Method

My research project is about finding out how media advertising affects women, so I would need a research method that questions these women on personal topics. I have found that the best way to do that would be to collect data by handing out surveys. This is a qualitative method of research. I decided to use this method after I saw that many of my journal articles have done the same with some amazing and informative results. I also want to test some survey questions out on a small scale, a small group of women from Southwest and Northern Virginia, just to see how it would do and what kind of numbers I would receive.

Critique III

Grabe, Shelly; Ward, L. Monique; Hyde, Janet Shibley. The Role of the Media in Body Image Concerns among Women: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental and Correlational Studies. Psychological Bulletin; v134 n3 p460-476 May 2008.

The author’s goal is to focus on body image dissatisfaction and related concerns, including behaviors and beliefs about eating and dieting. The authors have found that 50% of American girls and undergraduate women report being dissatisfied with their bodies. These feelings of dissatisfaction is not inconsequential, they have been linked to critical physical and mental health problems. The authors say that girls and young women are dissatisfied with their bodies not just because of parental messages or peer-related teasing but also by the thin ideal dominating the media. Across the media society has thinness consistently emphasized and rewarded for women, with thin television characters are overrepresented while overweight characters are underrepresented. The authors found that media images today have a far greater thinner female model than decades ago, leaving media for young women polluted with extremely thin models that portray and ideal that is unattainable to most.

The authors compiled multiple studies together to “examine the connections between media use and women’s body image and related issues that have been experimental laboratory studies that examine whether exposure to thin-ideal media increases body dissatisfaction or related concerns in the short term”. The author’s research found that media exposure is linked to women’s generalized dissatisfaction with their bodies, the increased investment in appearance and the increased endorsement of disordered eating behaviors. The effects are present across multiple outcomes and are demonstrated in both the experimental and correlational literatures. In the end they found that media exposure appears to be related to women’s body image negatively regardless of assessment technique, individual difference variables, media type, age, or other idiosyncratic study characteristics.

This article is great because it compiles multiple studies on the effects of media on women and their body dissatisfaction, it pretty much does most of the grunt work for someone looking into the effects of media images and women. This gives my research a great base, showing that media does affect women and their dissatisfaction of their body and body image. It also brings about short and long term problems that can be the outcome of the media exposure.

It is interdisciplinary because it incorporates multiple studies and forms of experiments, taking them and putting them in to one comprehensive article, allowing the article to be passed among multiple disciplines, media education, health classes, women’s studies and sociology.

Critique II

Buchanan, Taneisha S.; Fischer, Ann R.; Tokar, David M.; Yoder, Janice D. Testing a Culture-Specific Extension of Objectification Theory Regarding African American Women's Body Image. The Counseling Psychologist, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 697-718, July 2008.

The authors discuss in their article that body image dissatisfaction in African American women is actually reported less then in White and Latina women. They say that African American women tend to “endorse an ideal body image that is close to what they considered to be a healthy weight”(Buchanan). Their studies have brought them to believe that the objectification theory needed to be modified to handle a study on African American women, focusing on their particular ethgendered experiences, for example having their appearance evaluated in terms of skin tone, hair texture and facial features, along with body size and shape. The authors focused their study and article on the “salient physical attribute for African American women: skin tone.”

They found studies from the 80’s stating that when looking at educational level, occupational level and family income of Black Americans the results were stratified by skin tone. The higher educational attainment, greater participation in professional and technical careers, and higher income were associated with lighter skin tone. The data also concluded that lighter skin tone predicted higher self-esteem, even after variables such as education, income and marital status. This data, even though dated, still shows that at one time skin tone had important social implications for African Americans. Using this data and other empirical research, the authors found that African American women seem to have been more affected by preferences for lighter skin tone than African American men, possibley because of the societal importance of attractiveness for women in general. The authors found that “women are constrained to meet the standards of beauty of the dominant culture, and their appearance may affect their access to social and economic opportunities.” The researcher argued that beauty serves as social capital, so in theory light skin may equal beauty, thus, lighter skin tone may lead to social and economic rewards for African American women, which means that skin tone may be viewed as a body –image variable, just like body shape and size. So their study is to find out how self-objectification is linked between habitual body monitoring and body dissatisfaction.

