Jan Crawford of NOW moderates a workshop in sexism in the media at the "Sexism in the Schools" conference

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

"Sexism in the Schools" conference at P.S. 41 about sex biases in high schools

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Flyer at Sexism in the Schools Conference

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Anti-sexism demonstration against Olivetti NOW event

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Sexism and Imperialism in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and Blitzstein's Regina: A Performance Study

This dissertation project comprises three major operatic performances and an accompanying document; a performance study which surveys aspects of sexism and imperialism as represented in three operas written over the last three centuries by examining the implications of prejudice through research as well as through performances of the major roles found in the operas. Mr. Eversole performed the role of Sharpless in the 2014 Castleton Festival production of Madama Butterfly (music by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa), conducted by Bradley Moore. In 2015, Mr. Eversole sang the title role in four performances of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni with the Maryland Opera Studio at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, conducted by Craig Kier. Also as part of the Maryland Opera Studio 2015-16 season, Mr. Eversole appeared as Oscar Hubbard in four performances of Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes. These performances were also conducted by Craig Kier. The accompanying research document discusses significant issues of cultural, geographical, and sexual hegemony as they relate to each opera. It examines the plots and characters of the operas from a postcolonial and feminist perspective, and takes a moral stance against imperialism, sexism, domestic abuse, and in general, the exploitation of women and of the colonized by the socially privileged and powerful. Recordings of all three operas can be accessed at the University of Maryland Hornbake Library. They are: Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (the role of Sharpless) July 20, 2014, Castleton Festival production, Bradley Moore, Conductor Castleton, Virginia Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (title role) November 22nd, 2015, Maryland Opera Studio, Craig Kier, Conductor Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, UMD Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, (Oscar Hubbard) April 8th, 8016, Maryland Opera Studio, Craig Kier, Conductor Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, UMD

Demographic category membership and leadership in small groups : a social identity analysis

Developing the social identity theory of leadership (e.g., [Hogg, M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 184–200]), an experiment (N=257) tested the hypothesis that as group members identify more strongly with their group (salience) their evaluations of leadership effectiveness become more strongly influenced by the extent to which their demographic stereotype-based impressions of their leader match the norm of the group (prototypicality). Participants, with more or less traditional gender attitudes (orientation), were members, under high or low group salience conditions (salience), of non-interactive laboratory groups that had “instrumental” or “expressive” group norms (norm), and a male or female leader (leader gender). As predicted, these four variables interacted significantly to affect perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Reconfiguration of the eight conditions formed by orientation, norm and leader gender produced a single prototypicality variable. Irrespective of participant gender, prototypical leaders were considered more effective in high then low salience groups, and in high salience groups prototypical leaders were more effective than less prototypical leaders. Alternative explanations based on status characteristics and role incongruity theory do not account well for the findings. Implications of these results for the glass ceiling effect and for a wider social identity analysis of the impact of demographic group membership on leadership in small groups are discussed.

Crime, justice, and inequality : Oh Canada, where art thou?

Since Canada’s colonial beginnings, it has become increasingly riddled with classism, racism,sexism, and other damaging outcomes of structured social inequality. In 2006, however,many types of social injustice were turbo‐charged under the federal leadership of the Harper government. For example, a recent southern Ontario study shows that less than half of working people between the ages of 25 and 65 have full‐time jobs with benefits. The main objective of this paper is to critique the dominant Canadian political economic order and the pain and suffering it has caused for millions of people. Informed by left realism and other progressive ways of knowing, I also suggest some ways of turning the tide.

Book Review : "The Media Gaze: Representations of Diversities in Canada by Augie Fleras". Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2011.

The Media Gaze effectively shatters the assumption that Canada, in all its political correctness, is a cultural mosaic free of discrimination and prejudice. While great strides have been made to reduce blatant racism and sexism in Canadian media, Fleras illustrates how discriminatory and oppressive discourses are still very present in news, television, and film.He brings to light the structural, institutional, and practice-oriented means by which the media is systemically biased toward privileging mainstream audiences while misrepresenting minority groups in the public eye...

Social Media and Everyday Politics

From selfies and memes to hashtags and parodies, social media are used for mundane and personal expressions of political commentary, engagement, and participation. The coverage of politics reflects the social mediation of everyday life, where individual experiences and thoughts are documented and shared online. In Social Media and Everyday Politics, Tim Highfield examines political talk as everyday occurrences on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Tumblr, Instagram, and more. He considers the personal and the political, the serious and the silly, and the everyday within the extraordinary, as politics arises from seemingly banal and irreverent topics. The analysis features international examples and evolving practices, from French blogs to Vines from Australia, via the Arab Spring, Occupy, #jesuischarlie, Eurovision, #blacklivesmatter, Everyday Sexism, and #illridewithyou. This timely book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in media and communications, internet studies, and political science, as well as general readers keen to understand our contemporary media and political contexts.

