistence in the world. Project: Token establishes a bridge between Salter et al and Niemann’s sixth interconnected tenet of tokenism (broadly listed above though quoted directly here):

“tokenism does not necessarily arise from intentional prejudices of white persons or persons of color in the workplace, whose conscious and unconscious biases and perceptions are affected by the context (italics added)” (Niemann, 457).

Salter et al’s research confounds social-psychological thought with a cultural-psychological perspective that acknowledges racism, not only by its individual performance, but also the contexts that produce the in & out groups, the marginalized & dominant, the low status & privileged. In such a way, Salter et al supports Niemann’s communitarian investigation of tokenism reform. Within Project: Token’s continued efforts to reconfigure tokenistic cultures in higher education, thorough insights about the origin of racist culture will help advance tokenism reform into the institutional level.

The cultural-psychological terminology that Salter et al. introduces provides Project: Token with a vocabulary for understanding how students of color (the original 17 narratives & additional co-sponsorships) instill feelings associated with tokenism. The term “mutual constitution…the idea that psyche and culture are inseparable outgrowths of one another,” identifies two valuable social phenomena: 

  1. The environment will (re)create itself in the psyche, and the psyche (re)creates itself in the environment. 
  2. Racism exists as the simultaneous production of a racist environment and the structural foundation for the dynamic reproduction of racist action (Salter et al, 151). 

In other words, and in the context of tokenism in higher education, a compounding cycle occurs: a tokenistic environment produces both tokens and tokenizers; in return, both the  token and the tokenizer will recreate the same tokenistic environment. The art installation that spatialized voices and faces of color has been Project: Token’s most visible attempt at disrupting the cycle. The campus could no longer ignore the experiences of students of color due to heightened visibility. However, the art installation lasted only a month. The visibility boost continued in the co-sponsored narrative-based events that lasted temporarily. Salter et al’s vocabulary alludes back to the labor of tackling Niemann’s interconnected tenets. Project: Token will require more sustained disruption to help dismantle cycles of tokenism production and reproduction.

Project: Token must emphasize permanence because the violent nature of America’s colonial origin has been reproduced more sophisticatedly in new contemporary contexts. Salter et al illuminates the colonial cultural-psychological roots through the Marley Hypothesis that states, “white American students perceive little racism in U.S. society because they are relatively ignorant about critical historical knowledge” (Salter et al., 152). A culture of silence and disavowal has produced color-blind ideologies, “I don’t see color!,” or complete ignorance to history’s honest brutality. American culture promotes cultural tools of silence and disavowal (textbooks, museums, national holidays) to intentionally manipulate racial memory. Institutions for higher education could negate such complicit erasure. Once again, Niemann’s eighth tenet roughly states, tokenism can be overcome by the intentional efforts of the majority group. Salter et al echo Niemann with a candid cultural-psychological affirmation. Both Niemann and Salter et al challenge Project: Token to create honest, permanent, cultural artifacts informed by voices and faces of color. 

The cultural-psychological approach does not exclude social reform at the level of the individual, but assumes a greater responsibility for halting the reproduction of racist mentalities in culture. Salter et al pose a salient metaphor  to describe the approach: 

Rather than something extraordinary or rare, racism is akin to the water in which fish swim. […] A cultural-psychological approach suggests that the solution to the problem of racism is not to change the fish so that it can survive in toxic water but instead to change the water the fish has to live in (Salter et al, 150, 153). 

In order to change the waters of tokenism in higher education, Project: Token must practice more intentional cultural-psychological approaches and activate community narratives with the intent for institutional reform. Reiterating insights above, the approach will require substantial hierarchical dialogue in the academy, targeting the interconnected tenets of tokenism, and producing permanent cultural artifacts in opposition to silence and disavowal. 

IV. Combating Tokenism through Storytelling. 

Project: Token’s community outreach began with two students conducting a series of semi-conversational oral narrative interviews with the original 17 participants. Each oral narrative interview began with a single open suggestion to “speak your story” and occured on Davidson College’s campus at the participant’s selected “site of comfort.” Alongside the open-ended prompt, the interviewer guided the conversation with questions in response to the interviewee’s narration. The interview did not have a clear objective centered around themes of tokenism. Rather, Project: Token simply encouraged each participant to tell their story and focused on the cathartic act of storytelling. After a single session with the participant, lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to the two hours (all depending on the conversation), the interview closed and the interlocutors continued with a post-debrief. The original 17 narrative texts informed the inaugural leg to then jumpstart the conception of Project: Token. 

Though effective for the semester (the two students curated 17 oral narrative interviews in the span of eight weeks), the qualitative methodology could have been greatly improved. Firstly, the two students, one a college Sophomore and the other a college Senior at the time, possessed novice to intermediate social researching skills. Rather than inviting the participants into a formalized setting, Project: Token’s initial community outreach began improvisational and with more structure towards the final interviews (essentially as the student social researchers “got the hang of it”). Secondly, the semi-conversation interviews could have been supplemented with clearer guiding questions. The insights derived from each interview varied from participant to participant and reflected the detail of the conversation. The interviews lacked a clear thematic continuity centered around tokenism which resulted in both positive and negative consequences. 

Positively | Project: Token organically resembled a space for storytelling and invited participants into a “low stakes, low pressure” environment to speak their truths. 

Negatively | Qualitative data concerning experiences of tokenism may not have clearly appeared in each interview, or had to be carved out of the narrative text post-interview, by the project coordinator.

Thirdly, each interview occurred in a single session. With interviews ranging in length and varying in focus, a single session could by no means encapsulate the student’s entire life story, even in the semi-conversational model. After the original 17 oral narrative interviews, Project: Token ceased interviews to practice campus-wide community outreach through the co-sponsored development of narrative-based events. 

During the hiatus, the project coordinator began to address the critiques and seek a stronger qualitative method (eventually for the next wave of interviews). Gabriele Rosenthal’s article “The Healing Effect of Storytelling: On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of Research and Counseling,” recollects her groundbreaking work in biographical case reconstruction using biographical-narrative interviews. Rosenthal provides psychological evidence, through her first-hand experiences interviewing trauma survivors, refugees, and asylum seekers, that biographical case reconstruction through storytelling, and generating a life story, empowers and restores agency to the traumatized. She notices that the past trauma, when materialized and made real through vocalization, exists in seamless continuity with the present, and thus becomes capable of overcoming. She notes that the first sign of trauma’s the inability to speak about it: silence. As previously established by Niemann, and supported by Salter et al, the token experiences an array of social-psychological wounds (resulting from alienation, prejudice, and so on) to their psyche and identity. Within the biographical-narrative interview, and encouraging, and guiding, the interviewee to find a language for trauma, the act of speaking stimulates the curative process. In other words, speaking and acknowledging leads to healing. Storytelling, the act of acknowledgement, can offer an avenue to heal the trauma impressed onto the tokenized. Within a culture of silence and erasure, Project: Token comforts students of color, who may feel a lack agency (#1 of Niemann’s interconnected tenets), to speak their story, and thus challenge tokenistic environments. 

Rosenthal further identifies the immediate curative value of the biographical-narrative interview (healing that begins with the first interview), and the narrative-conversation-guiding method, for research and counseling purposes. All the while, Rosenthal continuously stresses the duty of a social researcher, also referred to as the interviewer or an interlocutor, to practice ethical interview strategies with care and consideration of the participant’s mental health. The article’s four sub-categories: 

  1. How to conduct a biographical narrative interview
  2. The main narration’s curative chances for coming to an understanding of oneself
  3. On the curative effects of directly asking the client to narrate
  4. Conversations during acute life crisis

effectively, and thoroughly, deconstruct the methodology, benefits, and limitations of the biographical-narrative interview (as if reading a how-to manual). Ultimately, Rosenthal stresses the careful utility of biographical-narrative techniques, and teaches social researchers how to cater those techniques to participants ranging from 1) being plagued with trauma to 2)  living in a stable life. No matter the degree of mental health damage experienced by the token, Project: Token must strengthen its qualitative method to cater specifically to the participant and their biography. 

Project: Token dealt, and will continue dealing, with college students commonly ranging from ages 18-21. In such a developmental period, transitioning from teenage years into young adulthood, a participant’s “life story” will not contain the breadth of Rosenthal’s participants, many in their late adulthood (40 and older). Some of the original 17 narratives ended shortly because the interlocutors ran out of things to speak about! Rosenthal’s methodology for conducting a biographical-narrative-interview would help Project: Token develop interviewers more proficient in stimulating the narration process. The phases of Rosenthal’s biographical-narrative approach apply several critical interventions for advancing the field of qualitative inquiry. 

  1. She encourages a preliminary session (the first phase) for constructing the interviewee’s “entire life story’s structure, or Gestalt, and the whole life narrative” before forming any social science research questions. The biographical-narrative interview’s curative value relies on the successful narration of the participant’s individual developmental phases, building trust, and establishing a space for intentional, deep listening, between the interlocutors. 
  2. The curative process continues (in the second phase) with the interviewer acting as a guide, or a medium, for generating narration. The interviewer does not intervene, or assert personal bias, onto the participant. Rather, through the careful employment of narrative-generating and questioning techniques, aids the participant in successfully remembering, (re)constructing, and articulating their biography. Rosenthal reframes the role of the interviewer as less extractive and more generative. 
  3. Especially noted through Rosenthal’s experiences interviewing refugees, the relationship between the interlocutors should extend beyond the interviews and into a realm of tangible, actionable support (i.e. additional resource provision or referral to mental health services). In such a way, Rosenthal’s views align with both Niemann’s and Salter et al’s concerning a communitarian approach, and coalition building between a variety of organizations, services, and resources,  for meaningful healing. 

Project: Token seamingly combined the three phases together with less efficiency. The original 17 interviews provided the biographer with an open space to tell their story. However, the interview quickly became guided by follow-up questions, rather than an uninterrupted session. Moreover, beyond the immediate warmth and support of providing a space for conversation, Project: Token could do much more resource provision. 

Already centered around empowering participant life stories, and attempting to mend the damage of tokenism through creative storytelling forms (photography, videography, poetry, and so on), relying on Rosenthal’s qualitative methodology, and acknowledging the curative process of biographical-interviews and biographical case reconstruction, will strengthen Project: Token with more effective, and intentional, interviewing methods! 

In conclusion, moving forward with the intention of institutional reform, Project: Token will continue its effort in combating tokenism on college campuses through creative, community narrative strategies. With a final reiteration of core insights, the next phase of Project: Token will gather voices and faces of color, empowering them with curative biographical-interview methods. The cultural-psychological approach will activate community narratives with the intent for institutional reform, necessitating substantial hierarchical dialogue in the academy, targeting the interconnected tenets of tokenism, and producing permanent cultural artifacts in opposition to silence and disavowal. 

End of Literature Review.

Notes | I’ll use the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the authoritative source on usage over time, as well as a book of critical terms for critical race studies, if I can find one. Until I get access to the Oxford English Dictionary I will use the definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and craft a narrative from Project: Token’s Origin Story.

Works Cited

Niemann, Yolanda Flores. “The Social Ecology of Tokenism in Higher Education.” Peace Review, vol. 28, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 451–458. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10402659.2016.1237098.

Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Healing Effects of Storytelling: On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of Research and Counseling.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 6, Dec. 2003, pp. 915–933, doi:10.1177/1077800403254888.

 Salter, Phia S., et al. “Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 27, no. 3, June 2018, pp. 150–155, doi:10.1177/0963721417724239.

“Tokenism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tokenism. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020. 

“What Is Social Ecology?” Social Work Degree Guide, www.socialworkdegreeguide.com/faq/what-is-social-ecology/?fbclid=IwAR2g_56O8vjXSAe04vDju-Zz02RdIf6FZEN5Uo_FBVzbNNjBeDM5b27c_5o.

Gendered Toy Marketing Lit Review

·

Imagine yourself back in the toy aisles of your local Target. Walking down one aisle, you are faced with a world of pink. Dolls, building blocks, and costumes sparkle in every shade of one color. Around the next corner, a sharp divide transforms these same toys into a blazing blue. Every child inside every Target store knows exactly which side of the divide they are allowed to shop on, based on if they are a boy or girl. This is normal. However, the gender divide that permeates toy advertising has not been an enduring aspect of our culture nor a remnant from a more sexist time. Even as we see increasing change towards gender equality in the workplace, social spheres, and legislature, the toy aisle shifts towards a more gendered approach than has been seen in fifty years. Scholars in multiple fields are studying this trend: economists have analyzed the marketing strategy’s profitability and influence,historians have compared shifts in gendered toy marketing across time, and psychologists have examined its effect on child cognition and development. While each field presents significant findings to explain and examine gendered toy marketing, little action has been taken to synthesize the research from various disciplines in order to communicate a holistic view to the public. 

