With her pink, cotton candy colored hair catching eyes and making her impossible to forget, Karlana June has won the 2013 Undergraduate Research Award at this year’s Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) Conference. She was awarded for her research paper “The Portrayal of Vietnamese Women in Vietnamese Print Media.”
June, 38, is a junior majoring in Mass Communications with a concentration in Journalism and Media Studies and minoring in English Writing Studies at University of South Florida St. Petersburg. The paper was a result of an independent study with Deni Elliott, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies and the Eleanor Poynter Jamison Chair in Media Ethics and Press Policy.
APPE is an international interdisciplinary association of ethics scholars. June was invited to do a poster presentation of her work and was the only undergraduate to be invited to do so. She received her award on Feb. 28 and presented her research on March 1.
A student presented a study abroad program to Vietnam during an anthropology class June was taking that left her with a feeling of wanderlust. After looking into it, she was disheartened to find the program would not meet any of her requirements for either her major or minor. She attended a conference where her teacher was presenting and ran into Dr. Frank Biafora, the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He suggested the idea of applying for an Independent Study that would allow her to go to on the study abroad program to Vietnam, something June had never really considered.
In order to get the approval, June needed a narrow focus. Advocating women empowerment and human rights, June took this as an opportunity to dedicate months of research to studying the portrayal of women in print media; more specifically Vietnamese women in print media in Vietnam. Soon enough, she was approved for not one, but two independent studies for her trip and received six credits for her research.
After returning from her trip, June worked with Elliott to finalize and write her analysis and findings. Elliott encouraged June to submit her research to APPE, which according to June is an accomplishment within itself.
June broke down her research into four categories: Feminine Touch/Self-touching, body parts (body chopping), submission and subordinate poses, and alternative/empowerment poses. She then broke each category down into sub-categories allowing her to further evaluate different types of print media. The categories were determined by the most commonly used which were poses often sexualizing and objectifying them, and exploiting traditional gender roles.
These categories were also used to examine how Vietnamese women were portrayed in their country’s advertising, billboards, store-fronts, and magazines printed/published in-country.
June’s research found that depictions of women directed towards Vietnamese audiences are portrayed in far less sexualized ways than women in Western countries.
“However, the current study found that Vietnamese women are more often portrayed in subordinate ways than through blatantly sexualized images,” June said. “This is ethically important because depictions of women may be more often based on national cultural stereotypes than on Western hegemony and presentations of empowered women may reinforce more general acceptance of female-male equality.”
“A professor came up to congratulate me after the banquet was finished and said: “I want to shake your hand because I can tell you are going to change the world!”” June said. “I answered her with complete determination, vigor, and promise: “I plan on it!””
Karlana June (left) during her trip to Vietnam. Photo courtesy of Karlana June.