The authors used 117 African American women, ages 18 – 59, from a large public university in the Midwestern U.S., contacted by email and given online surveys. They collected data on self-objectification, body dissatisfaction focusing on two kinds of appearance concerns: a culturally specific version involving skin tone and the more common body shame regarding shape and size. Their results were that African American women’s surveillance of their own body shape and size predicted body shame, with the pattern extending to skin tone.

This study brings to light that one’s body image is not just about the size and shape but can also deal with skin tone. This is something that would affect all minority women, because most minority women do not have the creamy white European skin of the dominant culture. The authors did a great job bringing about their research and their study, they even modified their study to factor in their age ranges in their participants. They show in their results data that with age women have less skin ton dissatisfaction then the college age participants.

This study was very interdisciplinary because the authors fused the disciplines of gender, culture and experiences to figure out that African American women have more than just their body shape and size to be dissatisfied over. The authors were able to effortlessly seam everything together as if that has always been the way to see this study and research. This article fits right in with my project because it adds a body image problem that well affect most of minority women and it is something that the media can expose and exploit. Just with the data that lighter skin tone African Americans have great social and economic success would be worth the article but to also have the data result in body shame extending to skin tone was the topper.

Critique I

Schooler, Deborah. Real Women Have Curves: A Longitudinal Investigation of TV and the Body Image Development of Latina Adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 132-153, March 2008

Schooler is looking into how media images affect the body image development of Latina adolescents. Schooler says that “Latina adolescents must negotiate between the cultural values provided by dominant white culture and those provided by their Latino/a families, communities, and cultures”. Most women in North America equate beauty with their success and that the dominant beauty ideal is a woman who is tall, typically has light skin tone with European features and above all be extremely thin, however Latina adolescents are taught a different ideal body image. In their families, the girls are supported to have a more curvy body than the dominant white ideal, a woman with a slender waist but larger breasts, hips and a round behind, which is more along the line of what African American culture sees women as. Schooler says that with the increase in media watching and intake of adolescents today, using it as a way to acculturate into mainstream culture, Latina girls are surrounded by the images of the ideal thin woman.

Schooler considered her participants’ use of mainstream, Spanish-language and Black-oriented television. She used these because of the different messages about body ideals that was conveyed by the different genres and because of the different salience and relevance these genres might have on a Latina adolescent. She “expected that different associations with body image will emerge for each of these genres”. Schooler also looked into the “role of acculturation in Latina adolescents’ body image development”. She examined the interactions between the television exposure and acculturation with the importance of mainstream, Black-oriented and Spanish-language television depending on the girls’ acculturation status.

Schooler’s research group was a diverse sample of 81 Latina adolescents from the Northeast U.S. with the majority of Puerto Rican or Dominican descent; they were spread out in the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grades. Schooler justifies her choice of region because these youths would be living in a predominantly White region of the country and these girls may be highly motivated to learn about mainstream, White cultural values. Schooler used a longitudinal method to study how the “contribution of television exposure at one point to changes in body image over time”. Schooler had them fill out questionnaires assessing their television viewing habits and body satisfaction, then resurveyed them two years later. She was only able to get 52 of the original 81 girls.

Schooler found that when compared to studies conducted with White and African American samples, Latina girls may have a more complex view of body image. Latina adolescents who may be more acculturated may see White actresses as valid images to compare their bodies with. Schooler found that including acculturation in studies of Latina body image development is highly important. She found that girls who are more acculturated show a greater decline in their body image across adolescence. Schooler findings show that Latina adolescents work in the White and Latino/a culture along with the African American culture. Meaning they can be influenced by both the white, thin ideal but also find refuge in the Black-oriented television.

I find that Schooler study is quite interesting, then that she is working with a very complex issue; adolescent body image development, but then adds the highly complex issues of race, in this case Latino/a. I think Schooler’s study and research has an importance in how one looks at their television intake and their growing body image, but more importantly it has me focusing on how society’s focus of the white, thin ideal woman affects how a Latina adolescent looks are herself and her self worth. She brings about more questions with her answers, saying that this study can bring about important connections to American Indian or Asian culture, also it can be modified to study any subculture and its interaction with mainstream media.

