New Research Publications

06 February 2017

New research publications report on studies examining gender balance in Irish radio broadcasting and pro-anorexia practices and discourses on the image sharing platform Instagram.

'Best and Worst Practice: a case study of qualitative gender balance in Irish broadcasting'

A new article in Media, Culture & Society by Anne O’Brien and Jane Suiter examines the gender of voices chosen as sources and presenters of radio news coverage in Ireland. The research was conducted in February 2013 focusing on two current affairs magazine programmes: RTÉ's 'Saturday with Claire Byrne' and Newstalk's 'The Sunday Show'. Utilising best and worst case studies from radio both updates and expands on previous Irish work in the area of gender representation. The study argues that the question of gender balance in broadcasting goes beyond the simple issue of quantitatively proportionate participation to require a more complex and qualitatively fair and balanced presentation of women within news programming. The study identifies a very clear gender bias with male-dominated coverage in both public and private sectors but with greater stereotyping by the latter.

Patterns in how women are (mis)represented are important to understand because of how activists, lobby groups and broadcasters may decide to go about ‘solving’ the problem of women’s participation in broadcasting. Political or cultural intervention to address the challenge of gender bias only in quantitative terms, that is, by increasing the rate of participation, will do little to untangle the equally vexing challenge of the stereotyping, typecasting and domesticating misrepresentation of women who actually manage to get on air.

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'"Written in These Scars are the Stories I Can’t Explain": A content analysis of pro-ana and thinspiration image sharing on Instagram'

In New Media + Society, Debbie Ging and Sarah Garvey report on a study of pro-anorexia (pro-ana) practices and discourses on the image sharing platform Instagram. Since pro-anorexia websites first appeared in the 1990s, a growing body of academic work examines pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. However, there is a dearth of research focusing on the context of new  social platforms. Using a dataset of 7560 Instagram images, this study employs content analysis to ask whether, to what extent and how pro-ana identities and discourses manifest themselves on a more open, image-based platform such as Instagram. The authors demonstrate that, by mainstreaming pro-ana, Instagram has rendered visible pro-ana sensibilities such as abstinence and self-discipline in the broader context of distressed girls’ lives and Western culture more generally. They argue that this increased visibility may in fact be a positive development.

These complex visual expressions of girls’ pain and the ways in which they are shared invite more holistic and contextualised understandings of pro-ana. Unlike static websites and blogs, the more overlapping, fluid and multi-tagging nature of Instagram provides a more ‘joined-up’ and multi-layered perspective of pro-ana behaviours and discourses online. These overlaps suggest that pro-ana self-disclosure on Instagram should be of interest not only to healthcare practitioners but also to those concerned about (cyber)bullying, depression and self-harm and gender equality.

Access the full article (subscription required).

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