'The ones with the beastly lives': Gender and textuality in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark

Anna Morgan, the central character of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, has previously been read as a victim of her own inability to fashion some form of life for herself.1 It is possible, however, to suggest an alternative to such character-based readings and instead examine the systems of oppression which work to ensure that Anna remains an excluded, marginalized subject. Rather than personal failings, it is Anna's gender and colonial status which prevent her from participating fully in the dominant social and economic order of Voyage in the Dark. Anna is textually constrained on three levels, which may be defined as economic, colonialist, and narrative. Imbricated within these is the question of gender, which functions to place Anna in a position of double-exclusion within the text. These forms of exclusion function at the levels of discourse and narrative; I would argue that Anna's position is not, therefore, a product of realist character 'flaws' but rather that her discursive placement within the novel offers insight into the ways in which colonialism and sexism function in terms of textuality.

Romantic terrorism? Survivor narratives of psychological and emotional tactics of domestic violence

This paper draws on the theoretical arguments outlined in Hayes (2014) to frame critical analyses of two real life domestic violence narratives. The authors are both academic criminologists and victims/survivors of domestic violence, but within differing contexts – one a conventional heterosexual relationship, the other a female same-sex relationship. Their experiences are intertwined in an extensive collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis that spans seven years of working and socialising together, in which each provided a sounding board and support for the other. The analysis therefore documents two personal journeys. The academic and theoretical are intertwined with the personal and subjective to elicit an evocative and yet empirically validated study. The theoretical underpinnings of romantic love distortion, misogyny and sexism are used to frame these experiences of domestic violence and the differing sexualities of the authors provide a rich context for exploring the ways in which domestic violence victimisation experiences are impacted by gender, sexuality, and heteronormative discourses of love, sex and relationships.

Genome-wide meta-analysis of common variant differences between men and women

The male-to-female sex ratio at birth is constant across world populations with an average of 1.06 (106 male to 100 female live births) for populations of European descent. The sex ratio is considered to be affected by numerous biological and environmental factors and to have a heritable component. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of common allele modest effects at autosomal and chromosome X variants that could explain the observed sex ratio at birth. We conducted a large-scale genome-wide association scan (GWAS) meta-analysis across 51 studies, comprising overall 114 863 individuals (61 094 women and 53 769 men) of European ancestry and 2 623 828 common (minor allele frequency >0.05) single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Allele frequencies were compared between men and women for directly-typed and imputed variants within each study. Forward-time simulations for unlinked, neutral, autosomal, common loci were performed under the demographic model for European populations with a fixed sex ratio and a random mating scheme to assess the probability of detecting significant allele frequency differences. We do not detect any genome-wide significant (P < 5 x 10(-8)) common SNP differences between men and women in this well-powered meta-analysis. The simulated data provided results entirely consistent with these findings. This large-scale investigation across ~115 000 individuals shows no detectable contribution from common genetic variants to the observed skew in the sex ratio. The absence of sex-specific differences is useful in guiding genetic association study design, for example when using mixed controls for sex-biased traits.

Theatre, networked performance, and notions of ‘democratised’ spectatorship

The potential to cultivate new relationships with spectators has long been cited as a primary motivator for those using digital technologies to construct networked or telematics performances or para-performance encounters in which performers and spectators come together in virtual – or at least virtually augmented – spaces and places. Today, with Web 2.0 technologies such as social media platforms becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and increasingly easy to use, more and more theatre makers are developing digitally mediated relationships with spectators. Sometimes for the purpose of an aesthetic encounter, sometimes for critical encounter, or sometimes as part of an audience politicisation, development or engagement agenda. Sometimes because this is genuinely an interest, and sometimes because spectators or funding bodies expect at least some engagement via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. In this paper, I examine peculiarities and paradoxes emerging in some of these efforts to engage spectators via networked performance or para-performance encounters. I use examples ranging from theatre, to performance art, to political activism – from ‘cyberformaces’ on Helen Varley Jamieson’s Upstage Avatar Performance Platform, to Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension installation where spectators around the world could use a webcam in a chat room to target him with paintballs while he was in residence in a living room set up in a gallery for a week, as a comment on use of drone technology in war, to Liz Crow’s Bedding Out where she invited people to physically and virtually join her in her bedroom to discuss the impact of an anti-disabled austerity politics emerging in her country, to Dislife’s use of holograms of disabled people popping up in disabled parking spaces when able bodied drivers attempted to pull into them, amongst others. I note the frequency with which these performance practices deploy discourses of democratisation, participation, power and agency to argue that these technologies assist in positioning spectators as co-creators actively engaged in the evolution of a performance (and, in politicised pieces that point to racism, sexism, or ableism, pushing spectators to reflect on their agency in that dramatic or daily-cum-dramatic performance of prejudice). I investigate how a range of issues – from the scenographic challenges in deploying networked technologies for both participant and bystander audiences others have already noted, to the siloisation of aesthetic, critical and audience activation activities on networked technologies, to conventionalised dramaturgies of response informed by power, politics and impression management that play out in online as much as offline performances, to the high personal, social and professional stakes involved in participating in a form where spectators responses are almost always documented, recorded and re-represented to secondary and tertiary sets of spectators via the circulation into new networks social media platforms so readily facilitate – complicate discourses of democratic co-creativity associated with networked performance and para-performance activities.