Schooler looks at this study from a sociological and women’s studies perspective. She shows how not just one thing affects these girls, that there are multiple factors in their lives, multiple disciplines. They do not just have society barring down on them, they have their own cultural views and values as well. This article fit great into my research project because it is specifically looking at how media can affect minority women. But it also adds the depth of their cultural values into the equation too, which would bring a whole new dimension into my research.

Annotated Bibliography

1)

Buchanan, Taneisha S.; Fischer, Ann R.; Tokar, David M.; Yoder, Janice D. Testing a Culture-Specific Extension of Objectification Theory Regarding African American Women's Body Image. The Counseling Psychologist, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 697-718, July 2008.

The authors focused on African American women’s body image, looking at the emphasized objectification in terns of body shape and size, adding the cultural scrutiny of skin tone. The researchers found habitual body monitoring of skin tone predicted specific skin-tone dissatisfaction along with general shame of body shape and size. They place the female body in a sociocultural context, saying that because if societal values, or even in my research case, media images, emphasizing women’s appearance. Through these women learn to view themselves through an observer’s perspective instead of through direct control.

2)
Conner, Mark; Johnson, Charlotte; Grogan, Sarah. Gender, Sexuality, Body Image and Eating Behaviours. Journal Of Health Psychology, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 505-515, July 2004.

The authors used one hundred and twenty one participants, had them report their sexual orientation, body mass index, body shape concerns, eating motives and eating styles. They found that measures of body dissatisfaction were greater in heterosexual women and homosexual men and that heterosexual women had smaller ideal body shapes. Findings showed support for the role of socially prescribed body shapes on body shape concerns, eating motivations and eating styles in women and men. It also suggests impacts are greater for heterosexual women and homosexual men.

3)
Engeln-Maddox, Renee; Miller, Steven A. Talking Back to the Media Ideal: The Development and Validation of the Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale. Psychology of Women Quarterly; v32 n2 p159-171 Jun 2008

The authors talk about the development of the Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale and the studies demonstrating the psychometric soundness of this measure. This Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale measures women’s likelihood to engage in processing media images that feature idealized female beauty. The scale divides women’s critiques in three subscales; Fake, Questioning/ Accusing and Too Thin. These subscales describe the level of critique of the media images. Fake meaning that the images of women being too perfect to be real, Questioning/ Accusing saying that the images of the women are harmful to women and then Too Thin is the tendency of women to think that the models are too thin or have eating disorders. This scale can be useful in working out the media literacy efforts and the explicated relationships between processing beauty images and body image-related concerns.

4)
Forbes, Gordon B.; Frederick, David A. The UCLA Body Project II: Breast and Body Dissatisfaction among African, Asian, European, and Hispanic American College Women. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, vol. 58, no. 7-8, pp. 449-457, Apr. 2008.

Forbes and Frederick look at how different ethnic women see their breasts and bodies and their global body dissatisfaction. They found that Asian women have the lowest body satisfaction on the Appearance Evaluation Scale, and the greatest breast dissatisfaction. They also found that ethnic differences in breast dissatisfaction disappeared when body size was statistically controlled. They found the results of their study to be consistent with research in that ethnic differences in body dissatisfaction are small, but that studies of ethnic differences must include appropriate controls for total or specific body size and that Asian college women reported a lower global satisfaction that all other women.

5)
Gleeson, Kate; Frith, Hannah. (De)constructing Body Image. Journal Of Health Psychology, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 79-90, January 2006.

The authors are looking in to the reification of body image that leads to unarticulated ideological and conceptual assumptions that can obscure the most dynamic and productive features of the construct. They make five assumptions about body images; that it exists, that it is a socially mediated product of perception, that it can be internal and of the individual, it can be treated and measured and lastly, individuals’ respond to body image measures as if providing information about some pre-existing images in their heads. The authors find that it would be more useful to consider body imaging more as a process then a product.

6)

Grabe, Shelly; Ward, L. Monique; Hyde, Janet Shibley. The Role of the Media in Body Image Concerns among Women: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental and Correlational Studies. Psychological Bulletin; v134 n3 p460-476 May 2008.

The authors look into the research that suggest that exposure to mass media that depicts the thin-ideal body may be linked to body image disturbance in women. The study looked into experimental and correlational studies testing the links between media images to women’s body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal and eating behaviors and beliefs. Their findings support the concept that exposure to media images showing the thin-ideal body is related to body image concerns for women.

