Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University. Missing page 78.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / The purpose of this thesis is to ascertain to what extent America's popular magazines are fulfilling their responsibility in arousing the public to the importance of education for its youth. The writer has attempted to discover which magazines publish the most articles on education; what is the extent of this magazine coverage; what are the viewpoints expressed in magazine articles on education; and to what extent do educators themselves write articles for the popular magazines. The list of those magazines used in this survey have been limited to those with over 2,000,000 subscribers with the exception of Redbook and Parents' Magazine. Time is excluded from analysis because of its extensive coverage of education. Educational journals and secular magazines also have not been used in this survey [TRUNCATED]

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

This is an ethnographic study of contemporary Australian women's magazine editors and their perceptions about their role and function within their workplaces, and, as creators of media products, within culture itself.

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This qualitative research study focuses on the experiences of, and effects on, students and staff who work with literary magazine projects at the high school level. The goal of the study was to better understand how literary magazines benefit students, and how the experiences of working on a lit mag project, contributing to a lit mag, reading a school’s lit mag might be beneficial to students and how it might be improved, both for those working with the lit mag and culture of writing in the school. Using a grounded theory research method, interviews were conducted with both staff and students who were involved in their school’s literary magazines. Semi-structured interviews were used as a way for participants to discuss what they perceived as strengths of their projects and areas for continued growth. Eight interviews were completed, which were then transcribed, fact checked, and analysed using a rigorous process of coding. Five major conclusions were arrived at and have been presented in this thesis as practical implications to help others start—or develop—a literary magazine at their school.

In response to contemporary moral and feminist criticisms regarding the hypothesised effect magazine discourses of sexuality have on readers, this thesis explores how six groups of adolescents and young adults respond to representations of sexualities from the teen and women's magazines Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Girlfriend and Dolly. Drawing upon theories of poststructural feminism, cultural studies and audience reception this work expands upon existing magazine literature by attending to the ways teen and women's magazines are interpreted and talked about by different groups of adolescents and young adults. This analysis fills a gap in contemporary magazine research, which has generally failed to address how gender and sexuality, as they are portrayed in contemporary periodical publications, are made sense of by readers. Therefore, in focusing on reader talk this thesis is also able to address the ways in which individual and collective identities are constructed interactively in the socially specific context of focus group discussions. Attention is given to looking at the complexities surrounding the relationships that exist between magazine reading, representations of sexuality and adolescents and young adults through an examination of the discourses girls, boys, young women and young men draw upon in their talk on magazine representations of sexualities. I argue that readers of magazines are active producers of meaning who think and talk about magazine representations of sexualities in a variety of complex, contradictory and often ambiguous ways. Research participants employ interpretive repertoires, drawn together from various new, traditional and alternative discourses about sexuality, in the process of attributing meaning to contemporary sexualities, as both cultural objects and aspects of everyday life. Thus, rather than take up and accept the sexual subject positions that magazines make available to readers, the talk of the research participants in this project illustrates how sexualities are constantly being negotiated. The articulation and performance of masculine and feminine sexualities is therefore recognized within this thesis as a highly contradictory, contextual and negotiated process.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

This thesis examines representations of ageing in women‟s magazines. Although ageing is an inevitable part of the human condition, this thesis takes the position that ageing is culturally constructed and that women‟s magazines are a key site in such constructions. It is noticeable that, within the Academy generally, there has been less work into the social construction of the ageing process than there has been into other relations of „difference‟ such as gender or race. That said, in the last two decades, work in this area has started to emerge. Factors which account for this include the influence of the baby boomer generation, a sizeable age cohort, born between 1945-1964 who are now growing older themselves. The thesis presents a textual and semiotic analysis of the way in which getting older is constituted through written, visual and spoken texts. The primary data in the research consists of articles from women‟s magazines, analysed using a range of semiotic and linguistic tools, most notably the theories of Roland Barthes, particularly his concept of „Myth‟. Metonymy and the function of stereotyping are also key theoretical concepts. In addition, I analyse data from transcriptions of informal interviews with women magazine readers drawing on the same theoretical concepts. In this way, I am able to examine how magazine texts are received by their readership and, moreover, how women position themselves in relation to what they are reading. The analysis is underpinned by three Myths of Ageing: firstly, that ageing is a decline scenario: it involves both mental and physical decline; secondly, that ageing is synonymous with loss of power: sexual, economic and social; and lastly that ageing must be resisted. I show how the „new positive‟ images of growing older that are being drawn out and portrayed in media representations are not necessarily positive in terms of the impact they have on contemporary women. These images are presented as „new‟, but I shall demonstrate that they are, in fact, a re-working of the underlying Myths of Ageing, myths which construct ageing as a culturally very negative experience, particularly for women in this historical moment.