Press articles and media
I've written articles and commented on advertising for several newspapers and industry publications - click article titles to read:
The Guardian
The Daily Telegraph
Huffington Post
The Drum
Academic research
I recently completed a study into the Nike 'Girl Effect' campaign and its impact in developing countries.
Exerpt:
By examining the Western discourses as well as the key primary Girl Effect texts, this study identifies two dominant discourses created by Nike Girl Effect. The first is a ‘save a schoolgirl, save the world’ narrative where Nike Girl Effect encourages the West to ‘imagine’ how, if girls are educated, they can potentially solve the world’s economic problems by becoming more like ‘us’. The study also highlights how the ‘us’ narrative is contradictory and problematic as the West has a confused relationship with adolescent girls’ sexuality, and schoolgirls in particular. The ‘behaviour change’ campaign in Ethiopia and Rwanda creates a discourse of ‘empowerment’ that projects the West’s ideals of femininity onto adolescent African girls. At the same time, the narrative is identified as closing down the chance for girls to hold any power in a political sense.
The discourse is such that any need for feminist politics and structural changes to the patriarchy in their countries is overlooked. Girls are re-packaged as Western consumers empowered by individual choice and the ability to earn money. Taking an out-dated stereotypical, essentialist view, Nike Girl Effect encourages the belief that girls are more ‘responsible’ than boys and will re-invest the money they earn into their families and communities. The conclusion is that Nike Girl Effect’s campaign is selling little more than a Western ‘fairy tale’ based on flimsy evidence and a colonial attitude to ‘other’ non-Western, dark-skinned girls who need ‘modernising’. The benefit to Nike is twofold: in Africa, by taking a paternalistic role in changing the way girls think and behave, they get to raise the next generation of girls who could potentially work in their factories and wear their sneakers. And in the West they associate themselves with a ‘good cause’ that their target audience will align themselves with and become loyal to the Nike brand.