7)
Harrison, K.; Fredrickson, B.L. Women's sports media, self-objectification, and mental health in black and white adolescent females. Journal of Communication, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 216-232, June 2003.

The authors studied the relationship from the perspective of objectification theory by surveying and experimenting with 426 adolescent females aged 10 to 19 years. They found that sports magazine reading predicted a greater body satisfaction among the older adolescents, no matter if they were in sports or not. Self-objectification in adolescents of all ages predicted mental health risks including body shame, disordered eating, and depression. They also had participants viewed a video depicting men's sports, women's lean sports, or women's nonlean sports. They found for white participants, watching lean sports increased self-objectification, whereas for participants of color, watching nonlean sports had the same effect. They study focused on self-objectification in adolescents and how their cultural differences in the female body ideal are reflected in portrayals of female athletes.

8)
Harrison, Kristen; Taylor, Laramie D.; Marske, Amy Lee. Women’s and Men’s Eating Behavior Following Exposure to Ideal-Body Images and Text. Communication Research, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 507-529, December 2006.

The authors tested the effects of exposure to ideal-body images and text on young adults’ eating behavior. There were two experiments, one for women and one for men. The women looked at slides that depicted images of slender female models with no text, with exercise- and diet-related text, with irrelevant text or no slides, which was their control. Women had a discrepancy between perceptions of their actual body and their same-gender peers bodies they believe they ought to have. Exposure to images alone and images plus diet and exercise related text brought about a reduction in the amount eaten in front of female peers, so that the images deterred the women from eating. Where as the male participants had the same exposure and ended up eating more in front of male peers, which brings about the social distinctions between female and male eating perspectives.

9)
Hazell, Vanessa; Clarke, Juanne. Race and Gender in the Media: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in two Mainstream Black Magazines. Journal of Black Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 5-21, September 2008.

Hazell and Clarke’s study focuses on the Black magazines Essence and Jet, looking at how blacks are portrayed in their own media. The magazines have positive and negative images of blacks. With ideologies of racism and White supremacy in the advertisements in these magazines. Hazell and Clarke comment a lot on how media images can reinforce societal beliefs, expectations and ideals in relation to gender and race. There can also be a case using their research to say these images can reinforce a body image ideal that can go against black cultural beliefs and historical body images. Their focus is in that media images in these magazines needs to have positive images that way out weigh the negative portrayals.

10)
Hill, Melanie S.; Fischer, Ann R. Examining Objectification Theory: Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's Experiences With Sexual- and Self-Objectification. The Counseling Psychologist, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 745-776, July 2008.

Hill and Fischer study the effects of societal sexually objectified on the relationship between women’s reports of cultural sexual objectification and self-objectification experiences. Their finds were that women’s reports of sexualized gaze or harassment significantly effected their own self-objectification, lesbian and heterosexual women reported similar levels of sexualized gaze or harassment and that the relationship between sexualized gaze or harassment and self-objectification was not really different for lesbians or heterosexual women. This can be brought in to the research of media images by looking at how different cultural media objectifies women and divide the women in to ethnic subsamples also.

11)
Kuperbergm Arielle; Stone, Pamela. The Media Depiction of Women Who Opt Out. Gender & Society, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 497-517, August 2008.

Kuperbergm and Stone discuss the way media images effect women’s behavior and the trend of educated women going from the workforce to full-time mothers, or opting out. The focus their study on media coverage of opting out that appears in publications reaching diverse and large audiences with high circulation. They also discuss the implications of the results of the articles’ themes against actual trends in women’s opting out which brings about a disjuncture and the creation of a new feminine mystique. This looks into the social image and ideal of women being mothers and the social repercussion of first working mothers then reverting back to traditionalist of full-time mothers. This brings about a media image of women.

12)
Legenbauer, Tanja; Ruhl, Ilka; Vocks, Silja. Influence of Appearance-Related TV Commercials on Body Image State. Behavior Modification, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 352-371, May 2008.

