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Ep. 7: Where research transforms the women we see

Hear about an innovative programme at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education & Society exposed gender and race inequalities in media advertising. The research, led by Prof Jessica Ringrose explores how media and technology can be harnessed for positive change and has led to the UK advertising industry including more diverse imagery.

Host and Producer

  • Dr Rosie Anderson, Research Fellow, Public Health Policy team, UCL

Guests

  • Professor Jessica Ringrose, Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity, IoE
  • Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, Associate Professor, Digital Humanities
  • Naomi Peter, Co-Founder, Anthill
  • Amelia Jenkinson, CEO, School of Sexuality Education

Transcript

Rosie Anderson  00:04

Hello, and welcome, or welcome back to the podcast where research transforms lives. I'm Dr. Rosie Anderson. And every Thursday this summer, I'm inviting you to take a deep dive with me into the UCL research that has changed the world around you. Sex sells. So the cliche goes, well the cliche doesn't go into is who's buying maybe because for so long the answer was that all money ultimately belong to a man. So when we say sex sells, we've really been talking about one type of sex, the type of sex heterosexual, socially advantaged men want or are told they should want and all the sexualization and anxieties about sexuality and power that go with that. Despite all the changes that have happened for women across the world since mass advertising has been a fact of life. The role of this one type of sex in shifting products never really went unchallenged, just as it stayed on top and film, music, theatre literature. And it's become part of the fabric of our lives, and of our cities. A few years ago, Professor Jessica Ringrose from the IOP and Dr. Kaitlyn Regehr. were asked by the London Mayor's office to investigate what women saw when they travelled through the city. How images of women impacted their well being, and whether they felt represented in the images they saw in advertising. With the participation of a diverse group of London women and girls, including Naomi Peter, they showed how invisible Some women are in popular culture. And the hunger there was for images that represented their experiences of inhabiting their womanhood. I spoke with them and with sexuality educator Amelia Jenkinson, about how their findings have changed policy and sex and relationships education in London, and across the UK. Thank you for talking to me first of all, it's really nice to have us all in the same room. I was gonna ask first up, Jessica, and Kaitlin, about how you came to be doing the particular piece of work that we're gonna be talking about, which was commissioned by the mayor's office in London. And what were the events leading up to that? And how, how did you become involved in, in doing this work in the first place?

 

Jessica Ringrose  02:17

Okay, so you might have remembered a big media event in London in 2015, where there was a really controversial advertisement with a really skinny blonde woman in a bikini yellow bikini and said, you know, beach body ready, and it was for your beach, are you beach body ready, and it was for protein powder. And women just were and girls got really angry about this representation and this invocation with the question mark, in this advertisement. And there was quite a viral protest. And at the time, I was studying some teenage girls who actually went on the protests in Hyde Park, and they had a write up in the New Statesman, they did a story on them. And I guess perhaps the Mayor of London maybe got a hold of this, and saw that I was doing some research on this topic. And they approached me in the late 2017, about a campaign they were going to be doing for Greater London Authority, called the women we see. And it was all about how do women and girls in London feel about representations, particularly in public advertising? What's problematic? And what can we do to change? What may or may not be problematic?

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  03:44

Yeah. And I think it was really interesting is that it was such a clear reaction to that public outcry. There was such kind of a visceral, public outpouring in reaction to this particular advertisement. So the the mayor's office decided to do something about it. And they said, Okay, how can we how can we change this?

 

Jessica Ringrose  04:05

And in fact, Sadiq Khan himself said he didn't want his daughters living in this context. He wanted to personally do something about it. Which we thought was really fantastic.

 

Rosie Anderson  04:15

And Naomi, Amelia, do you remember this happening at all? Were you I mean, I don't even know if you were living in London at the time. I wasn't but I do remember it actually. And I do remember seeing that advert. I was living in Newcastle, so even up north, we heard about it.