The Science & Effects of Gendered Toys and Gendered Toy Play 

If you happen to stumble upon a young girl and a young boy playing with toys in the same room, chances are the toys they are playing with, and their style of toy play is very different. The young girl may be engaging in a gentler quiet way. She may be playing with a doll, stuffed animals or even a toy house or kitchen. The young boy is likely engaging with his toys in a louder, rougher manner. He is playing with building blocks, and toy cars using all the appropriate sound effects. Even as societal gender roles and constraints have reduced in recent years, and gender expectations have lowered, these gendered play patterns are still very visible. These play patterns are of interest for a couple reasons. First, they demonstrate that girls and boys engage in different ways of play during their childhood. Secondly and most importantly, these different behaviors may have long-term effects on the development of cognitive skills. These effects will in turn have an affect on the individuals’ educational, occupational and personal lives.

Toys can be gendered in five ways: through labeled categorization, cultural marking, social partner messaging, observed or expressed preferences, or stereotypic beliefs. In addition to the toys themselves being gender-typed, there is also gender-typed play which is the way that boys and girls play with or engage with toys differently. Investigators have done extensive research in this area by observing the different ways that children engage with toys. There are a number of interesting findings. For example girls and boys have been observed to use the same toy in different ways when playing with it. Schau, Kahn, Diepold, and Cherry (1980) examined doll house play in preschool children, and found that when preschool boys played with a dollhouse, they spent most of their playtime playing with an item within it, the kitchen mixer. This is because they could turn it into a drill or a machine gun. Not only do boys and girls use the same toys differently, but when their play doesn’t involve toys at all they still play differently. Without props, boys are more likely to act out roles of something like Superman whereas girls will act out a role as a princess or a schoolteacher. 

Playing with certain toys such as building blocks has an impact on development of spatial skills which then is positively correlated with math skills later on. What is problematic here is that many toys that fit this category are marketed as more masculine meaning they would appeal more towards boys. Jigsaw puzzles are another group of toys that contribute towards a great increase of spatial skills and cognitive development that are more popular among boys than among girls. Another category of toys or games that contribute towards increases in cognitive skills including spatial skills are video games or online games. Online games or video games see more engagement from boys than girls. These cognitive domains having more male representation through their toy play earlier on, contributes to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields later on.

The Rise and Fall of Gendered Toy Marketing

As more children are exposed to gendered toy marketing, the greater effect this trend has on child development and society at large. One Sociology scholar, Elizabeth Sweet, found that gendered toy marketing has only increased in its popularity and pervasiveness over the past fifty years. In her article, “Toys Are More Divided by Gender Now Than They Were 50 Years Ago”, Sweet surveys the Sears catalog throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to showcase the rise and fall of gendered toy marketing. She finds that only fifty years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the unquestioned norm in society, approximately 2% of toys were differentiated by gender. By the 1990s, this number rose to 50%, and today, we see the Disney toy shelves coded by gender almost completely. Today’s toy aisle gender divide, Sweet states, acts as a societal regression to early 20th century norms when toys prepared girls for a life of homemaking and boys for the industrial economy. She concludes that “the ‘little homemaker’ of the 1950s has become the ‘little princess’ we see today.” The overt stereotypes of the 1920s are repackaged into implicit messages that present a false pretense of choice: blue or pink, G.I. Joe or Princess. Many who oppose a gender-neutral shift claim that it would take away choice, that gender-neutral toys would be bland and unexciting to children. To refute this claim, Sweet directs us to the 1970s, the height of gender-neutral toy marketing where children’s toys were brightly advertised in every color regardless of gender, as proof that neutral toys open up possibilities. While gender roles and stereotypes permeated the 20th century, an increased female presence in the workplace and the height of second-wave feminism caused the 1970s to become a decade that questioned what it means to be a boy or girl. While her analysis of Sears advertisements draws upon societal shifts in the workforce and in feminism to explain the varying prevalence of gendered toy marketing, Sweet does not connect these shifts to the business perspective in order to explain why gendering toys historically became more/less profitable, thereby causing marketers to alter their approach. Sweet’s historical analysis therefore allows us an opportunity to connect her research with the business perspective on our platform.

Why Companies Use Gender to Market & Exploring Brand Masculine Patterns 

One such business scholar, Dr. Salim L. Azar, studies content that overlaps with Elizabeth Sweet’s arguments: consumer behaviors, brand perceptions, and gender. While he does not bridge his work to the Humanities research that Elizabeth Sweet relies on, Azar’s article “Exploring Brand Masculine Patterns: Moving Beyond Monolithic Masculinity” also studies gendered marketing, exploring the nature and structure of brands’ masculine dimensions and exploring different patterns in brand masculinity. This paper deeply analyzes why brands use gender as a means to categorize and sell their products. Azar claims that gender has historically been used by brand managers as a basis for market segmentation and targeting strategies because gender is easily identifiable, accessible and sufficiently prevalent to be profitable. Even today, gender is considered a central component for segmentation strategies when launching new products and brands, even when the product could be used by all audiences. This can explain why gendered toys are so often seen even with the decrease of societal gender constraints. To appeal to male consumers, for example, brands often attribute a masculine sexual identity for traditionally non sex-typed brands and products. Understanding a brands’ masculine dimensions (BMD) is important because many practitioners use masculine gender-based marketing strategies to develop and manage their brands, which consumers then take into account when interacting with the brand. The paper allows us to have a deeper understanding of gendered branding patterns to fully understand how brands and products released by brands are perceived. 

Azar writes this article through the lens of marketing and business research, referencing many sources from journals such as The Journal of Brand Management or the Journal of Marketing Research to back his claims made about brand masculinity. Azar also cites a number of psychological studies and papers as well to back his claim. These psychological studies he references focuses on gender, masculinity and sex roles. In fact, everything written about gender throughout this article had substantial psychological research to back it up. He also cites a couple of articles that fit neatly at the intersection of psychology and marketing which is an interesting lens to look at brands, products and gender through. This article combines high levels of marketing research with Psychology literature, demonstrating the level of analysis that can be achieved when these fields are bridged.

Perspective of Marketing Professionals on Gendered Toy Marketing

While Azar analyzes previous literature in the field of marketing, other marketing experts have not surveyed this research. Due to this lack of understanding, marketing professionals are hesitant to alter their gendered approach, relying instead on stereotyped conceptions about children’s preferences. Our project will analyze archived responses from marketing professionals to the Marketing Society Forum monthly debate. In this forum, managing directors, chief executives, and others in marketing debate a new question related to the field each month. The question analyzed in this archived copy regards a pledge made by Marks & Spencer, a multinational retail company, to make its toy marketing gender-neutral. Overall, their responses reached agreement that no, a gender-neutral approach would not be beneficial. As stated by Tom Knox, the Chairman to DLKW Low, “Differences (between what boys and girls like to play with) pre-date the influence of marketers and their brands, but expecting marketers to ignore basic and profound differences in their audience seems ill-conceived and impractical.” If marketing professionals were to be exposed to research that demonstrates the cognitive and developmental effects of gendered toy marketing on the children exposed, they may not be so quick to argue that gender differences pre-date marketing exposure. More importantly, they may become more willing to shift their advertisements to a more gender-neutral approach. As of now, many responses to the debate question exhibit a “nervousness” to step into gender-neutral marketing. While no response mentioned profitability, it is simple mathematics that the ability to sell two versions of the same product (one for boys and one for girls) to one family is a more profitable approach. However, narrowing down a target audience for a product can also be harmful by cutting out potential consumers. We can provide a platform that both informs marketing professionals to the developmental consequences of gendered marketing and demonstrates how successful a gender-neutral approach can be by exhibiting successful campaigns that have already stepped into the new wave. 

Our project’s significance lies in its ability to connect multiple areas of study that have not been in conversation with one another, synthesizing this information in a manner that is both engaging and persuasive to our audience: marketing professionals who can change how these products are promoted. Through this synthesis, we hope to develop a theory to explain the rise in gendered marketing in an increasingly progressive climate, and raise a call to action for our audience to change their marketing approach. 

Works Cited

Sweet, Elizabeth. “Toys are more divided by gender now than they were 50 years ago.” The Atlantic 9 (2014): 2014.

Campaign UK. “Should All Marketing to Children Be Gender-Neutral?” The Marketing Society Forum, Campaign UK, 4 May 2016, www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/marketing-children-gender-neutral/1283685.

Azar, Salim L. “Exploring Brand Masculine Patterns: Moving Beyond Monolithic Masculinity: [1].” The Journal of Product and Brand Management 22, no. 7 (2013): 502-512.https://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1691005068?accountid=10427

Liben, Lynn S., et al. “Cognitive Consequences of Gendered Toy Play.” Gender Typing of  Children’s Toys: How Early Play Experiences Impact Development, American Psychological Association, 2018, pp. 213–55. APA PsycNET, doi:10.1037/0000077- 011.

Pledged: MCM, AT

Theoretical Ballroom:

This ballroom demonstrates the paths of conversation among our sources. Sources in the humanities converse with previous literature in the humanities, research in psychology cites previous research in its own field, and business articles speak to others in business (while relying on some psychology). The marketing professionals did not cite any outside sources in the Marketing Society Forum. We hope to synthesize the findings of each of these fields to create engaging and persuasive content.

SSRs

Sweet, Elizabeth. “Toys are more divided by gender now than they were 50 years ago.” The Atlantic 9 (2014): 2014.

Thesis: “Even at times when discrimination was much more common, catalogs contained more neutral appeals than advertisements today” (subheading for the article).

Restatement: Even as we see increasing change towards gender equality in the workplace, social spheres, and legislature, the toy aisle shifts towards a more gendered approach than has been seen in fifty years. 

Rhetorical Structure: 

The structure of this article is primarily organized chronologically by decade, beginning in the early 20th century and leading into the present. Sweet begins with an overall layout of the rise and fall of gendered toy marketing in Sears advertisements to exemplify the major shifts that permeated the entire industry. She then directs her focus to the early 1920s, where toy advertisements displayed overt stereotypes about gender, citing specific advertisements from the decade. She claims that this pattern continued until the 1970s, glossing over the decades in between so that she can focus on the decline of gendered marketing in this time. Here, she connects this decline to increases in second-wave feminism and in women in the workplace. The remainder of her article contrasts the themes seen in previous decades with gendered toy marketing seen today, concluding that today’s marketing strategy repackages the same gender stereotypes from the 1920s into implicit messaging and a false sense of choice. She points to the 1970s as an epitome of the gender-neutral approach and an example we should strive towards. Her theory builds upon the chronology of major social movements to explain why gendered toy marketing has risen and fallen throughout time. 

Rhetorical Strategies:

1. The chronology of Sweet’s article makes her argument both easier to follow and more engaging in its story format. Rather than jumping back and forth through time, the audience is able to get a clearer understanding of how/why the trend has risen and fallen through time. I would like to incorporate this chronological story format in our work. 

2. Sweet exemplifies marketing trends with real toy advertisements from the decade, rather than just speaking about the trends in general, abstract terms. This adds validity to her claims, and is something that I wish to incorporate in our writing. 

3. Sweet’s writing is separated into small segments that makes each individual concept easier to grasp, and therefore makes the overall argument less overwhelming. I will also strive to break up heavy text in our content into smaller sections. 

Campaign UK. “Should All Marketing to Children Be Gender-Neutral?” The Marketing Society Forum, Campaign UK, 4 May 2016, www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/marketing-children-gender-neutral/1283685.

Thesis: “Should all marketing to children be gender-neutral? The Marketing Society Forum: Marks & Spencer has pledged to make its toy marketing gender-neutral in response to criticism about its ‘Boy’s Stuff’ and ‘Little Miss Arty’ lines” (Forum question).

Restatement:  The Marketing Society Forum asks marketing professionals for their opinion about gender-neutral marketing to children, based upon the decision of one company, Marks & Spencer, to transition its marketing strategy to one that is gender-neutral. 

Structure: This source follows a question-answer format. The page first displays the question: should all marketing to children be gender-neutral? The respondent’s answers are then shown, first with the heading of yes, no, or maybe, and then with a more lengthy description to explain their thoughts on gender-neutral toy marketing. As this is a questionnaire, the site itself merely displays these responses and does not develop meta-commentary on the answers. The site does demonstrate credibility by providing the respondent’s names, job positions, and Twitter accounts.

Rhetorical Strategies

1. As this source was merely an archive of responses to a debate question, it is difficult to judge the rhetorical strategies of the source itself (as most of the content is created by respondents). However, the use of “yes”, “no”, or “maybe” headers made the content much easier to sift through. With a brief sweep of the page, the audience is able to understand the general stance of marketing professionals on the debate. I would like to include frequent headers in our writing to break up the content and to make the content more digestible for our audiences. 

2. Including the Twitter accounts of respondents not only increases credibility, but encourages further dialogue surrounding the debate. If I disagreed with or was interested in one of the opinions, I would only have to tag them on Twitter with a question. I would like to increase dialogue about the debate through our platform, and as such, will include social media accounts of my sources when possible to encourage this. 

3. I appreciated the site’s use of tags to categorize the article and to connect it with similar content. I will also use tags on our platform to direct the audience to further information on our site. 

Means of Improvement: While this forum allows for marketing professionals to engage in one question on the same platform, it does not allow for them to respond to each other. I believe that a very important aspect of a debate is being able to respond to others’ points, and as such, I would include a comments section for each response in this source. We hope to include comments sections at the end of every page on our website to encourage discussion.