The authors looked at how the influence of media exposure affects the body image state in eating-disordered patients. They assessed the attitudinal and perceptual component of the patients’ body image, along with any associations with dysfunctional cognitions and behavioral consequences. How the media images affect these patients by their behavioral, i.e. eating disorders and by their body images. The authors concluded that their studies suggest that media exposure acts more like a stimulus that triggers body-related schemas. How does this fit in with minority women’s body images, well some women how have body image problems can end up with an eating disorder. With media images focusing on the ideal woman, which is usually thin, white women, then minority women may end up with an eating disorder, as Schooler notes in her research about Latina adolescents.

13)
Louie, Josephine Kam-Yue. Television, ethnic identity, and race: The views of Chinese youth from immigrant families. Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 67, no. 06, Dec 2006.

The author used a survey to question 213 Chinese teens attending high schools in the Boston area. She looked into how much TV they watched, average of 21 hours a week, with about 8 hours being spent watching Chinese-language media and the remaining 13 hours watching American English-language based media. She then did an analysis of their motives for watching the media and found that viewing the media was modestly related to the teen’s ethnic identity, attitudes towards Asians and whites. She concluded her research by doing in depth interviews with six of the teens and found that the media seemed to have served different functions for each teen. She concluded that it may be possible for media content to promote interracial understanding and empathy among young viewers.

14)
Paquette, Marie-Claude; Raine, Kim. Sociocultural Context of Women's Body Image. Social Science & Medicine, vol. 59, no. 5, pp. 1047-1058, Sept 2004.

The authors look at how a woman’s personal and sociocultural context influences her body image. Women’s bodies are the focus of both increasing rates of obesity and body dissatisfaction. Some have seen to explain these trends in that they are both the products of an unfavorable sociocultural environment in the area of food and weight. There can be strong cultural value placed on thinness, especially for women in our society. This can take precedence over health. The authors say that to fully understand and address the impact that a woman’s body image dissatisfaction can have over her, one requires an understanding of the multiple contexts of a woman’s life. The authors took 44 non-eating disordered women and interviewed them twice to understand their body images and how they were shaped. They found that the women’s body mages fluctuates between women.

15)
Schooler, Deborah. Real Women Have Curves: A Longitudinal Investigation of TV and the Body Image Development of Latina Adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 132-153, March 2008

Schooler is from Brown University and conducted a study on the effects of mainstream body ideals and Latino/a cultural values on their body image development. She examined their body satisfaction, acculturation, and use of mainstream, Spanish-language, and Black-oriented television. Then did a 2 year follow up. She found that frequent viewing of mainstream media resulted in an association of decreased body image and frequent viewing of Black-oriented media was associated with greater body satisfaction. She discusses how most body image studies focus on white girls and women, leaving out minorities. Schooler focuses on educating the reader on Latina body images and values, comparing that to the mainstream media ideals and the effects it has on white girls’ body images. This study looks into how a specific minority is effect by media body images and ideals.

Needs assesment

There are multiple forms of media dangled in front of our faces everyday, from newspapers to magazines, and TVs to computers. Every where ones looks there are images for things we “need”, we must have. People we should know, admire and aspire to be. There is no way for people to not look at the images that mainstream media plasters all over our lives. Images of woman are common for selling a multitude of products but what are the images really telling society. Do these images effect societies views of women? These images are mostly of white, skinny models selling sex as a phone or jeans or car. However, these images are also selling an unrealistic and sometimes unhealthy ideal women. My question is how do these media images effect the social and gender roles of minority women?

Any women and look around and see what the media has deemed a desirable woman. And most women well tell about their struggle to conform to this ideal. But how does this really effect a minority woman. I can to this question by thinking of my own experiences with society and media images. I am a white woman but I am also a minority because of my sexuality. I struggled much of my teen years with not working into the media and societal norms of a woman and what to see how other minority women are affected.

This is a significant topic because there are constant images of ideal woman that girls are exposed to that have serious effects on their self image. Even adult women still deal with image and self esteem issues because of the continued pressure for normalcy. Really, when was the last time we heard of a celebrity not losing weight and being praised? These are ideals that are constantly plaguing women.

With my studies in sociology I have an understand of social ideals and influences that effect peoples lives and point of view. With my studies in Women’s Studies I have learned how to understand these social ideals and influences for their patriarchal roots. There is no way to discuss social and gender roles in society and their effects with out discussing women and the lack of a woman view in societal norms.

