Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal Volume 14 Issue 2

Releasing the highly anticipated forum 'The Crip, The Fat and The Ugly in an Age of Austerity: Resistance, Reclamation and Affirmation' w/ Guest Editors Dr. Kirsty Liddiard & Jen Slater. Including a delightful #DisFilm interview w/ Dominick Evans, along with the latest Disability Studies opportunities

Spartan Daily, January 29, 2020

Volume 154, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2020/1002/thumbnail.jp

May the Best (Looking) Man Win: The Unconscious Role of Attractiveness in Employment Decisions

[Excerpt] In 1972, Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster set out to determine whether people hold “stereotyped notions of the personality traits possessed by individuals of varying attractiveness.” The results of the study were astonishing: based only on the photographs provided, participants predicted attractive subjects would be happier, possess more socially desirable personalities, practice more prestigious occupations, and exhibit higher marital competence. Their findings were published in an article entitled “What is Beautiful is Good” and gave rise to an enduring theory of the same name. In the decades since the Dion et al. experiment, the “what is beautiful is good” hypothesis has played a particularly meaningful role in occupational studies. Given the high-stakes nature of job acquisition, many researchers have asked, for example, whether attractive job candidates are more likely to be hired than their peers. In short, attractive individuals will receive more job offers, better advancement opportunities, and higher salaries than their less attractive peers—despite numerous findings that they are no more intelligent or capable. This article aims to explore the sources and potential resolution of appearance-based employment decisions. In other words, now that we know appearance-based employment discrimination exists, where does it come from and what do we do about it? Part I examines the psychology of attractiveness, exploring what registers as attractive and what unconscious responses attractiveness commonly evokes. It begins with a definition of beauty in terms of both biological and performed traits and concludes with a discussion of beauty facts versus fictions. Part II provides an overview of existing legal remedies to victims of appearance-based discrimination and explains why legal reform is an ill-suited solution. After ruling out the law, this article concludes that appearance-based employment decisions should be curbed internally, via management and human resources efforts

Beauty surveillance: the digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism

This paper argues that ‘beauty apps’ are transforming the arena of appearance politics and foregrounds a theoretical architecture for critically understanding them. Informed by a feminist-Foucaultian framework, it argues that beauty apps offer a technology of gender which brings together digital self-monitoring and postfeminist modalities of subjecthood to produce an hitherto unprecedented regulatory gaze upon women that is marked by the intensification, extensification and psychologization of surveillance. The paper is divided into four sections. First it introduces the literature on digital self-tracking. Secondly it sets out our understanding of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Thirdly it looks at beauty and surveillance, before offering, in the final section, a typology of appearance apps. This is followed by a discussion of the modes of address/authority deployed in these apps – especially what we call ‘surveillant sisterhood’ - and the kinds of entrepreneurial subjectivity they constitute. The paper seeks to make a contribution to feminist surveillance studies and argues that much more detailed research is needed to critically examine beauty apps

What inequality means for children: evidence from Young Lives

Understanding how poverty and inequalities impact on children is the major goal of Young Lives, a unique longitudinal, mixed-methods research and policy study. We are tracking two cohorts of 12,000 children growing-up in Ethiopia, the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) India, Peru and Vietnam. In this expanded version of the paper prepared for UN Global Consultatation on Inequalities we offer eight key research messages, focusing on: 1. How inequalities interact in their impact on children’s development, and the vulnerability of the most disadvantaged households. 2. The ways inequalities rapidly undermine the development of human potential. 3. How gender differences interconnect with other inequalities, but do not always advantage boys in Young Lives countries. 4. The links between poverty, early stunting, and later outcomes, including psychosocial functioning, as well as emerging evidence that some children may recover. 5. Inequalities that open up during the later years of childhood, linked to transitions around leaving school, working, and anticipating marriage etc. 6. Children’s own perceptions of poverty and inequality, as these shape their well-being and long-term prospects. 7. Evidence of the growing significance of education, including the ways school systems can increase as well as reduce inequalities. 8. The potential of social protection programmes in poverty alleviation. We conclude that since inequalities are multidimensional, so too must be the response. Equitable growth policies, education and health services, underpinned by effective social protection, all have a role to play