Azar, Salim L. “Exploring Brand Masculine Patterns: Moving Beyond Monolithic                                                                                                                              Masculinity: [1].” The Journal of Product and Brand Management 22, no. 7 (2013): 502-512.https://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1691005068?accountid=10427

Thesis: “The results indicate that brand masculinity is a bi-dimensional construct (i.e. “Male chauvinism” and “Heroic” dimensions). A cluster analysis performed on 45 brands revealed four brand masculine patterns: hegemonic, emerging, chivalrous and subaltern”.

 “The results provide brand managers with a marketing tool to measure their brands’ masculinity and allow them to adapt specific, previously developed gendered marketing strategies”. “This research contributes to the brand personality and brand gender literature with new insights about the nature and structure of brands’ masculine dimensions. The study moves the conceptualization of this construct forward rejecting thus previous monolithic approaches to brand masculinity”.

Restatement: Brand masculinity is a bi-dimensional construct, with four brand masculine patterns. These findings are helpful for brands to use as a marketing tool in order to more effectively and deeply use previously developed gendered marketing strategies. There are more insights about brand masculine dimensions that will help brands with brand personality and gender-based marketing.

Structure: The structure of this article is interesting, it is almost like a lab report. There are many subheadings where the structure of the scale development is laid out in steps. There is also an introduction and a discussion and conclusion although the discussion and conclusion section is put together as one section.

Rhetorical Strategies:

1. It is helpful that this article has many subheadings as it successfully organizes the research and thoughts of the author.

2. The background research provided in the introduction of this paper is really helpful in understanding the research that is done later on.

3. The abstract was organized in a way I haven’t seen before, but it was helpful in terms of the structure of this paper especially when trying to make since of the findings that the scale was used to find. 

Liben, Lynn S., et al. “Cognitive Consequences of Gendered Toy Play.” Gender Typing 

   of  Children’s Toys: How Early Play Experiences Impact Development, American  

Psychological Association, 2018, pp. 213–55. APA PsycNET, doi:10.1037/0000077- 011.

Thesis: “Despite many reductions in societal gender constraints over the last century (Liben, 2016), gender-stereotypical play patterns like these remain common, particularly during toddlerhood and the preschool years (Blakemore, Berenbaum, & Liben, 2009). These patterns are of interest not only because they demonstrate that girls and boys engage in different kinds of play during their childhoods but also because these different behaviors may have long-term effects on the development of cognitive skills, in turn affecting individuals’ educational, occupational, and daily lives” (213-214).

Restatement: Even as the culture around gender constraints has changed a lot in recent years, there are still gender-stereotypical play patterns that are common. These patterns of play can have long-term cognitive effects on children.

Structure: This resource is a chapter from a much longer book. It is structured in the way that many chapters are. This chapter also has a lot of subtitles and sections which is a helpful organization. It is organized in a way that very clearly explains everything to the readers. It has a lot of sections, with lots of information that is helpful for the reader to understand everything in the thesis.

Rhetorical Strategies:

1. The subheadings and subsections are really helpful organizationally.

2. The background on cognitive development is very useful in fully understanding the purpose and thesis of the chapter.

3. This chapter is extremely long, but has a lot of useful information.

Literature Review: Sustainable Fashion

·

Maria Brown

Professor Churchill and Richards

English 406: Digital Design

11 February 2020

Literature Review

Sustainability has become an increasingly important factor in the Fashion industry. The trend of consumers to take into account sustainability more into their choices of purchase relates to a decrease in fast fashion. Fast fashion is an occurrence of an industry in which fashion products are cheap and made in great abundance. The products are often highly stylized towards trends of the moment. In this way, this trend of fast fashion has been criticized for producing products which were not made to last and in the end produce an abundance of waste. On the other hand the emergence of sustainability has had its share of challenges as well. Starting with how it can be defined. The concept of sustainability is not crystal clear as many scholars have sought to define in it several ways. One of which is the Triple Bottom Line which takes into account economic, social, and environmental factors. Another way to define sustainability is through corporate social responsibility. In my research outside the scholarly articles, I found that several companies have different nomenclatures for their variety of sustainability ranging from organic to fair trade. The lack of clarity in the sustainability world has caused greenwashing or for companies to call themselves sustainable and gain the recognition in customer sales without really being able to clearly be held accountable for their efforts in sustainability. In order for sustainable fashion to be easier to navigate for our consumers, we hope to present a visual and digital project to help consumers understand the academic and business concepts and action in fashion sustainability, so that they can make better informed decisions.

Henninger’s “What Is Sustainable Fashion?” formulates the concept of sustainability in the fashion industry. By initially calling attention the lack of clarity in the term sustainability, the article addresses the environment and how this article will solve a problem within the scholarly world of sustainability. It will seek to define more clearly the term sustainable. It does so by creating a collection of values by which can be utilized to evaluate sustainability, which it calls a matrix. Shen’s “Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain: Lessons from H&M” coordinates an analysis of H&M’s sustainable efforts. It seeks to validate its conclusion from information collected from H&M’s supply chain. In this way, we see how business can generate sustainable changes as well as some ways in which business reject and negotiate sustainable practices in the supply chain. Lastly, Park and Kim’s “An Empirical Test of the Triple Bottom Line of Customer-Centric Sustainability: The Case of Fast Fashion”, regards the sustainable movement which has taken a hold of the fashion industry as a relationship to the fast fashion and consumer-centric sustainability. It in turn responds with an analysis of the Triple Bottom Line in the practice of customer-business relations. It does so with a survey and data analysis, which yields the insights it forms its conclusion about a relationship with consumers to the trend of sustainability through the triple bottom line.

These sources speak to one another through the development of what sustainability entails in the fashion industry. The first article poses the question of whether sustainability can be more clearly evaluated and defined. The third article pushes the question of sustainability to have it align more closely with its relationship with the consumers. It asks the question of what sustainability does to entice consumers to products and how it factors into consumers and businesses to make decisions about products. The second article seeks to further take a perspective of what sustainability can do through specifically the supply chain. It seeks to decipher trends in sustainability which yield a conclusion about business choice and decision making. It pulls apart the concepts of sustainability from a business perspective.

The following sources remark on the concerns and marking of trends in sustainability in fashion. They take different perspectives focusing on business and then on the consumers. However, they position their conclusions on the scope of their focus. In the Shen article, their contributions to sustainability is centered on the supply-chain and business angle, and in the Park and Kim article, their analysis of sustainability is centered on the relationship of sustainability in customer-business relationships for the benefit of business. I think that our project connects the information gathered in these sections to be tailored to the customer perspective. Through a synthesis of the business and academic perspective, a full and complete guide can be given to the consumer to make educated decisions regarding fashion sustainability.

Works Cited   

Henninger, Claudia E., et al. “What Is Sustainable Fashion?” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management; Bradford, vol. 20, no. 4, 2016, pp. 400–16. ProQuest, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-07-2015-0052.

Shen, Bin. “Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain: Lessons from H&M.” Sustainability, vol. 6, no. 9, 2014, pp. 6236–6249. davidson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, doi:10.3390/su6096236.

Park, Hyejune, and Youn-kyung Kim. “An Empirical Test of the Triple Bottom Line of Customer-Centric Sustainability: The Case of Fast Fashion.” Fashion and Textiles; Heidelberg, vol. 3, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 1–18. ProQuest, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40691-016-0077-6. 

Ballroom Map

Secondary Source Reports

Henninger, Claudia E., et al. “What Is Sustainable Fashion?” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management; Bradford, vol. 20, no. 4, 2016, pp. 400–16. ProQuest, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-07-2015-0052.

The thesis of this article can be summarized in the purpose and finding section of the abstract of this article. It states that “The purpose of this paper is to examine what the term sustainable fashion means from the perspective of micro-organisations, experts, and consumers.” (Henninger 400). In addition, it states that the “Findings indicate that interpretation of sustainable fashion is context and person dependent. A matrix of key criteria provides the opportunity to find common elements.” (Henninger 400). The article aims to share a definition of sustainability which is supported by multiple sources including participants and academic scholars in the fashion industry. With the information that is gathered in the process of consultation with their sources, it then shapes a concept built on the commonalities in the information received regarding sustainability. 

In the Introduction section, the article seeks to clarify a problem of disparity between sustainable fashion as a trend and the academic understanding of the impact of sustainable fashion (Henninger 400). It clarifies this understanding through the development of the term sustainable fashion as it evolved from slow fashion a term which arose from the business phenomena of fast fashion (Henninger 401).  In the preceding exposition sections, the article elaborates on a key term and philosophy of slow fashion in relation to the term fast fashion. Fast fashion is the rapid consumption of new fashion trends which are produced quickly for a relatively low price. The slow fashion movement seeks to hold the business more accountable to the interests of the consumers through fairer conditions for workers and the environment (Henninger 402).The article establishes another key term, social constructionism, which helps explain two types of sustainability (Henninger 403).  The article transitions to a section which centers in their evidence and explains how they proceeded to collect their information and the trends which they found. The article critically reflects on the process to which they collected their findings. Then in an analysis section, the article defines some common trends of their data set in a thesis encumbered in their data. It looks at the phenomenon which saw a definition of sustainable fashion as highly associated with sustainability and exclusive shopping. The article notes the danger that sustainability has for simply being in the name only, and not have the impact that the consumer thinks it is having. The article also notes that sustainability has a penchant for being a high price quality, not for everyday customers. In the knowledge and awareness section, the article details how the high-end fashion industry celebrates and thus defines the sustainable fashion industry. The article also notes that social media and popular perspective was a prominent influence on the promotion of sustainability. The article then draws comparison of its findings to other sources which brings about criticism of sustainable fashion as antithetical to both definitions of fashion and sustainability. This leaves the article to their conclusion which is a reassertion of their thesis which is the problematic and fluid nature of sustainability and the development through their analysis of a set of values creating a matrix which can help inform sustainability efforts in the fashion industry. 

The argument of this article effectively stages the information to be received best through a filtering of information to the reader. The first part of the article prefaces with a range of background information and terms which build upon one another to help inform later conclusions. The information is not saturated with assumptions about the knowledge of the sustainable scholar but rather supports a partnership with the reader to help them learn through the article rather than simply comprehend. An example of this is through the definition of slow fashion, social constructionism, and greenwashing. 

Shen, Bin. “Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain: Lessons from H&M.” Sustainability, vol. 6, no. 9, 2014, pp. 6236–6249. davidson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, doi:10.3390/su6096236.

The article can be defined by its thesis: “based on the secondary data and analysis, we learn the lessons of H&M’s sustainable fashion supply chain from the country perspective: (1) the H&M’s sourcing managers may be more likely to select suppliers in the countries with lower degrees of human wellbeing; (2) the H&M’s supply chain manager may set a higher level of inventory in a country with a higher human wellbeing; and (3) the H&M CEO may consider the degrees of human wellbeing and economic well being, instead of environmental wellbeing when launching the online shopping channel in a specific country.” This article exemplifies H&M for its transition towards sustainable fashion through a focus on the production of the clothes.

 The article relates in the introduction the notion of the Triple Bottom Line, which measures sustainability for its impact on the environment, economy, and society (Shen 6238). Prefacing some of these key terms, the article also distinguishes a trend of major fashion brands towards marketing themselves as sustainable. This trend relates to the practice of refining what sustainability should include. The article reviews sustainability first in the production phase through a discussion of eco-material-materials which consider the life of the product after it has been created. The review of the production phase also extends towards the human workers and the impact it has on their overall health. The article continues to another phase of the fashion industry, which is the distribution stage. It details how fashion products travel to stores and to their consumers. Then the article applies the knowledge which is shared with the reader in the context of H&M. The article completes a review of H&M through an analysis of the supply chain. In this degree it tries to yield information which can help the reader understand some trends of sustainable fashion business. 

I appreciate how the article establishes clear assertions. The article is well-structured to enable the reader to understand what message or point they are being persuaded of. The presentation of information works effectively and pointedly towards the goals of the article. The article also distinguishes is assertions with specificity which enables the reader to better contextualize the meaning of this article. It does not try to make sweeping assertions, which makes its assertions more accountable and powerful to its readers.

Park, Hyejune, and Youn-kyung Kim. “An Empirical Test of the Triple Bottom Line of Customer-Centric Sustainability: The Case of Fast Fashion.” Fashion and Textiles; Heidelberg, vol. 3, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 1–18. ProQuest, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40691-016-0077-6. 

Park and Kim’s article “An Empirical Test of the Triple Bottom Line of Customer-Centric Sustainability: The Case of Fast Fashion”, addresses the question of whether the Triple Bottom Line, a concept of assessing sustainability interacts with the customer relationship with the business. The article states that it intends to “to determine if the triple bottom line (TBL) model can serve as an accounting framework for consumers’ perceived sustainability of fashion brands; (b) to investigate whether TBL sustainability can be linked to brand relation‑ ships with fast fashion; and (c) to determine whether the predictive role of the TBL sustainability of fast fashion brands difers from that of sustainable fashion brands.” (Park and Kim 1). 

