InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

This issue of InterActions features four articles that remind us the world we live in, with all of its inequities, is socially constructed, not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Each article helps us to “see” a particular conglomeration of forces for what they are.

Radical women of color have a vibrant history of autonomous publishing practices, producing books, zines, and other media; in recent years, these writers have turned to blogs as venues for publishing and communication.  However, the writing produced by women of color continues to be subject to appropriation, without attribution, by white writers.  Using three case studies, I examine this phenomenon and argue that librarians must collect radical women-of-color blogs in order to help preserve their writing and combat white appropriation.  Then, drawing on practices in zine librarianship, I make specific recommendations for librarians interested in curating blog collections.

Using a theoretical framework extended from Rimal and Real’s (2003) Risk Perception Attitude framework, this research examines women’s information behavior, specifically information finding and reaction to information, on government health websites in the context of HIV/AIDS prevention. In the empirical study, think aloud and structured individual interview were used to collect data from 40 female university students in the U.S. in their completion of an information seeking task and an interview. Factors that influence women’s information finding and reaction to information were identified. This research challenges and extends Rimal and Real’s (2003) Risk Perception Attitude framework by proposing an Extended Risk Perception Attitude framework. This research also exemplifies Gupta’s (2000) categories of social construction of gender and sexuality in the HIV/AIDS discourse, and adds new evidence that proves their validity. In addition, this research enriches the literature in health-related information behavior by switching the research focus to other information behaviors than information seeking.

This paper employs Johan Galtung’s (1990) typology of violence – direct, structural and cultural – as an analytical lens to examine the ways in which schools, teachers and students draw on aspects of hegemonic masculinity to establish and endorse difference between boys’ and girls’ capacities to be violent, and willfully ignore performances of violent masculinities. It focuses on school values and policies represented in disciplinary structures, contact sports, and curricular knowledges, as well as practices of students and teachers, to explore the ways in which they collectively code violence in the script of masculinity. The conclusion proposes strategies for challenging the cultural violence of hegemonic masculinity in schools.

Despite the plethora of data collected and analyzed about tuition as a primary cost of higher education, little to no attention has been paid to fees as a portion of that cost.  Most of the existing research, including reports from the National Center for Education Statistics, combines tuition and required fees into one entity, and rarely separates fees from tuition.  Framed by the theory of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), this analysis examines the use of required fees as part of the overall price of a higher education institution, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.  Further, factors related to internal pressures facing public institutions are correlated with the use of fees as a revenue generating strategy.  Findings suggest that sales and services of auxiliaries and gifts and government appropriations are positively related with the use of fees within the overall price of a higher education institution, indicating fees may be a result of universities participating in market-like behaviors.  Results indicate institutions may be using fees as a way to increase the cost of attendance without directly increasing list tuition.

Review of "Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century" by John B. Thompson.

This is a book review for the 2011 book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law by Dean Spade.

Book Review of the edited volume, The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle.