Papers by Katherine Bischoping
Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 2018
To people familiar with Confucian teachings about revering elders, it may besurprising that, over... more To people familiar with Confucian teachings about revering elders, it may besurprising that, over the last decade and a half, a discourse has emerged and spread widelyin China in which elders are denigrated as out-of-date and corrupt. Using newspaper articles,commentaries and videos, this paper first traces the emergence of intergenerational conflictsover bus seats, along with related phenomena that have become flashpoints in the new elder-blaming discourse. Second, this paper delineates and challenges popular and academic notionsthat intergenerational differences in values and dispositions entirely account for intergenera-tional conflict. Specifically, it criticizes a notion, popular in China, that the older generationsbecame corrupted through a series of historical misfortunes from the 1959–1961 famineonward. Aided by the tools of cross-cultural comparison, historicization, and media studies,it offers alternative explanations for intergenerational conflict, including underdevelopedinfrastructure, lack of public resources, occupational pressures on the younger generations,and a decline in social trust. Third, this paper discusses why an elder-blaming discourse hasbeen so possible to propagate. Owing to their greater illiteracy and lack of internet access,China’s older generations can rarely make their voices heard amidst sensationalist reportingthat over-represents their offenses. Further, that the Chinese population is concerned withstarkly increasing and profound social problems, yet is given few opportunities to comment onthese problems’ structural roots, contributes to elder scapegoating.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in b... more The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
Narrative Inquiry, 2017
Over the last decade, sometimes violent conflicts have erupted between generations in China over ... more Over the last decade, sometimes violent conflicts have erupted between generations in China over who should have a seat on a crowded bus. Our previous research used macro-level social factors to explain the emergence of discourses that blamed elders as conniving and demanding, and youth as pampered and selfish. The present study is the complementary micro-level analysis of why agentic individuals instantiate the first of these discourses, the elder-blaming one. Using tools from narrative analysis, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we explore three narrative phenomena. First, we demonstrate that ageist stereotyping is not instantiated as an end in itself; rather, it can be used for identity maintenance involving age, geopolitics, and interpersonal ties. Second, incorporating principles of dramaturgy, we investigate how the phenomenon of one speaker “topping” another’s story – i.e., by raising the stakes of conflict and bringing matters to a more surprising, and satisfying resolution – is intertwined with the use of stereotypes. Finally, drawing on the participants’ renarration of a film plot that we can compare to our own renarration, we investigate how memory comes to the service of story sequencing and stereotyping alike. Here, we use the concept of “conversational memory” or “social memory”, which configures memory as a malleable, context-sensitive construct, often valued most for it present-day relevances, including to the interactive process that elicits them.
Keywords: Small stories, narrative analysis ageism, stereotyping, Chinese buses, identity, conversational memory, social memory
Sex Roles, 1993
Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moor... more Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moore, who theorized that the gender differences in topic choice he observed in a field observation study would persist over time, as they were manifestations of men's and women's "original natures. "In this paper, I report a 1990 replication of Moore's study, in which similar but smaller gender differences in topic choice are found. In order to explore further the apparent trend toward smaller gender differences, reports of quantitative observation studies conducted between 1922 and 1990 are examined. Other explanations besides change over time--such as variations in conversation setting and audience, target populations, and researcher's intentions---may account for the decline in gender differences in topic choice. Social influences are seen more clearly in the discourse about gender differences in conversation than in gender differences in conversation topics themselves.
Sex Roles, 1993
Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moor... more Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moore, who theorized that the gender differences in topic choice he observed in a field observation study would persist over time, as they were manifestations of men's and women's "original natures. "In this paper, I report a 1990 replication of Moore's study, in which similar but smaller gender differences in topic choice are found. In order to explore further the apparent trend toward smaller gender differences, reports of quantitative observation studies conducted between 1922 and 1990 are examined. Other explanations besides change over time--such as variations in conversation setting and audience, target populations, and researcher's intentions---may account for the decline in gender differences in topic choice. Social influences are seen more clearly in the discourse about gender differences in conversation than in gender differences in conversation topics themselves.
The Journal of Men's Studies, 2012
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1998
Holocaust-knowledge surveys attracted considerable public attention in 1993, when media reports s... more Holocaust-knowledge surveys attracted considerable public attention in 1993, when media reports stated that 22% of the American public appeared to deny the existence of the Holocaust. Once this disturbing result was explained by question-wording experiments (experiments that exposed difficulties with the wording of the questions), public-opinion researchers abandoned discussion of Holocaust-knowledge surveys. In retrospect, the discourse about these surveys appears to have been limited, overlooking critical assumptions about the methodologies and theoretical bases of Holocaust-knowledge surveys. In this paper, assumptions about the primacy of question-wording studies, the exclusion of emotions from definitions of knowledge, and the omission of critical-thinking skills from these definitions are identified with data from a multi-method study of Holocaust knowledge. The paper employs theoretical perspectives in Holocaust and genocide studies to search for alternative methods of conceptualizing and measuring knowledge, and to illustrate how methods and meaning could be better integrated.
The Review of Higher Education, 1998
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Papers by Katherine Bischoping
Keywords: Small stories, narrative analysis ageism, stereotyping, Chinese buses, identity, conversational memory, social memory
Keywords: Small stories, narrative analysis ageism, stereotyping, Chinese buses, identity, conversational memory, social memory
The rewarding, enjoyable aspect of academic inquiry is testing how far these analytical ideas can be pushed and explored. As part of our annual justice conference, we invited academic contributions as well as photographic and artistic exposures of the following approaches to justice and visibility including but not limited to: social justice; ecological justice; indigenous justice; urban justice; human rights and justice; works on surveillance; the role of sight in criminal justice; media representations of law; order and justice more broadly; the use of visual methods in the justice disciplines; and the visuality of forensics. As the reader will see in what follows, the contributors have been comprehensive and meticulous in their examination of these topics.
