Positive thinking

Ella Tennant, Keele University   As we mark International Women’s Day after a year of renewed media attention to issues of gender inequality, it could be that there are more important threats facing women and the survival of our planet, than mere words. But after the #MeToo campaigns, exposure of the gender pay gap , and recent publication of yet more research that challenges the idea of a gendered brain , it is mindboggling to see how “ gendered blindness ” – described as “the one-size-fits-men approach” in design and tech culture – lives on. Meanwhile women’s equal contribution to society and culture is ignored. Visible women – those in the public eye or who call out unfair treatment – are subject to scrutiny and treated suspiciously in a way that men are not. Gender scholars have argued that English is a language made by men for men with the sole purpose of representing and perpetuating their point of view. The way we see the world is therefore shaped by patriarc...

Marianna Bolognesi, University of Oxford   Words work as a glue, allowing us to group together different experiences under one label. This is especially true for concepts that we cannot see or touch. But we still don’t really understand how language works in shaping the meaning of these more abstract concepts, or how it allows us to group experiences together under one “umbrella” term, which denotes something we cannot point to, or see, or touch. Concrete concepts such as “banana” and abstract ones such as “freedom” differ in many ways. To get a grasp of this difference, Google the words “banana” and “freedom” and compare the images that are returned by the browser. For “banana” you get pictures that are quite similar to one another. For “freedom”, on the other hand, you get very different types of images that apparently have little in common. Screenshots of Google Image searches using ‘banana’ and ‘freedom’ as keywords. Google , Author provided Th...

Tara Coltman-Patel, Nottingham Trent University Obesity is a highly stigmatised condition. Those with obesity are frequently subject to prejudice and ridicule at home, school, work and even from health care professionals. Every day, they face social rejection and are deemed lazy, unattractive, unmotivated and unhappy . Alarmingly, many obese individuals feel unable to challenge such stigma, so they passively accept and sometimes believe it . We live in a world where we are constantly reminded that obesity is a “crisis”, an “epidemic”, that it is crippling the economy, and that it is a burden on society. These ideologies are disseminated throughout the news media, social media, by politicians and by health care professionals – and they are the birthplace of weight stigma. Weight stigma can manifest itself in several different ways. It can be overt, such as verbal and physical abuse, but it can also be indirect and subtle. My research focuses on the subtle and subcons...