Dr Elizabeth Lovegrove

Dystopias come from somewhere, and they go somewhere. They appear because someone is able to convince others that they are reasonable, and they disappear because someone is able to exploit their weaknesses. They rise, and they fall.
Rise and Fall is a GM-less story game for 2-5 people in which players create a dystopia, explore its rise to power, how everyday life operates during its tenure, and then how the regime is brought down.​​​​​​​

This Brookes Briefing offers principles and practices for sustainable mindset teaching, including a brief background on the issue, practical tips for how to embed sustainable mindset ideas into teaching, and suggestions for further reading.

In this thesis, I explore textual interactions between teenage girls and their magazines to ask how did this textually-mediated conversation between readers and producers of the magazines contribute to the developing narrative about the nature of girlhood on display in those magazines. This use of readers’ interventions in the text is a new approach to the study of girls’ magazines, as well as a contribution to the tension in feminist magazine scholarship between magazines as an insidious tool of patriarchy, and readers as critically aware. I use a combination of theoretical approaches from book history, feminist theory, and critical discourse analysis, and draw primary data both from magazine texts and from survey responses from adults sharing their recollections of reading teen magazines.

I use case studies covering romance, sex, relationships with parents, sexism, and becoming a woman, to examine how changes in the historical context were reflected in teen magazines and especially in the letters girls wrote to the magazines. On each theme, I explore the way the topic developed in the magazines in general, and then focus on a particular magazine in more depth.

Exploration of these case studies, and my survey responses, allows me to argue that, contrary to the usual depiction of girls as passive recipients of information aimed at them, some of them do challenge some of this information, but that the patriarchal influence of magazines nevertheless remains with them into adulthood. Paying close attention to the commercial aims of the magazines, I also argue that the textual interaction between readers and magazines, perhaps especially when readers are expressing disagreement with the magazine, serves an important function for magazines in keeping their readers engaged, but also in mitigating possible threats from advertisers, parent companies, and readers’ parents, that might ensue from the publication of contentious material.

This annotated bibliography introduces the main areas of research into magazines for teenagers, and signposts some of the key thinkers and publications on the topic.