Personal Narrative

Interdisciplinary studies appealed to me as a major because I naturally have interdisciplinary traits. I have reliability in that I am always there for my wife, friends, teammates, classmates and co-workers. My rugby coach was giving out awards at the end of the season and gave me an award for reliability, saying I was always at practices, games and fundraisers, was right there for the plays, that I was there for the team. I am resilient because when faced with obstacles I have worked to overcome them. When I did not finish college in the timeframe my parents wanted and would fund, I dropped out for a year to get my finances in order. I got a job and worked with my advisor, financial aid and wife to work on how to finish college and finance it. I love diversity. I enjoy meeting new people and learning new things. Being one of the few white children in my elementary school in Washington, DC, I learned to respect and admire everyone’s differences and understand that they make us better people. I enjoy being in new social roles, especially ones that let me flex my initiative and be assertive. I was Virginia Tech’s LGBTA president for a year and part of the Executive Board for a few years before that and was able to be part of the launch team for the Safe Watch program and to help revamp the Safe Zone program. I have a broad education from being raised in Southeast DC, going to twelve years of Catholic school (was baptized Methodist but am a self declared agnostic), spending time in the Corps of Cadets, having two and a half years of Animal and Poultry Sciences and almost two years of art classes on top of my minors and major of Interdisciplinary Studies, as well as being newly married. That also means my interests are all over the place. I have had twelve years of soccer and eight years of band. Five year of rugby, countless art classes and sketch books, all my college year, and that is six and counting, of LGBTA support group. I have CD’s of Enya and Yanni right next to my Melissa Etheridge collection. I have Women, Creativity and the Arts next to Social Stratification and Inequality. However, of all these interdisciplinarian traits the one that started my path to interdisciplinary studies is my dissatisfaction with monodisciplinary constraints.

Since I was seven, I wanted to be a veterinarian, I could not even spell that until I was, well twenty. I wanted to work with animals and have a farm, then I got to college. Through my education I have found that is was hard for me to stay on one topic, one interest. I wanted to know everything and in college I found that I wanted to take some English classes on top of my Animal and Poultry Sciences classes, I actually enjoyed freshman English. So I took Topics of Literature by Women and Modern British Literature (loved Virginia Woolf but hated James Joyce). It was my Women’s Literature class that really got my attention, I was taught by a professor that also was part of the Women’s Studies department and was forever changed. She brought this whole different perspective to literature that my British Lit teacher did not. Reading the books not just for the topics, settings and characters but also for the slight shift in emphasis, Jane Eyre became so much more than a story about a governess and man but about the struggles of a woman in that era, of a strong-headed woman. I was hooked on readjusting my view of the world and ready to face society as a feminist.

Now to face society with my new view point I needed to understand society more. I needed to understand how people become what they are. So I decided to take a baby step and took gender relations, which went quite well with my feminist mindset. Sociology brought home a lot of my experiences and help me understand more about the interactions in society that I saw. It gave me the perspective of minority groups that I am not a part of but also a look into how roles in our society bring about and oppress these minorities. Sociology also helped me better understand things I wanted to do with my future and goals.

Taking juvenile delinquency and criminology along with all my classes focusing on inequality and minority relations helped bring me to the understand that I want to work either in a social worker or counselor role, hopefully focusing on youth and more personal to me, LGBTQ youth or HIV/AIDS cases. I have years of listening to friends and acquaintances work through their problems from romantic to coming out to figuring out how to pay the bills. So I feel that I can eventually fulfill the role as a counselor there to listen and help work through problems with juveniles and for some I will be able to relate. There is also my passion of HIV/ AIDS. I have been in charge of Virginia Tech’s LGBTA’s AIDS Awareness Week and helped expand it to dealing with not just education about protection but also about ways to help other countries like Africa and India with their epidemics, which brings in my minors of sociology and women’s studies. These countries have areas still set in the traditional gender roles that help spread the virus.

I feel that really I am supposed to be an interdisciplinarian. I have nothing but hungry for learning new ideas and perspective.

What is IDST?