The article devises to its aims through a process of defining elements of the Triple Bottom Line, including the effects of the economic, social, and environmental factors. Prefacing this dive into the facets of the Triple Bottom Line, the article explores the fast fashion phenomenon and customer-centric sustainability, which enables readers to better situate their understanding of the Triple Bottom Line in the context of the fashion industry, as well as connecting the Triple Bottom Line with brand relationships. In the next section of the article, the definition of the Triple Bottom Line is tested through a survey and data analysis of customer’s relationship with sustainability in their choices of fashion. To present information clearly, the parameters and method of the survey and data analysis are defined. Then the results are presented, and conclusions made about trends they saw which hint towards a relationship of Triple Bottom Line to customer preferences.

This source effectively demonstrated a procedural and methodical format to presenting information and then a conclusion. This document drew upon elements of scientific relevance through a staging of the information to produce the most coherent argument and conclusion. I believe that in addition the formation of data analysis and the presentation of the data in the argument was crucial as well to showing the readers the experience of their conclusions.

Literature Review

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Sustainable fashion is becoming an international “megatrend,” but consumers are frequently misled (Henninger 400). They are being told labels like eco-fashion, green-fashion, and ethical-fashion mean more than they do. There is no system in place to regulate the labels or ensure that sustainable items match consumers’ perceptions of what they are buying. Just because some people think that living wages for women workers is ethical, it does not mean that the company they are buying clothes from has the same interpretation. Academics today are studying what sustainable fashion means to both consumers and producers, exposing the inconsistencies and offering suggestions as how to better connect the two. Lijo John, Bin Shen, Sarah Bly, and Claudia Henninger all address what sustainable fashion means to them according to their research and how sustainable fashion is able to succeed as a business.

In Converging Sustainability Definitions: Industry Independent Dimensions, John argues that sustainability must be measured in four categories: environmental, social, ethical, and economical (John 208). John provides a holistic definition of sustainability that can be applied to any market or business model. John’s main point is that all four of the categories affect one another, and therefore must be kept in context. John created two models to show a company how to implement sustainability in the three different levels of building and sustaining a business: strategic, tactical, and operational approaches (John 218). His research shows that to be a successful sustainable enterprise, a company must put sustainability at the core of every decision they make. 

Henninger is able to build off of the general definition John provides, making a more niche definition for the sustainable fashion market particularly. In Henninger’s What is Sustainable Fashion, multiple academic sources are analyzed and compared to create a broad and general understanding of the term “sustainable fashion.” Shen argues, that there have been many studies about sustainable fashion as it relates to other things “[but] current studies lack an academic understanding of what sustainable fashion is from a holistic perspective” (Shen 401). Henninger says that a universal understanding of sustainable fashion for both the consumer and producer is “vital in order to avoid negative connotations such as greenwashing;” which is when a company exploits the eco-friendly aspects of their company for marketing purposes without real dedication to back up the claims (Henninger 401).

Henninger creates a matrix for brands and consumers to rate the sustainability efforts of a company or organization based on evidence from other academic sources. The matrix lays out the different elements people consider when thinking of sustainable fashion and a rating system that gages what level of commitment a company has for each element. 

Henninger gives an explanation as to what sustainable fashion is, and Shen adds on to that by explaining how sustainability is implemented into an existing supply chain. In Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain: Lessons From H&M, Shen gives a detailed explanation as to how complicated integrating sustainability into a supply chain can be. Shen uses previous academic sources to give the reader a better understanding of the triple bottom line and how social impact can become integral in a company’s success. Shen then concludes with the analysis of H&M’s eco-friendly line Conscious Action. Saying that H&M is more likely to prioritize human and economic well-being over environmental impacts (Shen 6246). H&M shows how hard it is for a company to meet all the elements of sustainability.

In comparison to Shen, Bly takes the same information, and shows how consumers perceive the definition of sustainability. In Exit from the High Street, Bly shows how early sustainable fashion consumers helped jumpstart the industry. Bly believes that the industry is able to remain relevant because of the consumers prioritizing sustainability over other motivators. But Bly’s research indicates that the motivations of these pioneers “is as much about reducing measurable environmental or social impacts as it is about incorporating broader concepts … to achieve goals beyond the pro environmental or ethical” (Bly 125). Consumers buy sustainable clothing for a range of reasons, all of which are important to take into consideration when creating a digital humanities project for consumers.  

All of these sources bring different understandings of the sustainable fashion market into a conversation. Shen shows the implementation of John’s sustainability definition. Shen uses H&M’s supply chain as an example to show how sustainability must be considered in every decision, proving John’s theory. Yet, Bly shows how the consumer demand for particular elements of sustainability continue to keep sustainable enterprises profitable. Both Shen and Bly build off of Henninger’s basic matrix in two different ways, but when brought together they give a full picture of the sustainable fashion market, from production to consumption. 

Shen determines in the case of H&M, that human well-being is prioritized over environmental well-being (Shen 6246). Showing that somthing like living wages are the most important element of sustainability. Yet, Henninger comments on eco and green materials, giving a focus on the importance of environmental impact. In contrast to both, Bly speaks to the unsustainable consumption of clothing which has less to do with the producer and more to do with the buyer. Even with four academic sources we see how vague the understanding of sustainable fashion can be. 

Our research shows that there are plenty of academics talking about what sustainability should look like in the fashion industry, and other industries too. The issue is, their findings are not being openly displayed for consumers. Most companies are not likely to broadcast what academics are saying about sustainability in the fashion industry for fear of scrutiny. This is where our project comes in. We will be able to use Bly’s research to connect us to sustainable fashion pioneers and influencers, who could help spread our message. Also, her research gives regular people a better understanding of what they can do to become more sustainable consumers. Shen’s research will help us show consumers what companies need to be doing to be able to claim sustainability. Our project is trying to bridge the academic conversations and the consumer conversations, so that everyone is able to have a clearer understanding of what sustainability looks like now and how it needs to look in the future to make real change.

PLEGED

Ballroom:

Secondary Source Reports:

Works Cited

Bly, Sarah, Wencke Gwozdz, and Lucia A. Reisch, ‘Exit from the High Street: An Exploratory Study of Sustainable Fashion Consumption Pioneers’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 39.2 (2015), 125–135 <https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12159>

Henninger, Claudia E., Panayiota J. Alevizou, and Caroline J. Oates, ‘What Is Sustainable Fashion?’, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management; Bradford, 20.4 (2016), 400–416 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-07-2015-0052>

John, Lijo, and Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy, ‘Converging Sustainability Definitions: Industry Independent Dimensions’, World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, 12.3 (2015), 206–32

Shen, Bin, ‘Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain: Lessons from H&M’, Sustainability, 6.9 (2014), 6236–6249 <https://doi.org/10.3390/su6096236>

Literature Review for Intergenerational Mental Health

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Young Adult Mental Health

Now more than ever, college students are struggling with debilitating mental health issues. Although mental illness has been greatly destigmatized in the recent decade, students are still struggling to have their needs met. People have turned to social media platforms to publicize their mental health concerns and the ways in which they cope with the daily stress of life. Although this movement has fostered an online community and support system for many young adults who struggle with mental illness, colleges and universities still struggle to provide adequate resources for students’ mental health. Many students feel that, in academic settings, they are being set up for failure because they can’t balance all of their activities (Reilly 39). This stress is exacerbated by a lack of perspective regarding the future, and this lack of perspective fuels more anxiety.

In “Depression on Campus” by Katie Reilly, Reilly presents an argument about college students’ mental health, focusing primarily on how mental illness has increased amongst students on college campuses and how these colleges and universities are treating growing mental health concerns. She states that “from 2009 to ‘15, the number of students visiting counseling centers increased by about 30% on average, while university enrollment grew by less than 6%…” (Reilly 41). Schools then had to work to catch up to this demand, but they didn’t have enough resources. In one anecdote, a girl named Dana said that it took her two weeks to get off of the waitlist to meet with a college counselor at her school, and she was unable to make a follow-up appointment because the center was overbooked (Reilly 41). Reilly’s report utilizes anecdotes like Dana’s that show how students struggle to have their mental health needs met. 

She concludes the article by describing certain measures that colleges have taken to combat this issue, but also makes it clear that there is a lot of work left in order to make these changes sustainable and continuously effective. She summarizes a recent report about recent efforts that universities have made to ameliorate the issue of being unable to attend to the mental health needs of students: 

A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health found that, on average, universities have increased rapid-access services—including walk-in appointments and crisis treatment for students demonstrating signs of distress—since 2010 in response to rising demand from students. But routine treatment services, including recurring appointments and specialized counseling, have decreased on average in that time (42). 

This report shows that the responses to the surge in demand for counseling services are tangible, but they are not necessarily lasting. While this is progress, it is a temporary fix for a deep rooted problem. The purpose of Reilly’s article is more to spread awareness through facts and anecdotes about a growing mental health problem among college students in our country. She does not offer her own solutions, but she also does not make it seem as if this is an impossible problem to solve. 

In “Talk, Don’t Run: Can an Intergenerational Program Relieve Teenage Pressure?” by Lisa Cox Hall, Hall focuses specifically on how intergenerational relationships have impacted teenagers and young adults. Intergenerational programs (IGPs) have existed in the United States since the 60’s. Hall states that “conceptually and theoretically, bringing young and old together can achieve a multitude of delightful and appealing benefits such as reducing ageist stereotypes in children and increasing a sense of purpose in retired adults” (Hall 404). She also contends that engaging in IGPs involves “conscientiousness and thinking more of others than thinking only of oneself” (406). This increases the self-esteem of the teenagers and young adults who are engaging in IGPs because they have more of a sense of purpose, which can lead to “greater life satisfaction, less depression, and more hopefulness” (Hall 406). 

Hall also says that they have a positive impact on the mental health of young adults because they provide perspective for students that they don’t have in their day to day lives and give them a broader sense of understanding about the world and their impact. This perspective from older generations also alleviates young adults of a lot of their anxiety (Hall 406). Hall states that, through intergenerational programming, young adults “may be able to comprehend that patience is the antidote to anxiety, that surviving failure is what makes failing survivable, and that sheer experience provides insight that can diminish self-doubt and hopelessness” (Hall 406). This is one of the main benefits of intergenerational programming for young adults, the fact that they can gain an invaluable perspective about life that they cannot get without the wisdom of someone who is older. 

In the final article, “Reflections on the Dynamics of a Student Organized Intergenerational Visiting Program to Promote Social Connectedness”, Kendall Horan and Margaret Perkinson report an example of an intergenerational program at the University of Hawaii. The university started this program with students who live far from home and cannot interact with their families on a regular basis (Horan and Perkinson 397). These students partnered with a local nursing home and coordinated twelve visits, each lasting two hours, over the course of the semester (Horan and Perkinson 397). They engaged in activities like storytelling, pumpkin carving, Christmas ornament decorating, and just meeting to talk and get to know each other (Horan and Perkinson 397). It created a sense of purpose and belonging in both groups, but it especially impacted the students by making them feel as if they were a part of a larger community that provided support and even friendship. Horan and Perkinson include an anecdote from one of the students:

I really love spending Sunday at the care home. They are all so friendly and loving. I feel like we both give each other a sense of purpose. They bring the best qualities out in my heart and I believe we do the same. When I came for Valentine’s Day, it brought joy to my heart that a rose could make a resident tear. The joy that we brought to them will always be a significant memory in my heart, because they brought it right back. It humbled my heart that a simple gesture can bring pure joy to a person (Horan and Perkinson 399). 

This student makes an important remark about how the program provides her with a sense of purpose, and that this sense of purpose can lead to happiness and a newfound sense of appreciation for small gestures. This study relates to Hall’s article about how intergenerational programs can improve self esteem in students by giving them a sense of purpose.

These three articles are part of a growing dialogue surrounding teen and young adult mental health. They each use a different approach in order to talk about the problem, and through these different approaches they address mental health issues on varying scales. For example, in the Reilly article, she focuses on mental health amongst all college students by focusing on what colleges and universities have found in certain studies and through collecting certain data about their student body and mental health. From there, she speculates about causes for an increase in mental health problems and also provides student anecdotes about why they have been struggling and why their needs have not been met by their school. She does not necessarily provide a solution for the issues that she brings up, but she does bring attention to the fact that colleges and universities have a lot of work to do in order to sufficiently attend to the mental health needs of all of their students, because these needs have grown over the past decade.

The Hall article provides more of a specific argument about teen and young adult mental health, stating that it can be improved greatly by engaging in intergenerational relationships. She does not provide as many statistics as Reilly does, but she does provide specifics about how young adults interact with older people, and why these interactions have a positive effect on their mental health. She focuses on the perspective that young adults can gain from forming relationships and opening up to older people. This is similar to Horan and Perkinson’s study, but they take it a step further by including the details of an actual intergenerational program that took place on a college campus. She provides details of the program, anecdotes, and photos in order to encapsulate the effects of an intergenerational program. 

These three articles all work to illuminate how important mental health is for young adults, who challenge to maintain a strong self-image in today’s society with social media, as well as with the added demands from school and extracurricular activities. They show the urgency of this issue, and how, if not combated in innovative, lasting ways, mental illness in younger generations could worsen. The Hall and Horan and Perkinson articles focus primarily on the mental health benefits of interacting with older generations, whereas the Reilly article looks at mental illness treatment on college campuses as a larger issue. This article is imperative to understanding the urgency of finding solutions for young adults’ mental health problems, and it informs the other two articles.

