Projects

Project Description

The Media School launched its Fashion Media concentration in the 2022-2023 academic year. I was hired to teach courses in the area, based on my experience as a fashion media scholar and former fashion journalist. The research projects look at media, fashion, and politics in digital and print spaces. The project to explore would be examining international fashion blogs and Global Englishes. The abstract is as follows: The fashion weblog (blog) emerged as a space on the Internet to disseminate colorful visuals and complementary stories to chronicle individual musings and promote brands. Fashion and beauty trends, retail news, on-the-street candid shots of personal style, and shopping hauls appeared on homepages and hamburger menus. Content creators connect viewers to matters of taste and socio-cultural implications of style and dress as a way of expression. Scholars look to understand its connection to gender; its cultural production practices; and its legitimacy in the print and digital journalism and media field. I aim to expand the discourse of fashion communication knowledge production of these cultural products and examine English as a lingua franca connecting bloggers from countries such as France, Brazil, and Japan across the digital landscape. This discourse analysis employs Braj Kachru’s model of Global Englishes to identify content and relies on theoretical frameworks of Gramsci’s hegemony and Bourdieu’s cultural capital to interpret rhetorical choices made. I argue English enables bloggers to make definitive statements about identity and culture and contribute to the international discourse about matters of taste.

Technology or Computational Component

I am interested in seeking a co-advisor (another faculty member in Luddy, perhaps) who has expertise in scraping text from websites for discourse analysis. Currently, I use NVivo and Excel to extract data by hand but would be interested in learning this process. I envision having the students learn from a faculty member with the expertise in text mining and coding. And then, I would mentor students in how to organize the data and conduct analyses looking at patterns, trends, and keywords informed by scholarship. The data collected thus far includes blogs from France, Brazil, and Japan. I envision my initial study would spawn future research articles looking at blogs from one country.