 

Naomi Peter  04:30

Ya know, I remember quite quite vividly, but also, as well as the outcry there was there was also an outcry against the advocates the protest, and people complaining about what what's wrong with with what we're seeing? Yeah, I do. That's what I do remember.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  04:49

That's absolutely right. The brand got in touch and actually challenged. A lot of the protesters they they went onto Twitter, and actually rebutted a lot of what was being said. And I think that's a really important part that you have these, you know, young women taking to, to both the streets and to social media to voice their distaste for this, and you have a brand with all the power that a brand, you know, has actually talking back to them and say, No, you're wrong. Yeah, I

 

Amelia Jenkinson  05:24

Yeah I really remember that aspect of it. I was doing a master's in London at the time. So I remember seeing the adverts and feeling pleased when they had been graffitied following Twitter threads where people kind of posting pictures of themselves swearing at the adverts and things. But I was running, like sort of small feminist project, whether with a colleague as well. So yeah, we were definitely sort of aware, aware of it happening and sort of no more page three and things happening at the same time. So there have been quite a loss around a sort of representation. I suppose.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  05:57

When that moment happened, those it was very important year 2015, right, that you had all of a sudden people feeling that they could talk back to things this is this is the year of me, too, right, which followed that autumn after that summer campaign. So there was I think 2015 was a really important moment in time, where you have women starting to, you know, challenge the status quo in the media in a very kind of concrete, substantive way. So I think you're right to say that that actually people start to say, wait a minute, why do I have to be bombarded with this just to go to work or school?

 

Rosie Anderson  06:39

Yeah, I think I think the idea that you could answer back to that was something that was emerging at that point wasn't,

 

Jessica Ringrose  06:45

it's also quite depressing, though, because they actually generated a massive amount of advertising revenue off of that ad. So, you know, the kind of backlash but they're, I can't remember the exact figures. But it went up massively because of the controversy that was created. So ultimately, it was like, a kind of like, a tricky way of trying to actually like, get their brand bigger protein world. So we do have to think about the economics of it, and what's going through their mind when they do these kind of things in the stance. So

 

Rosie Anderson  07:17

So Naomi, how did you get involved,

 

Naomi Peter  07:19

I was invited. I was invited and then came down and had a talk, and I thought it was gonna be quite casual, then there was like, a whole mini production crew. I was like, this is interesting. And then just effectively as a Londoner, shared my personal experience.

 

Rosie Anderson  07:38

And were you particularly drawn to it as a research topic? Is it something that you'd given a lot of thought to the past?

 

Naomi Peter  07:43

Yes, I mean, entirely. For me, representation is absolutely key. It hasn't been around in many areas. Growing up. I mean, for me, watching television, not seeing any people of colour was normal. I remember when I said to my mom, I was like, Yeah, you know, when we were young, we love the cowboys and Indian films. And she was like, Well, no, that's all that they had, basically. And, you know, the, the roles were always so stringent, and they still kind of are, I mean, it's improving. But that's because we're allowing also women into the space. It's not predominantly led by straight sis, white man. And as soon as you create diversity, just not not just in how people look, but also skill sets and cultural backgrounds, and how people think you end up with a far greater representation, which just makes everyone feel included. So is that something I'm interested in? Yes. Because I mean, I like to work in those spaces. I work in it from a creative aspect. And for me, I always pay much more attention to bring women within the industry because it's so heavily male dominated, and also not overly overly sexualized, because that's another thing that we have within the marketing and branding area.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  08:59

Yeah. And I think like one thing that was, in many ways quite unique about this project is we had these three kind of big institutions coming together, we had the academic institution. So there was this research led project that then was feeding into in Naomi's absolutely right, a fairly surface industry, right. Advertising. And so we were operating in conversation with kind of corporate marketing. And then we have this policy angle at this also. So the other big, big kind of institution was was government. And so we were trying to triangulate all of these things within this project. And so, yes, there was the advertising campaign, but ultimately, I feel like the biggest change we were able to make was the policy change. So to feed into advertising standards.

 

Rosie Anderson  09:53

It's a different proposition, isn't it? Then how do we how do we market research this how do we how do we take this out? The World Market Research this so that we can, you know, tap into the disaffected people who went on that March and sell them some stuff. It's a different thing to so having a conversation about the kind of environment you want to live in the kind of society you want to live in, how do you set some standards for that, which is more what you all were trying to do, as well as shape some of those day by day decisions that have been made in advertising companies and things. But that is a big project. And that's a big task. And you use some very creative methods to go about investigating that, ie,