These three articles are important to our work specifically because we need to be aware of how mental illness is increasing in younger generations, as a lot of our work is centered around improving the lives of both young adults and older people by showing them the benefits of intergenerational programming. I think that it is important to look at the current state of teenagers and young adults and to acknowledge the fact that there has been an increase in diagnosed mental illness amongst this demographic, and what this means for our project. It shows that the work we are doing in promoting intergenerational relationships is important during this time because it has the potential to help young adults improve their mental health and self-esteem. 

Secondary Source Reports:

  1. Reilly, Katie. “Depression on Campus.” TIME Magazine, April 9, 2018.

Thesis: “Spigner, 21, is among the rapidly growing number of college students seeking mental-health treatment on campuses facing an unprecedented demand for counseling services” (41).

Restatement: The number of college students seeking help on campus for their mental health has increased greatly, making it difficult for colleges to accommodate every student and leaving many students without the help that they need.

Structure: The structure of this article is concise and informative, likely because it is a magazine article. The statistics and anecdotes that Reilly includes are stated very clearly and all provide valuable insight into the thesis by showing specifically how college students are struggling with mental health services on campus because of such an increase in stress, anxiety, and depression amongst students. Reilly relies greatly on anecdotes both about how students feel they are struggling in college and how college administration feels they are struggling with in terms of providing counseling and resources for all students who need it. They show that colleges are aware of the increase in students seeking counseling on campus and are making efforts to ameliorate the situation, but that it is difficult to get the resources for students so that they do not have to wait long periods of time to see a counselor. Reilly does not offer a solution but rather sheds light on this pressing issue so that people can be aware of this shift amongst college students.

Rhetorical Strategies: Reilly uses statistics well and knows what is important to include and what isn’t, therefore avoiding just putting in a block quote. I also like how she uses concrete anecdotes, and how the anecdotes are from students and faculty at different schools of various sizes to show how mental health issues impact any kind of college or university. This article is more of an exploration of the recent increase in mental illness on campus, but I think that it would have been beneficial for Reilly to include ideas for solutions or something as a conclusion based off of all of the information she collected.

2. Hall, Lisa Cox. “Talk, Don’t Run: Can an Intergenerational Program Relieve Teenage Pressure?” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, vol. 17, no. 3, 31 July 2019, pp. 404-09. Taylor and Francis Online.

Thesis: “Conceptually and theoretically, bringing young and old together can achieve a multitude of delightful and appealing benefits such as reducing ageist stereotypes in children and increasing a sense of purpose in retired adults” (404).

Restatement: Intergenerational relationships can have positive benefits on both older and younger people, including reducing ageist stereotypes in children and improving their perspective and increasing a sense of purpose in older adults.

Structure: The structure of this article is very organized and starts by explaining what intergenerational relationships are and providing certain examples of intergenerational programs. Hall also provides information about the demographic that engages in intergenerational programming, stating that it is mainly low-income families. She focuses on examples of how young adults see themselves and includes documentaries about young adult life in order to provide examples of how they are struggling with finding a sense of self and purpose. She also includes information and statistics from multiple studies that surveyed the effects of intergenerational relationships on young adults.

Rhetorical Strategy: I like how specific and well-researched Hall’s article is. It shows that she considered a variety of sources and studies about intergenerational relationships and decided what information was the most pressing and important to include. It increased her credibility and also showed how vast the dialogue is surrounding intergenerational relationships and programming.

3. Horan, Kendall, and Margaret A. Perkinson. “Reflections on the Dynamics of a Student Organized Intergenerational Visiting Program to Promote Social Connectedness.” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, vol. 17, no. 3, 31 July 2019. Taylor and Francis Group.

Thesis: “Intergenerational programs have been found to be successful in creating opportunities for personal growth and social connections for student participants and for older adults both living in the community and in residential care” (396)

Restatement: Intergenerational programs are beneficial for both young adults and older adults because they provide opportunities for personal growth and social connections within certain communities. 

Structure: This article is organized into sections that are clearly labeled to describe a specific example of an intergenerational program. Horan and Perkinson do not directly mention the increase of mental health issues amongst young adults, but they do talk about how the college students who participated in this intergenerational program felt isolated from their families and were looking to be more involved in the community. They also conclude the article with pictures and anecdotes from both the young adults and older adults who participated in the program. 

Rhetorical Strategy: I liked how everything was split into sections, starting with general background information about intergenerational relationships and getting progressively more specific as they explained the specific program in Hawaii. This is more of a report about the intergenerational program rather than a direct analysis of the effects. They do talk about the effects on both generations that participated in the program, but they do this mainly through sharing anecdotes instead of through a psychological analysis.

Ballroom Map:

Three Approaches to Refugee Resettlement Discourse

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Recent discourse surrounding refugee resettlement often falls into one of three broad currents. The first current focuses on reforming federal policy concerning immigrants and asylum seekers as well as the public and private agencies that manage their resettlement. The second current centers around academic framing of refugee resettlement, synthesizing sociological research to analyze trends. The third and final current centers around activism and is directed toward individuals at the local level seeking practical strategies to aid and improve refugee resettlement in their communities. This literature review selects an article from each of these respective currents and puts them in conversation by comparing the answers each provides to the following two questions: 

1) What problem with the current system of refugee resettlement or problem faced by refugees has the author chosen to identify?

2) What solution does the author propose for the problem they identify? 

In their 2012 article, “Linguistic Isolation, Social Capital, and Immigrant Belonging,” Stephanie J. Nawyn, Linda Gjokaj, DeBrenna LaFa Agbényiga, and Breanne Grace argue that resettled refugees without English proficiency face linguistic isolation in the United States, depriving them of access to resources and acceptance within their communities. The authors argue that a refugee’s lack of social capital – defined as “social networks that have the potential to provide either material or nonmaterial resources” – exacerbates this linguistic isolation, cutting them off from resources which refugees with more social ties have greater opportunity to access (Nawyn et al 257).

The authors interviewed 36 Burundian and Burmese refugees who had recently resettled in Grand Rapids and Lansing, Michigan, asking them about the barriers to integration and access to basic services. The participants were more concerned about “their lack of access to basic information” than how their lack of English skills restricted their economic opportunities (265). The authors found that Burmese participants, through weak ties gained through communities such as church congregations, could connect with more bilingual conationals for assistance accessing resources than the Burundian participants, who exhibited more linguistic isolation. 

Nawyn et al. conclude that more information must be made available on a local level for immigrants to access important resources and on a community level for opportunities to be provided for refugees to create social ties. Additionally, they argue for two changes in how social capital is addressed in sociological theory and research: first, that there must be a clear definition of the concept, and second, that social capital theory must be liberated from the myopic lens of rational choice theory and neoliberal models that ignore non-economic implications of social capital like linguistic isolation. 

In “Unfulfilled Promises, Future Possibilities: The Refugee Resettlement System in the United States,” Anastasia Brown and Todd Scribner present an historical overview of federal policy concerning refugees leading up to the Refugee Act of 1980 and the subsequent decline in funding for resettlement. The authors identify the erosion of provisions for refugees after the Refugee Act of 1980 as the source of strain between the public and private agencies in the immigration system. 

The historical overview surveys the progression of United States refugee policy from World War II to the Refugee Act. The proliferation in “displaced persons following the end of World War II” led the United States to become “proactive” in resettlement, as well as later crises in “Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe” (Brown and Scribner 102). It was not until the Refugee Act of 1980 that the U.S. government established a standardized system for admittance or explicit delineation of roles for resettlement agencies. Brown and Scribner cite statistics from federal bodies as well as non-governmental organizations that indicate the decrease of funding for refugees since the establishment of the Refugee Act has put strain on resettlement agencies, which must accommodate each year’s flow of immigrants and asylum seekers with insufficient information and resources. 

The first recommendation that Brown and Scribner propose is an overall increase in funding, calling the federal government to reclaim the role of leadership in the resettlement process, a responsibility “specified in the Refugee Act” (122). Next, the authors recommend federal agencies establish systems to better track the secondary migration of refugees to other communities in the country in order to continue providing them with resources such as interest-free loans through the refugee travel loan program. Finally, the authors propose improved methods of communication between parties coordinating international and domestic resettlement, including greater information sharing between government agencies, providing medical and mental health information to resettlement agencies, as well as measures to “provide a greater degree of predictability to the resettlement process,” such as providing budgetary information that would allow agencies on the local level to prepare for and adapt to meet the needs of the incoming refugee population (115). 

Todd Scribner analyzes the effects of the Trump administration on the resettlement process in the United States in his 2017 article “You are Not Welcome Here Anymore: Restoring Support for Refugee Resettlement in the Age of Trump.” While this article includes an overview of U.S. policy similar to his 2014 article with Anastasia Brown, Scribner here turns his focus from policy to cultural narratives, explicating “the restrictionist logic that informs the Trump administration’s worldview” while examining how historian Bernard Lewis and political theorist Samuel Huntington’s paradigm of the Clash of Civilizations establishes a lens descriptive of the culture-privileging approach to international affairs that the President and his advisors and supporters espouse (Scribner 265).  

Formulated by Bernard Lewis and popularized by Samuel Huntington, the Clash of Civilizations (CoC) describes the international situation after the Soviet Union’s fall in which culture has overtaken ideology as the foundation of international conflict. Before then, the United States accepted refugees from the Soviet Union and other communist governments in part to “demonstrate a point,” that refugees’ desire to escape to America from left-wing governments “would reveal the undesirable character of communist countries and the superiority of the West” (269). As the East versus West paradigm fell away, it seemed, as argued by Francis Fukuyama in his “end of history” theory that liberal democracy had established itself as the final form of government. Huntington disagreed, arguing that while liberal democracy had emerged triumphant from the ideological conflict against socialism and communism, fundamental cultural divisions between “discrete civilizations,” including Western and Islamic cultures, remain as opposed as ever (270). Adherents to the CoC paradigm see instances of Islamic-inspired terrorism as manifestations of anti-Westernism that illustrates the incompatibility of Western and Islamic civilizations. 

While Trump has not invoked the CoC directly, Scribner argues that his administration’s efforts to curb immigration stem from a similar cultural logic that views migrants from Islamic countries as incompatible with the culture of the United States, that is, that of white Christian America. “As a part of this worldview,” Scribner claims, “not only do Muslims pose an external national security threat vis-à-vis terrorism,” they also present “an internal one insofar as they threaten the cultural and political foundations that have given the United States its distinctive character” (276). An overview follows of the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict immigration, particularly from countries with Muslim populations. Most significant is the 2015 travel ban on all Muslims entering the United States in response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack, which directly illustrated the perspective of Islamic terrorism as “an existential threat” in line with the CoC paradigm (265). Scribner also includes statistics from U.S. voters, indicating that many Americans share the Trump administration’s perception of immigration as a threat to the country.

Scribner concludes by presenting three broad recommendations to restore support for refugee resettlement. First, he calls for “effective advocacy” against federal restrictionist policies and calling for a “generous refugee admissions program” (278). Second, he argues for an equal amount of attention to “grassroots organizing and educational efforts in local communities,” asking proponents, including “religious institutions, immigration advocates, nonprofits, and other organizations,” to find where they can promote integration locally (278). Finally, he calls for advocates to accept the overall paradigm underlying the Clash of Civilizations – that culture plays “a preeminent role in the promotion and establishment of policy” (278). To combat restrictive measures like the Trump administration’s policies, activists must understand what premises convinced their supporters in the first place. 

The solutions the authors of these three articles propose to the problems they identify fall within the three major currents of refugee resettlement discourse introduced in the first paragraph, the currents of policy, academics, and activism. Brown and Scribner’s 2014 piece “Unfulfilled Promises, Future Possibilities…” provides the best example of the first category, presenting three major proposals – more federal funding, better tracking of secondary migrations, and improved communication and coordination – which are all directed at the level of federal policy. Brown and Scribner identify the erosion of federal support for domestic resettlement and overall “lack of adequate support” as the primary cause of the “substantial strain” felt by both “refugee receiving communities and on resettlement agencies” (Brown and Scribner 102).

The research put forth by Nawyn et al. in “Linguistic Isolation, Social Capital, and Immigrant Belonging” leads the authors to suggest proposals applying largely to the second current of discourse, which privileges improvements to theoretical framing and academic understanding of issues surrounding refugees. They counter a dominant critical position concerning immigrant social citizenship which “assumes that if immigrants have the right to access resources from the state, they have social citizenship in that state,” first by arguing for a clear definition of social capital within the sociological field that acknowledges the importance of language skills for navigating provided resources and second for an expansion of the definition of social capital beyond the restrictive neoliberal market model (Nawyn et al. 276). Their research and proposals may provide a foundation for practical reform, but fellow academics compose their primary audience.