IJR Volume 5
Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, Visualizing Justice (IJR) Volume 5: Winter 2016, editors Richard Jochelson, Kevin Walby, Michelle Bertrand and Steven Kohm, Centre for Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS), The University of Winnipeg, ISSN 1925-2420
Table of Contents
Introduction Kevin Walby, Richard Jochelson, Michelle Bertrand and Steven Kohm
Visualizing Cultural Criminology: See(k)ing Justice in the Films of Atom Egoyan Steven Kohm and James Gacek
Meth, Markets, Masculinities: Action and Identity in AMC’s Breaking Bad Diana Young
“When She Cracks”: The Visual (Re)Construction of “Deadly Women” in Infotainment Media Isabel Scheuneman Scott and Jennifer M. Kilty
“Let’s Be Bad Guys”: (Re)Visualizing (In)Justice on the Western Frontier in Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity Garrett Lecoq
The Representation of Prison Subculture Models in Mid- 20th Century Hollywood Film Courtney A. Waid-Lindberg, Daryl J. Kosiak and Kristi Brownfield
Visualizing Interrogative Injustice: Challenging Law Enforcement Narratives of Mr. Big Operations through Documentary Film Amar Khoday*
Linking Visuality to Justice through International Cover Designs for Discipline and Punish Katherine Bischoping, Selom Chapman-Nyaho and Rebecca Raby*
Rationale: Of Manicures, Make-Overs, Matryoshkas, and Transformation Visualizing My Legal Studies Rebecca Bromwich
Visible Justice: YouTube and the UK Supreme Court Leslie J Moran
Reflections on Visual Methods from a Study of Manitoulin Island’s Penal History Museums Kevin Walby and Justin Piché
Visualizing Prison Life: Does Prison Architecture Influence Correctional Officer Behaviour? An Exploratory Study Michael Weinrath, Camella Budzinski and Tanis Melnyk
(In) Visible Histories: Colonialism, Space and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Mandi Gray and Karl Gardner
Justice as Invisibility: Law, Terror, and Dehumanization Robert Diab
Examining Narratives of Cultural Diversity in Mental Health Law Ruby Dhand
Visualizing Indigenous Perspectives of how the Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Program (SCYAP) Addresses Social Exclusion John Charlton and John Hansen
*Khoday wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Legal Research Institute at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law as well as the helpful research assistance of Eric Kerson
*Bischoping et al are grateful to C. Lewis Kausel and Simon Penny for their insights, and Andrey Bondarenko, Mykola Lyalyuk, David Moffette, and Hazel Smith for their assistance in identifying images.
ABASTRACT The experiences of indigenous peoples have been left outside the framework of comparative genocide research. We first discuss conceptual
In this paper we investigate Chinese generations’ memories of Lei Feng (1940-1962), a communist national role model famed for his countless everyday acts of serving others in a collectivist spirit. Using interviews with forty-one participants ranging from eighteen to eighty-one, we argue that four Chinese generations, as defined by their age (and education), have largely distinctive memories of and attitudes toward Lei Feng. The generation that received its early education during the heyday of the Lei Feng campaign largely remains devoted to him and references the “Lei Feng spirit” in characterizing contemporary China as morally declining. Their weathered predecessors as well as the youngest consumerist generation have a more detached or even irreverent perspective on Lei Feng’s legacy. The final generation, caught in China’s transition from a state-planned, revolutionary, virtuocratic society to one of free enterprise, consumerism, and meritocracy, holds the most heterogeneous perspectives. For several of this generation, the mismatch between their sociopolitical context and the pedagogical messages about Lei Feng has led to a painstaking interrogation of moral obligations in contemporary China.
In 1963, Chairman Mao singled out for national hero status a man named Lei Feng, an ordinary soldier said to have done countless selfless deeds in expression of his collectivist spirit. In China, Lei Feng’s iconic status has been largely maintained, bolstered by the continuing circulation of his diary passages and photographs illustrating his kindly spirit. However, skeptical observers both inside and outside of China disparage the Lei Feng legend, judging not only his good deeds but also the artifacts documenting them to be laughably fraudulent constructs of the Communist Party. We take advantage of Lei Feng as an occasion through which we examine the cultural politics in evidencing and in meaning-making about pranks, across both western democracies and Chinese communism. First, we observe that critics of the Chinese communist regime tend to position unadulterated evidence as the condition of political integrity. These skeptics take the enduring propagation of “inauthentic” evidence to be indicative of a government based on illegitimate tactics and/or of a credulous population. By interviewing research participants in China, we identify an alternate perspective in which the Lei Feng artifacts intermingle evidential and pedagogical representation, and can be justifiably curated by the state for societal good. Second, we focus on the Chinese and Western discussions about a Lei Feng-related trick that a western journalist had played on a Chinese journalist one April Fools’ Day. Examining Western commentary on this trick, we question why the possibility that it had “gone too far” was not addressed, and propose that positioning Chinese as humorless does ideological work. Examining Chinese commentary, we observe how western practices of April Fools’ Day are positioned as hazardous and rumormongering – a positioning no less ideological.
Key Words: Authenticity, Cultural Politics, Evidence, Humor, Holidays, Lei Feng