Presenting at the Poster Session

      After many hours of research and hard work, I can finally say that I have completed my senior thesis project! As stated in my last post, it sometimes felt as though this day would never arrive. Today, I had the opportunity to attend and present my findings at RIT's College of Liberal Arts (COLA) Poster Session. Featured here were posters of undergraduate student research from the Department of Psychology, the School of Communication, the Museum Studies Program, and the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Program. 

      It was wonderful to posit my findings and discuss various aspects of my project with faculty, students, and community members. In my research, I found that 1970 was the peak year of the Second Wave Feminist Movement. I also found that editorials and lifestyle articles improved over the period I assessed and advertisements were more positive around the peak year, but regressed later in my analysis. Many people commented that they liked how my content was displayed in a magazine layout format. I conversed with several faculty members regarding their firsthand experience with mass media representation of women's roles during the time period I assessed. While my analysis is of images from nearly 50 years ago, it is interesting to see that similar messages still appear in magazines today, perhaps more subtly. However, I think mass media representation and construction of women's roles is dramatically changing in magazines, on television, and more. I believe that part of this is due to the digital age. People can express their discontent in a variety of ways online through social media posts, blogging, commenting, and emailing. I am thankful that the RIT Archive Collections' Vogue magazines and The Vogue Archive database were available to me and that I had the opportunity to analyze print media from 50 years ago. I believe mass media, such as magazines like Vogue, provide an insight to the past and its culture that otherwise would be lost or forgotten if they were not preserved physically or digitally. While I am graduating on Friday, I do see my work with this project continuing on, as I am deeply passionate about it.