Scribner’s 2017 article “You are Not Welcome Here Anymore” prominently features the third current of discourse, informing activists about the wave of restrictionist policies and sentiments they seek to resist. While he promotes “grassroots organizing and educational efforts in local communities” and “integration on the local level,” Scribner pivots to emphasize the importance of refugee advocates understanding the present importance of culture as perhaps more immediately important (Scribner 278). Scribner does not dismiss grassroots advocacy, but he acknowledges that rethinking “fundamental narratives that guide our… self-understanding as a nation,” must become “the priority in the public engagement of civic associations, faith communities, and other organizations interested in the public square” (279). Refugee advocacy in this new era requires activists to understand the cultural logic driving the anxieties behind the national programs they oppose.

Scribner’s approach in his 2017 article aligns with Nawyn et al.’s focus on culture, but their proposals diverge as a result of their different audiences. Nawyn et al., operating within an academic paradigm as they seek to provide data and influence future studies, contribute more to analysis than activism. While both articles appear in academic journals, Scribner’s addresses his proposals to advocates of refugee resettlement on the individual and organizational level who are already engaged in education and resettlement efforts. Although Nawyn et al. and Scribner’s articles are from different currents of discourse, both present proposals intended to change how their respective audiences conceive of an issue related to resettlement – social capital’s effect on linguistic isolation for Nawyn et al. and the Trump administration’s CoC-adjacent restrictions on resettlement for Scribner. For the authors of both articles, one’s understanding is a critical step in addressing the problems they describe.

Consistent with the policy-focused current of resettlement discourse, Brown and Scribner in their 2014 piece identify opportunities for reform within federal agencies and programs. Their attention to the mechanisms of resettlement in the U.S. establishes this article as something of an outlier in the conversation, with the other two articles focusing on the people navigating the system rather than the system itself. While Nawyn et al. call for more funding for refugee resettlement on a local level, consistent with Brown and Scribner’s request for more federal funding, Nawyn et al. focus on access rather than funding as the primary barrier to refugees receiving services. Brown and Scribner’s proposal to increase federal assistance to private resettlement agencies and public services indicates that the planning and funding keeping the services operational currently is inadequate. For Nawyn et al., a campaign to make basic resources accessible for refugees without English language skills would be a significant step in addressing the problem of linguistic isolation.

Brown and Scribner’s impersonal approach in calling for more federal funding, improved planning, and better communication and coordination assumes the administration operating the executive branch as well as present members of Congress are amenable to the reforms. Scribner’s 2017 article illustrates how an administration seeking to curb immigration can debilitate the resettlement system. His call for a reevaluation of approaches to advocacy in the 2017 article read like an amendment to the more impersonal, policy-focused approach he took in his 2014 article with Brown. Both of the articles featuring Scribner present more practical reforms than Nawyn et al.’s piece, but in the 2014 article, Brown and Scribner assume receptive conditions that Scribner in 2017 acknowledges one can no longer assume. As a result, Scribner in 2017 proposes change on a local, even individual level, whereas Brown and Scribner present far more ambitious proposals to the overall structure of U.S. resettlement in 2014. 

As the diverse proposals of each featured article demonstrate, while people who write about refugee resettlement in the United States can agree that the system and the people who must navigate it face a host of problems, each writer’s perspective determines which of those problems they identify as requiring immediate attention and reform. Our project also identifies a problem and proposes a response, although our approach may not fit into one of the three currents of discourse that the three selected articles exemplify. In her proposal for our project, Annelise Claire claims that writers covering refugee narratives “tend to stress the chaos and destruction of war and the trauma of flight” while the “epilogue” of “resettling, rebuilding, picking up lives where they were left off” is too often left unnarrated (Claire “Refugee Narratives: The Epilogue”). The Epilogues Project is one response to the problem of unnarrated resettlement stories. While our research into policy, academic framings, and activism has informed our approach – and each of these facets have influenced our selected interview questions – our primary focus is working with our participants to present their stories in their words on their terms rather than reducing their experiences to evidence for a claim or argument. Through the project we will build a model for narrating resettlement, emphasizing that the events of a refugee’s experience worth telling do not end with their first day in a new home country. 

Works Cited

Brown, Anastasia, and Todd Scribner. “Unfulfilled Promises, Future Possibilities: The Refugee Resettlement System in the United States.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 2, no. 2, June 2014, pp. 101–20. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/233150241400200203.

Claire, Annelise. “Refugee Narratives: The Epilogue.” digitaldesign.annelise claire.com, https://digitaldesign.anneliseclaire.com/project-proposal/refugee-narratives-the-epilogue/. Accessed 24 March 2020.

Nawyn, Stephanie J., et al. “Linguistic Isolation, Social Capital, and Immigrant Belonging:” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 41, no. 3, Jan. 2012. pp. 255-82. journals.sagepub.com, doi:10.1177/0891241611433623.

Scribner, Todd. “You Are Not Welcome Here Anymore: Restoring Support for Refugee Resettlement in the Age of Trump.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 5, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 263–84. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/233150241700500203.

Pledged – A. C., S. B., G. P. 

Map of the critical conversation between ourselves and the scholars covered in the literature review.

Secondary Source Reports

I. Source

Nawyn, Stephanie J., et al. “Linguistic Isolation, Social Capital, and Immigrant Belonging:” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 41, no. 3, Jan. 2012. pp. 255-82. journals.sagepub.com, doi:10.1177/0891241611433623.

II. Thesis

“While migration scholars have focused predominantly on how linguistic social capital can be exchanged for other forms of capital… we argue that it is also important to recognize the noneconomic value of linguistic social capital. By examining the experiences of linguistically isolated immigrants, we highlight how language serves as a source of social capital that shapes noneconomic outcomes” (Nawyn et al. 256).

The experiences of linguistically isolated refugees demonstrate that language skills influence aspects of social capital other than economic factors, including access to resources and feeling confident and respected in one’s community.

III. Description and analysis of the structure of the article 

The authors outline their thesis that, in contrast to previous sociological studies about language skills and social capital, researchers should see that lack of English proficiency for refugees pose more problems than simply economic ones. Effects such as “(1) feeling respected and valued in their receiving communities and (2) developing social ties in those communities that could provide them with essential information” are examples of noneconomic elements of social integration that language skills can provide in an immigrant community (Nawyn et al. 256). The authors summarize the efforts of previous theorists to define social capital before providing their own definition of social capital as “…social networks that have the potential to provide either material or nonmaterial resources (including achieving physical and mental health, a sense of personal safety, and feeling integrated into a community and valued by others in that community)” (257). Next, they identify that scholars studying immigration have neglected to pay adequate attention to “the relationship between language skills and feelings of belonging or exclusion for immigrants and refugees,” and present their research conducted with 36 recently resettled Burundian and Burmese refugees in Michigan, explaining how lack of social capital exacerbates refugees’ linguistic isolation (257). On the individual level, the refugees were more concerned about how their lack of proficiency in English limited their access to basic information than they were concerned about how it limited employment opportunities. The authors found that the Burmese refugees found opportunities through their churches to develop weak ties with other immigrants who had been settled in the U.S. for a longer time, while the Burundian refugees lived in communities “with only a few bilingual elites and no members who had been in the United States more than a year,” meaning fewer ties and less social capital (273).

The authors conclude that their data shows “a lack of linguistic social capital within receiving and immigrant communities introduces uncertainty in their lives that itself is a source of anxiety,” particularly as the prevalence of linguistic isolation in one’s community compounds that individual’s isolation (275). They conclude with three implications from their study. First, policy must change to spread more information concerning the available resources for immigrants in the United States. Second, the authors argue that there must be a clear definition of social capital within sociological research. The third and final implication of their research is that social capital theory is too often embedded in rational choice theory and reductive neoliberal models. To reduce refugee experiences to that of individuals navigating a market of economic assets is to promote an incomplete view endemic to the neoliberal model.

IV. Rhetorical Strategies

Nawyn et al. repeat their conclusion throughout the article without stating it in the same words, reinforcing their main points naturally. The authors also use anecdotes effectively, devoting a section of the article to include examples from interview participants, illustrating their findings from the interviews. Finally, the authors provide an overview of the research participants’ immigration histories in the “Migration Histories” section, outlining the differing circumstances Burundian and Burmese refugees faced abroad and in the United States. They demonstrate how to examine each refugee’s story with enough generality to understand their circumstances for migration without assuming all faced similar challenges. 

Work Cited

Nawyn, Stephanie J., et al. “Linguistic Isolation, Social Capital, and Immigrant Belonging:” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 41, no. 3, Jan. 2012. pp. 255-82. journals.sagepub.com, doi:10.1177/0891241611433623.

Pledged – G.P.

Sam Browning

Brown, Anastasia, and Todd Scribner. “Unfulfilled Promises, Future Possibilities: The Refugee Resettlement System in the United States.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 2, no. 2, June 2014, pp. 101–20. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/233150241400200203.

Thesis:

“This paper argues for specific reforms that would allow the resettlement system to live up to its unfulfilled promise and that would realign it with the vision set forth in the Refugee Act of 1980. Beginning in the post-World War II period, federal refugee resettlement programs became increasingly intertwined with the work of nongovernmental, humanitarian agencies. The passage of the Refugee Act signified a high point in this progression and delineated the roles and responsibilities of the federal government and private organizations in the resettlement process. At the core of the Act is the goal of helping refugees become self-sufficient. However, self-sufficiency has become narrowly defined and, in any event, the system has failed to provide the necessary resources to further this objective. In addition, breakdowns in coordination and information sharing on multiple levels have undermined the program.” (103)

In this thesis, Brown and Scribner state that a public-private relationship in the field of refugee resettlement has existed for a long time, eventually culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980, and while this Act has certainly helped the US resettle millions of refugees, time has made apparent problems which can now be addressed to bolster the American resettlement system.

Structure:

The authors begin by hooking the reader with a staggering statistic estimating roughly 15.4 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2012. They then provide background on refugees and the resettlement process and introduce the history of resettlement and legislature in the US before asserting their thesis. Next, they give a history of refugee policy in the US from World War II to the Refugee Act of 1980 and subsequently dive into the issues they allude to in their thesis: the link between early employment and self-sufficiency, the insufficient role played by federal programs, a lack of proper funding, crowding from secondary migration, and poor coordination and information sharing by the federal government. Brown and Scribner employ many studies and statistics throughout their discussion, then synthesize the data to analyze the issues and propose potential solutions. Finally, they conclude by reminding resettlement agencies that they too must continue to work to improve the system and themselves, as well as restating that the current legislation has undoubtedly been beneficial in addressing the refugee crisis, but there are some problems that demand attention for the creation of a better resettlement system in the US.

Rhetorical Strategies:

Three strategies from Brown and Scribner’s work that I would like to apply to my own are ample use of evidence, clear division of sections, and the creation of an argument and discussion of problems without dismissing the current system. They cite an incredible number of studies, statistics, legislature, and organizations, and it gives their arguments a good deal of credibility. Also, by clearly dividing and titling the sections of their paper, they prepare the reader for what information is coming next, group ideas together for easier retention and better flow, and make it easy to find specific information during subsequent readings. Finally, they also are very fair in their discussion; they build their argument for changes to be made and clearly address problems, but they still acknowledge the good that has come from the current system.

Annelise Claire

Citation:

Scribner, Todd. “You Are Not Welcome Here Anymore: Restoring Support for Refugee 

Resettlement in the Age of Trump.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 5, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 263–84. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/233150241700500203.

Thesis:

“This paper will try to make sense of the restrictionist logic that informs the Trump administration’s worldview, alongside some of the underlying cultural, philosophical, and political conditions that inspired support for Trump by millions of Americans. This paper contends that the Clash of Civilizations (CoC) paradigm is a useful lens to help understand the positions that President Trump has taken with respect to international affairs broadly, and specifically in his approach to migration policy” (265).

Scribner’s piece attempts to explain why so many Americans embrace Trump’s anti-immigrant/anti-refugee rhetoric and where those ideas that inform his words and policy come from. Specifically, Scribner argues that much of Trump’s policies and ideologies come from a belief that cultures (such as Muslim Middle Eastern cultures and Western, Christian cultures) do not and should not mix.

Structure:

Scribner’s piece begins with a compelling hook intended to draw his readers in at once. He opens with an account of Trump’s first attack on Mexican immigrants, beginning his campaign against immigration from certain parts of the world. The hook effectively engages the reader’s attention at once and sets the stage for Scribner’s ensuing argument. Scribner then divides his piece into several sections with headers in order to communicate each section’s purpose (one section for historical background, one section for Trump’s campaign, etc.). Each section adds another layer to his argument with background information, specific examples of Trump’s ideologies and actions throughout his administration, analysis, and so on. The use of historical background especially assists Scribner’s argument as it puts his claims in context. He traces anti-immigration sentiments and refugee resettlement attempts in the US back to World War II and continuing through the Cold War and 9/11 to explain the sentiments and programs that currently exist in the US. In addition, Scribner provides copious footnotes and references throughout the piece to back his claims and to point his readers to additional resources.

Rhetorical Strategies:

I would like to take the above three strategies that I listed – the hook, historical background to support the main argument, and headings to divide the different sections – and use them in this project. The hook, or some engaging statement, would be a great way to open our project on the about page of the website, for example. A page providing historical background will be necessary; we will need to contextualize the current refugee resettlement situation in the US using historical information, and doing so should help our readers understand where they fit into the broader issue of refugee resettlement in the context of US history. Finally, headings help with readability, especially where a lot of text is involved. If we have a lot of information about the history of refugee resettlement, for example, or if our interview transcripts are lengthy, we will need to divide up and categorize our chunks of text to improve readability. 