Virginia Tech describes Interdisciplinary Studies as a field that “explores how the natural, artificial, and cultural dimensions of our world fit together. They take perspectives of many disciplines, in order to define new objects of study, and thus search for new ways to surmount obstacles and achieve our goals.” My personal thoughts on this major differ somewhat. I see it as giving me multiple “eyes,” “glasses” or “hats” of perception. It is looking at a problem and seeing it from widely different perspectives, say sociological over mechanical. I would describe it as my two minors coming together to refine my ability to look at a problem or issue and figure out a solution that I might not otherwise have come to if I had merely studied it from a one dimensional perspective.

The two minors that comprise my degree are Women’s Studies and Sociology. Women’s studies seeks to critique our world and society from a female centered perspective. I chose this major because I am avidly interested in studying the world from a non-patriarchal viewpoint. WorldWideLearn.com describes sociology as “Sociologists study human behavior as it pertains to human interaction within the guidelines of an organizational structure. The interaction between humans is more complex than the interactions between other animal species. Human behavior is greatly influenced and governed by social, religious, and legal guidelines. A sociologist studies these behaviors and the influences that preserve certain behaviors and change others. Sociology is a broad science, covering many different disciplines the social sciences. Anthropology, archeology, and linguistics are the few disciplines that surpass what sociology readily encompasses. Sociology also studies more tangible measures of human behavior such as class or social status, social movements, criminal deviance, and even revolution.” I chose this part of my degree because I wanted to study how people interact within society and how social factors affect their lives and those behaviors. My life and the experiences I have directly influence my desire to study in these fields.

Interdisciplinary studies appealed to me as a major because I am naturally an interdisciplinary person. I have a woman’s view on the world and problems. I have the added view of also being a lesbian. Those are two different perspectives that have the link of being minority standings. Another perspective is that I grow up in Washington, DC. I have the life experience of growing up in a metropolitan environment. I also have both firsthand and secondhand perspective, from what I have lived and experienced as an individual and from the enlightenment my formal education has provided. All these things put together gives be an interdisciplinary perspective on life, society and most importantly, situations.

The complex problems I wish to study and essentially build a career and life around are those of HIV/AIDS, underprivileged and displaced youth, and LGBT folk. I know that I want to tackle these problems in an educational capacity, although I’m not sure exactly what this would entail. I have begun with my experience as LGBTA President and as its support group leader. I will be applying for jobs with the Whitman Walker AIDS Clinic and hopefully that experience could tie me into my other goals of working with youth and the LGBT community.

In conclusion, someone with a background in Interdisciplinary Studies has the ability to empathize with multiple people in multiple environments, whether that be work, educational, community, or at home. This is an incredibly important talent in a modern world, where interconnectedness can make or break you in both a career and personal life. Without this ability, one might never know what opportunities they have overlooked. I know that because of my studies, I will recognize these opportunities and seize them.

Terms

Disciplinarity – Using one perspective to explain, teach and work from.

Interdisciplinarity – using more than one way of thinking to look or solve a problem.

Multidisciplinarity – using multiple perspectives to explain something without them being interactive.

Transdisciplinarity – Explaining or looking at a subject by using disciplines as more of jumping off points, of places to veer from, of ideals to break than as laws.

Cross-disciplinarity – to view something from another perspective.

· Answer the following questions:

1. What does it mean that the terms above are “essentially contested concepts?”

With interdisciplinary such an evolving concept all words associated with it will themselves continue to evolve and be disputed. So the terms are essential to understanding and explaining interdisciplinary studies, yet they are still being refined and as our world changes so will these concepts. They will forever be contested among interdisciplinary scholars.

2. When and why did interdisciplinary studies programs emerge in American universities?

The programs came about in the 30’s with a class on American literature and history called American Studies. Then came about more classes using the same concept on other cultures bringing about Area studies classes.

3. What criticisms do interdisciplinarians have of disciplines?

Disciplines only work with certain “world views” and experiences. There is no wiggle room, there is no place for new questions, there is no place for new learning.

4. How does the framework of interdisciplinary studies seek to overcome limitations of disciplinary practice?

Interdisciplinary studies framework allows multiple perspectives to be learned and used. There is not limitation on what a student can learn and use to solve and explain a problem. There is no one way of learning.

5. Create an original metaphor for interdisciplinary studies.

Interdisciplinary study is like taking pictures to make a collage.