Literature Review

·

Intergenerational Programming has been shown to enhance the quality of life between different generations around the world. IP has been developed amongst different communities to facilitate intergenerational conversation that then creates benefits for individual people (positive effects on mental health, increase in motivation), relational benefits (escape from isolation, openness to diverse individuals), and communal benefits (reintegration, volunteer work). The several schools of thought involving IP discuss the benefits of IP and the necessity for implementation in a world that is slowly changing in how familial structure and society is created, where families and societies are becoming increasingly divided, and generations are finding fewer platforms where interaction is less natural and less consistent to what it was decades prior. The research and data towards IP appear to have a number of scholars and specialists hesitant to show any definite consensus as to the validity of IP testing and results. 

Daniel R. George argues in “Intergenerational Volunteering and Quality Of Life: Mixed Methods Evaluation Of A Randomized Control Trial Involving Persons With Mild to Moderate Dementia” that intergenerational volunteering will enhance the Quality of Life (QOL) of an individual, primarily reducing stress. An individual’s understanding of their own quality of life, is something that correlates with a person’s sense of self-worth and purpose. Intergenerational programming, and the research outlined in this article, has proven that an increase of an individual’s QOL has larger benefits to their emotional and mental state of being.  An IP case study conducted in Cleveland, Ohio which had participants with mild to moderate dementia interacting with kindergarten students showed that this relationship between the two age groups created drastic improvement in the older participants’ moods. Older participants described their experience of their interactions with younger participants as spontaneous and fun, stating that children don’t judge them on their cognitive incapacities, and thereby alleviating the social pressure they often feel amongst their peers. 

Catherine Ventura- Merkel and Marc Freedman speak about how IP has manifested and the need to implement it within society as a way to keep intergenerational interaction and conversation a part of everyone’s lives. Isolation among generations is widening within the nuclear family structure. The old are starting to fear the young, and this fear manifests within society, as tension and competition start to grow between generations. IP techniques are used to a greater extent within communities and programs dedicated to at risk youth. These programs include seniors helping teenage mothers to raise their children and continue their schooling, working to keep juvenile offenders out of jail, or providing support during incarceration, and retired tradespeople helping to strengthen employment prospects amongst the youth participants. Ventura-Merkel’s argument states that there is a need for IP in a changing world, where nuclear families are now the norm, and natural interaction between different generations is limited, leading to misunderstanding and fear amongst generations of people.

Alan Hatton-Yeo and Clare Batty argue that familial ties and ‘togetherness’ leads to a willingness to provide mutual assistance, which must be facilitated in some form within Intergenerational Programs in order to see results. Hatton-Yeo draws on studies that show a larger divide between generations in ethnically diverse communities, that appear just as prevalent in society as does cultural or ethnic divides within that same society. The importance of program building to insure intergenerational understanding is critiqued throughout this book. The authors discuss how equality, both in ethnic diversity and social and cultural diversity, needs to be more directly addressed when fostering relationships, and not just intergenerational ones. Furthermore, the authors point out that poverty has a more corrosive effect on cohesion than either ethnic or generational difference. This means that working to create relationships amongst different groups of people will be more effective if there is a focus not just intergenerational differences. Groups that work to focus on the importance of all people and the establishment of cohesion, will benefit the most. Specifically, Hatton-Yeo encourages the use of culture and sport to be platforms for promoting meaningful relationships across generations and different backgrounds.

Judith Powell and George Arquitt explain that how older generations are perceived by younger generations affects how they are treated in society. In their research the authors used a case study of 90 children, and found that through IP older adults were more successful than classroom teachers at teaching students. However, the authors admit that the research on IP is limited. They reference Brubaker and Powers (1976), and further explain that instruments of measurement assessing participants within IP are not as vast and unbiased as they would need to make definite conclusions about the quantitative effects and benefits of IP.  

The scholarly sources all show that there are several benefits for all generations when participating in Intergenerational Programming and volunteering. George discusses the increase in QOL within the older generation, as well as an increase in feelings of acceptance, purpose, and enthusiasm in participation and social interaction. Ventura-Merkel similarly talks about the benefits that IP has on the older generations, as old folks appear to be moving further into isolation. Ventura-Merkel also adheres to the notion that, historically, integration of generations was more naturally routed. However, evolving familial structures and a changing modern world, has made it more necessary for federally funded and unique projects for IP to be established. Hatton-Yeo, similar to George, speaks on the importance of ‘togetherness’ and a need to feel accepted across all generations. However, Hatton-Yeo speaks about these mindsets more broadly, in terms of all people spanning from ethnically, culturally, socially, and economically diverse groups. People’s sense of community and belonging and the belief that those that surround you care and believe that you care for them is critical to social capital and ‘togetherness’. Powell speaks on the nuclear family, similar to Ventura-Merkel and a changing environment where generations don’t interact constantly or naturally as they once did. Powell examined a study conducted in 1920, where 50% of all families in Massachusetts had at least one other adult living with the family in addition to the parents. Presently, this figure is 3.5%. Powell also discusses the need to disregard pre-existing views, assumptions, and stereotypes  about different generations, similar to what Hatton-Yeo spoke about. Based on the research conducted by the authors, IP has a positive effect on negative stereotypes that the older generation and younger generations have about each other. Hatton-Yeo states that negative age-related stereotypes only perpetuate when individuals are not interacting with separate generations from themselves. However, there appears to be consensus amongst the entire group of scholars that more research still needs to be conducted, where quantitative analysis can be done and there can be clear, hard evidence to determine what kinds of IP best work for particular groups of people and amongst the different generations. 

Our project will work in conversation with scholarship, in order to establish a platform that provides individuals the knowledge that is out there currently, to educate individuals about the benefits of IP and to consider possible ways to integrate certain activities or programs into your routine and lifestyle. Because our work originally stemmed from producing content focused on an already established program at Davidson College, Adopt-a-Grandfriend, we wanted to educate primarily Davidson students and the Davidson community on ways to get involved. Because circumstances have changed, our focus will further be on how scholarship of IP can benefit the greater community where Davidson students may reside presently. Our argument will be that there are benefits for IP for all generations that get involved. Learning to facilitate relationships with older generations will help individuals with depression, a lack of motivation, and self-isolation. Older generations interacting with younger generations will see the effects that youthful energy will have on their quality of life, the sense of importance and purpose, and an atmosphere of acceptance, warmth and amusement. 

Ballroom Map

SSRs

George, Daniel R. “Intergenerational Volunteering and Quality of Life: Mixed Methods Evaluation of a Randomized Control Trial Involving Persons with Mild to Moderate Dementia.” Quality of Life Research, vol. 20, no. 7, 2011, pp. 987–95. JSTOR.

Thesis: “Mixed methods evaluation demonstrated that intergenerational volunteering might enhance quality of life through several key pathways, most significantly reduced stress” (987).
Restatement: Intergenerational volunteering is proven to have positive effects on an individual’s quality of life, particularly in reducing stress.

Structure: The structure of this article is similar to how a lab or field work research is structured, where the author divides his work and analysis into separate categories of the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. In the piece prior to the research portion, there is an abstract, and a section that highlights keywords and uncommon abbreviations that are throughout the piece, which provides easy referencing. George spends the majority of his time describing the experience that participants had during this project, and what was taken from this project personally by the participants involved. Though lab formatted, George dives into the relationships formulated and the anecdotal evidence that he collects from open and honest conversations with the participants. The conclusion is clear and concise, though acknowledging that the use of randomized control groups and other factors of the experiment are hard to contextualize statistical results,  providing a weaker analysis on the quantitative and qualitative results.  

Rhetorical Structure:

  1. I like in George’s piece, he uses graphs to portray information in a different way than his essay structure report. It is beneficial to see certain aspects in a different format, that way the viewer can see it in a new way.
  2. I also admire the way the report is structured, in that abbreviations and keywords are listed prior to the body of the piece. This helps the reader understand what to look out for and to identify terms that are significant.
  3. I enjoy the way the author uses anecdotes to incorporate into the results portion of the report. Participants are seen being quoted in the text, alongside evidence he has gathered from the case studies, which allows for the audience to feel connected and present in that moment. Examples can be found on Page 992.

Hatton-Yeo, Alan, and Clare Batty. “Evaluating the Contribution of Intergenerational Practice to Achieving Social Cohesion.” Promoting Social Cohesion, edited by Peter Ratcliffe and Ines Newman, 1st ed., Bristol University Press, 2011, pp. 243–58. JSTOR, JSTOR, doi:10.2307/j.ctt9qgw9s.18.

Thesis: “A wide range of practical national and international case studies is included to illustrate and to develop some of the main points, particularly around the engagement of IP with the ‘harder conversations’ of cohesion – such as those concerning equality and poverty” (243). 
Restatement: Case studies on IP have been shown to be a departure point for many problems related to societal and cultural cohesion amongst different groups of people, and in particular to address equality and poverty more generally.  

Structure: Hatton-Yeo begins by putting intergenerational practice within the context of social policies aimed to establish social cohesion. The author goes on to talk about intergenerational programming and intergenerational solidarity more broadly, speaking on the complexities and the various representations of intergenerational relationships that surrounds us. A push for understanding intergenerational solidarity more broadly and in less finite terms is further proposed as a departure into an analysis of social cohesion. Evidence is shown throughout the chapter, to highlight the different ways that IP has been woven into government funded systems throughout the world. Hatton-Yeo then speaks on the development of IP historically, highlighting a shift in society where Intergenerational Programs became more prevalent as a way to address two increasingly vulnerable populations: young people and older adults. In order to prove this, he shares pieces of evidence related to different programs that best represent the rising needs of two groups of people. He concludes by talking about the different forms of IP and the benefits they offer, while also acknowledging that individual programs and individual assessments for the most part are not nearly as extensive as they need to be, and work for exploring issues of intergenerational solidarity on a broader base needs to be highlighted.

Rhetorical Structure:

  1. I like the use of bullet points to separate the paragraphs. It helps to see what points are being made and what the author chooses to highlight, which can be viewed on Pages 247 and 249.  
  2. I appreciate how within these bullet point sections, the author outlines clear aims for the project. An example of this is when the article states, “The project took a mentoring approach that had three core aims: to raise the achievement and aspiration of pupils who were at risk of failure; to promote the sense of identity and value of older people; to connect local schools to the community and promote the understanding of the importance of education” (252).
  3. I enjoy the way the author concludes by putting IP within the greater context of the world and the problems that we face more broadly, as it portrays IP as something truly significant and important to everyone. It states, “IP is a necessary participant in the ‘harder conversations’ that are central to community and social cohesion

Powell, Judith A., and George E. Arquitt. “Getting the Generations Back Together: A Rationale for Development of Community Based Intergenerational Interaction Programs.” The Family Coordinator, vol. 27, no. 4, 1978, pp. 421–26. JSTOR, JSTOR, doi:10.2307/583446

Thesis: “The purpose of this paper is to (a) summarize briefly the relevant literature’, including results of our own recently completed studies on intergenerational interaction effects, and (b) present programming suggestions to aid those who work with families to identify resources and coordinate both formal and informal aging-youth-child networks in local communities to provide for intergenerational experience and to serve as an arena for research on the effects of intergenerational programming on age stereotypes and attitudinal change” (422). 
Restatement: In this essay, summaries of the various relevant literature is highlighted to indicate what information is out there regarding intergenerational programming, as well as spotlights various institutions and resources throughout the local communities in order to acknowledge intergenerational experiences established, and for the consideration that these places can be basis for further research in the benefits of Intergenerational programming and a communities changing perceptions on age-related stereotypes.

Structure: Powell’s hook is a statistic collected in Massachusetts, where 50% of all families in the 1920’s had at least one other adult living with the family in addition to the parents, which has dropped radically to 3.5% for the present day. The Literature review that she creates is separated into sections that describe the attitudes toward older adults among children and youth, the attitudes toward youth among older adults, and the effects of intergenerational interaction on attitudes. This perfectly considers the problems, and in turn exposes how society has allowed for these stereotypes to exist against other generations. She then finishes by touching upon the author’s own related research, what she intends to do with that research to further progress. She concludes by touching upon the problems faced when collecting data, responding to limitations identified by Brubaker and Powers’ conversation on the instruments used for Intergenerational research have measured knowledge about old age, and most samples have been either small or samples of convenience. She does point out that some programs can resist falling into those ways and assessing intergenerational communication and structures for the better.  

Rhetorical Strategies:

  1. I like how the author separates the literature review into sections that include attitudes towards older adults among children and youth, attitudes towards youth among older adults, and the effects of intergenerational interaction on attitudes. This structure flows well and allows for readers to easily follow the progression of cause and effect.
  2. I like the use of the word “we” as the author summarizes her points and speaks on behalf of her own work administered. It brings the author directly into conversation with the viewer and feels more immediate than just simply reading with no first-person narrative involved.
  3. I appreciate the footnotes that the author uses to further describe some of the groups involved in IP programs. This really helps contextualize everything, however it proves to be separate for those that want to read more on the subject.

Ventura-Merkel, Catherine, and Marc Freedman. “Helping At-Risk Youth through Intergenerational Programming.” Children Today, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 1988, pp. 10–13.

Thesis: The allure of evidence emerging from the field, the existence of these programs, the steady growth of the elderly population in this country, and the profound and continuing needs of the disadvantaged young people all point to the wisdom of moving forward to better understand and develop more intergenerational programs for helping at-risk youth. 
Restatement: Research has shown that intergenerational programming improves the livelihood of at-risk youth.  New evidence has emerged that due to a growing elderly population, and the evolving needs of disadvantaged youth, there has been success with already existing programs. 

Structure: This article first talks about a change in familial structure, and the evolving structures in America that has resulted in a widening separation of age-groups and the establishment of age-specific institutions. She then leads to intergenerational programs as a way to resolve these consequences, as isolation among generations lead to many problems within society. The article then leads into a specific group of people, at-risk youth, and  describes several programs that have helped them, based on interaction between older generations of people. It concludes by listing Intergenerational Programs specific for at-risk youth, each having the address and a short blurb on what the program does and a description of the participants involved. 

Rhetorical Strategies:

  1. I appreciate how the author uses sentence structure and repetition to create drama and a sense of urgency to the research that she’s describing. She states, “Despite the societal changes affecting family structure and stability, despite the fast growing number of retired older Americans, despite the increase number of children and youth living in poverty, few efforts were launched to address the cross -generational consequences of these changes or to explore the potential benefits of such interaction for the individuals, institutions, and communities involved (11).
  2. I value how the article ends with a list of at-risk youth specific intergenerational programs, that are written concisely and with information only on the location, purpose of the program, and what kind of participants they work with.
  3. I think this article does a great job at setting the stage, speaking first on what the familial structure used to be like, what it has become, and how that has effected the youth in society. This then leads the conversation into prevention and initiatives to help with at-risk youths, which easily moves into intergenerational programming as its focus.  

PLEDGE: NS

Literature Review

·

Intergenerational Mental Health, Subtopic: Elderly Mental Health

Despite the saying that “age is just a number,” the negative outlook on aging still prevails as a conventional idea in society. Stereotypes of growing old include being grouchy and having deteriorating health and mobility issues that result in being unproductive members of society. Aging is a topic that most do not like to think about. However, an increasing elderly population has led to a growing concern for geriatric care that must be addressed (Murayama et al. 306). Mental health plays a large role in this subject. One reality of aging is change and loss, which can affect the mental health of those left behind. As a society, we must further examine these stereotypes about aging, as many studies reveal a different way to think about this phenomenon. Understanding the mental health trends of the elderly population will improve social policy and programming being developed to serve an aging society.

The first article is by psychologist Becca Levy, whose longitudinal study seeks to unveil the underlying cause of negative self-perceptions related to aging. Levy hypothesizes that “rigidity would predict negative aging stereotypes in older individuals” (Levy 560). Defined by Frenkel-Brunswik, rigidity is an “intolerance to ambiguity,” or an unwillingness to change one’s mindset (Levy 560). In this study, rigidity pertains to the stereotypes applied to oneself about aging. Levy’s results suggest that “older individuals with more rigidity had significantly more negative aging stereotypes and negative aging self-perceptions over time” (Levy 559). Essentially, an individual’s perception of aging reveals a self-fulfilling prophecy for their own aging. On one hand, “findings suggest that having more flexibility can benefit older individuals’ self views” (Levy 559). On the other, past studies have shown that negative aging self-perceptions predict lesser functional health in individuals (Levy 561). One reason for this effect may be because “younger people assimilate negative aging stereotypes to the same extent to which they will hold these stereotypes in old age” (Levy 560). People tend to increase rigidity as they age. Therefore, I speculate that those who learn negative aging stereotypes in their formative years will continue this mindset into their adult life.

Psychologists Tomás et al. build upon Levy’s idea that negative self-perceptions related to aging can increase over time, as well as lead to deterioration of health. The second study attempts to “formulate an association between loneliness and satisfaction with life and loneliness and depression” in Spanish people (Tomás et al. 1225). Loneliness is “recognized as an important and serious health problem” (Tomás et al. 1226). Tomás et al. addressed that loneliness is one of the negative stereotypes of aging (Tomás et al. 1226). In reality, loneliness is dependent on social factors, such as being widowed or having a small social network, death of parents, and poor health, which happen to be common situations of elderly people (Tomás et al. 1226). Aging stereotypes do not address the “resilience of older adults and their ability to adapt themselves to this new social reality” (Tomás et al. 1226). This point relates to Levy’s study, which showed that adults who have a flexible outlook on aging have a more positive outlook at older ages (Levy). Study results deepened the association between depression and wellbeing in relation to loneliness and social support. There was a negative association between loneliness and satisfaction with life, and a positive association between loneliness and depression (Tomás et al. 1231). Overall, the study suggested that the populations most vulnerable to experiencing loneliness are women, non-married people, older adults who live alone, those who do not participate in social activities and ones with poor health (Tomás et al. 1231). Which leads me to wonder, what do these results suggest about the populations of people that communities most need to reach out to?

The third article by Murayama et al. aims to “clarify the effect of intergenerational program[ming] on elderly [peoples’] symptoms of depressive mood and in improving their sense of coherence (SOC), which is an element for successful coping with stressors” (Murayama et al. 306). Intergenerational programming (IGP) is “a form of human service that involves ongoing and organized interaction between members of younger and older age groups for the benefit of all participants” (Murayama et al. 306). Past studies have shown that IGP increases SOC and decreases depressive mood. Murayama, et. al. examined this impact on elderly people who read picture books to children at school through an IGP called REPRINTS (306). Researchers concluded that IGPs may be key to improving health among elderly people (Murayama et al. 306). This article is in conversation with Tomás et al., as IGP may be a solution to loneliness in vulnerable populations. The reason for this connection is because IGPs showed to decrease the risk of social isolation and loneliness due to the greater sense of meaningfulness (Murayama et al. 306). An important factor of this study was that the REPRINTS IGP was consistent and long-term, which Murayama et al. say is essential for IGP success (312). A large roadblock in the growth of IGP is that it is difficult to establish and maintain because of people’s busy schedules and many commitments.

While each article focuses on a unique aspect of elderly mental health, all three come to a consensus. There is a need to expand upon existing community support for the aging and elderly population. Levy prescribes a need for some sort of intervention that reduces negative aging self-perception (567). Tomás et al. suggest that Social intervention programs be developed to promote social support and positive relationships (1231-1232). The study by Murayama et al. showed that IGP can strengthen elderly people’s ties with the rest of the community, making it a better place (312). Our Intergenerational Mental Health project will work toward applying the concepts outlined in these articles. In an effort to encourage our audience to seek out and incorporate IGP into their lives, we seek to compile information on IGPs and gather narratives from college-aged students who have experience with IGP. Levy suggests that intervention should target younger individuals to change the prevailing negative stereotypes about aging, as “old age is not the source of the negative aging stereotypes,” but rather, rigidity and stereotypes being presented to people at a younger age (Levy 568). Research has shown that IGP changes both generations’ perspectives on one another. While difficult to quantitatively measure, we argue that this type of social interaction will benefit both participating parties. All in all, collaboration is essential for a successful IGP, so we hope to encourage the development of community across generations by working together.

Word Count: 1090

Works Cited

Levy, Becca R. “Rigidity as a Predictor of Older Person’s Aging Stereotypes and Aging Self Perceptions.” Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 36, no. 4, 2008, pp. 559–70. ProQuest, doi:DOI:10.2224/sbp.2008.36.4.559.

Murayama, Yoh, et al. “The Effect of Intergenerational Programs on the Mental Health of Elderly Adults.” Aging and Mental Health, vol. 19, no. 4, July 2014, pp. 306–14. EBSCOhost, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2014.933309.

Tomás, Jose M., et al. “Loneliness and Social Support: Differential Predictive Power on Depression and Satisfaction in Senior Citizens.” Wiley: Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 47, no. 5, Apr. 2019, pp. 1225–34. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/jcop.22184.

Metaphorical Conference Ballroom

three different fields of conversation psychology, gerontology and intergenerational programming arguments made about intergenerational mental health
Describing the conversation that happens between the sources in my literature review

Secondary Source Reports

I. Levy, Becca R. “Rigidity as a Predictor of Older Person’s Aging Stereotypes and Aging Self Perceptions.” Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 36, no. 4, 2008, pp. 559–70. ProQuest, doi:DOI:10.2224/sbp.2008.36.4.559.

II a). “Rigidity would predict negative aging stereotypes in older individuals” (Levy 560).
b). Older adults who hold unchanging, negative ideas about aging will also present these same stereotypes in their own lives.

III. Levy builds upon the theory of rigidity and the self-fulfilling prophecy idea. She frames her idea on the stigmatization of individuals, and how the stigmatized individuals themselves may take up these negative stereotypes, which, in doing so, allows for proliferation. Most of her background evidence is listed in the introduction, which provides a background on her past, related studies as a psychologist and social gerontologist. Levy performs a longitudinal study by interviewing 50+-year-old individuals over the course of 20 years, in 6 intervals. She found that her hypothesis was correct. She predicts that these older adults did not start believing these stereotypes as they aged, but rather, learned them when they were younger. Therefore, she thinks that younger individuals should be targeted in trying to change the negative stereotypes that we, as a larger society, tend to learn about aging.

IV. 1. Framing in a story: The introduction setup is easy to follow. Focusing on telling a story for the project, maybe even through the use of digital tools such as Storymap, will aid accessibility.
2. Levy explains the two main “premises” of her argument. This wording stood out to me, as I thought it made her study sound very logical and well thought out. Maybe explaining our premises in making arguments in our project will do the same for us.
3. In the discussion section, Levy makes conclusions and predictions. In doing so, she refers back to prior research that is now applicable to her study results. I thought this was insightful.

I. Murayama, Yoh, et al. “The Effect of Intergenerational Programs on the Mental Health of Elderly Adults.” Aging and Mental Health, vol. 19, no. 4, July 2014, pp. 306–14. EBSCOhost, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2014.933309.

II a). “Clarify the effect of intergenerational program[ming] on elderly [peoples’] symptoms of depressive mood and in improving their sense of coherence (SOC), which is an element for successful coping with stressors” (Murayama et al. 306).
b). It has already been established that there is a connection between intergenerational programming (IGP) and benefits for elderly people. In this study, Murayama et al. seeks to provide further evidence between this relationship, specifically in terms of the effect on depressive mood and sense of coherence.

III. Murayama et al. begins by discussing the rapidly increasing elderly population in Japan, which is where this study takes place. Next, it defines IGP, which is necessary to understand the general idea and reasoning for why it is done. Murayama et al. also includes some background info on the known benefits for IGP, which shows why they want to make more concrete connections. After describing the study population, Murayama et al. outline the results in figure and table form. It is helpful to go to these diagrams in order to quickly understand the gist of the paper, that IGPs showed to decrease the risk of social isolation and loneliness due to the greater sense of meaningfulness. In the end, the researchers include discussion on the specific factors that make the REPRINTS IGP successful, which can help readers understand some key elements in a successful IGP. They state this is necessary to know, as IGP development has been slow despite its benefits due to challenges in planning.

IV. 1. Use of “IGP” to abbreviate intergenerational programming, helpful to cut down on bulky-ness of repeated use of the same phrase.
2. Most paper abstracts summarize the paper in one block paragraph. This one laid it out nicely by summarizing each section of the paper separately, making it easier to grasp the main ideas of the study.
3. Collaboration: Murayama et al. emphasize that collaboration between many groups is important and necessary for a successful IGP. We want to use this concept of collaboration as well, framing its importance in our project.

I. Tomás, Jose M., et al. “Loneliness and Social Support: Differential Predictive Power on Depression and Satisfaction in Senior Citizens.” Wiley: Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 47, no. 5, Apr. 2019, pp. 1225–34. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/jcop.22184.

II a). “Formulate an association between loneliness and satisfaction with life and loneliness and depression” (Tomás et al. 1225).
b). Tomás et al. seek to find a quantitative and/or qualitative association between loneliness in comparison to satisfaction with life and depression.

III. Tomás et al. frame their study with the topic of loneliness among older people as being an issue in terms of mental health. This topic is important, as it can help inform healthcare and social policies. They also discussed the causes of loneliness and age groups most affected by this feeling, which was 80+-year-olds. Past studies showed that older adults are resilient to change. The researchers utilized three different questionnaires that determine loneliness in individuals. The results deepened the association between depression and wellbeing in relation to loneliness and social support. The study concluded that certain populations are vulnerable to loneliness.

IV. 1. Elderly vs. older adult terminology: “Older adult” is more appropriate to use when talking about people of 50+ years old. This group does not count as “elderly,” but significantly older compared to college-age adults. “Elderly” can be used to describe people 80+ years old.
2. Social support was a key term in this paper, which I think also relates to our project and would be good to include.
3. Tomás et al. incorporate a separate section to discuss the implications of their findings, which allows for critical thinking of the results and their implications.

PLEDGED: CME

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