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  10:37

we're really interested in how different women from different boroughs moved through London in used public space. And so we had really diverse encounters. So knew we had I picked up one individual from a nightclub at two in the morning to take her on her trip home. And kind of the the nervousness that she had about that we talked about, we thought about, you know what her journey was like, in contrast to a woman in southwest London, who was a pensioner who just wanted to walk out to get her milk, you know, in contrast to a woman in North London, who wanted to do her very first journey on the overground, with her baby postpartum. Right, so we had these very diverse encounters with individuals. And in our initial interviews, I would call them and we'd figure out, you know, what would be a journey that was most indicative of their use of London. And then we would travel on this journey. And those journeys might have been by foot or by tube or by bus. And I think what was so fascinating about these really kind of textured encounters, was we realised that advertisements change the space. So we had one woman who identified as differently abled, and black British who had two children, and she wanted to take the bus to take her children to the library of seven and a four year old child. And when we walked up to the bus stop, there was a giant advertisement for American Apparel in a woman in flesh coloured underwear, that was almost the you know, the entire side of of a bus stop. And she said, You know, I'm able to monitor the advertising that my children see in my home, if an ad pops up on my laptop, I turn the laptop over, I wait five seconds, and then I turn it back over in the ad has gone. And that's how I protect my children. But I can't flip the bus stop over. And it's through these travelling interviews that we've really got a sense that public advertising is non consensual. And as a result of that, it needs to be held to a higher standard. And that was a big finding within our work. Absolutely.

 

Jessica Ringrose  13:31

Well, we had a very similar type of experience. We went to one of our research schools and we got out of the train. And there was one of the boohoo advertisements of the you know, tasselled bodysuit. And so when we went into the school, this boohoo advertisement, which is very close to their school grounds, became the topic of the conversation, and how, you know, these kinds of advertisements made the girls feel, you know, they felt that it was very sexualizing, they felt that there could be a way of wearing that body suit, maybe in a particular environment, like a festival or something. But the way that they were being sold this body suit didn't wasn't really like that it was it was more that it was an it was more than this advertisement made them feel bad about themselves when they were walking past it on the way to school.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  14:27

And they had to pass it to get it, which I think is crucial. That was on their school journey. They couldn't not pass

 

Jessica Ringrose  14:33

it. Absolutely. So what we did with young people to try and find a space of like resistance and talking back to these processes is we designed an art space methodology of collaging. So what we would do is we would bring in a whole bunch of different advertisements, we'd bring in the free ones from the tube, and just a whole bunch of different magazines and we would just set them a task Have It was just a big blank sheet of paper and like, you know, what would you like to see differently in advertising. And it was like incredible these beautiful collages they made, they separated into small groups, and all sorts of really critical, amazing messages, you know about body hair, about thinness, about ability about, you know, LGBTQ rights, just anything you could think of the because the young people were, you know, extremely critical and savvy and those collages became a really important part of the project because they provided a vehicle, a voice of the young people when they themselves couldn't be there. So now me I don't know if you remember, when we were at the launch of the research, we had those collages displayed displayed. And people kept going up to them and touching them and commenting on them and saying how amazing they were. And that's the power of these innovative Artspace methodologies because they were actually capturing young people's voices they're showing the critically resisting kind of like, I know that Amelia has gone on to kind of like use that in in different ways in in the work that she's been doing in school sexuality education,

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  16:14

my favourite was like taking a model then drawing little tiny black hairs all. Day Yeah.

 

Amelia Jenkinson  16:30

Yeah, we were really inspired by the collages, which is informed a big part of our body image workshop that we do in schools primarily in secondary schools. And we actually start as per the whole project with the Beachbody ready adverts and explain about the complaints about the image and our students like why why do you think it kind of had this reaction to start that conversation. So we give them a bit of scaffolding and a bit of space to think critically about representation, the images that we see around us the impact of that, before we go into the collaging. We use things like MTV decoded, has a great video on kind of white beauty standards and that sort of thing. So giving them similar to the project, that kind of intersectional framework to think about your body image representation. And then we follow a very similar methodology. So give them a bunch of magazines have printed out adverts, using like the boohoo advert and things like that, to sort of recreate all of those images that were really integral to their to the project. And they work together in small groups, again, we leave it fairly open and say like, do be as creative as you like. And then the great thing about it is that we have this physical artefact to leave in the school at the end as well, which then they can display somewhere to get other students thinking critically about these topics and take photos of them and sort of post them on social media and things so that it goes beyond just the workshop itself. But committee sort of Yeah, I guess you that that critical consciousness raising more broadly.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  18:06

So then based on these qualitative Artspace methodologies with the documentary style, travelling interviews and the Craftivism workshops in schools, we then developed the quantitative survey, which I feel was quite innovative often. If you have kind of a mix qual and quants methodological approach, you will have a big survey, and then you'll just slap some qualitative interviews on the top to get a better texture, you know, whereas we were actually going the other way around. We had the qual in forming the survey. Absolutely.

 

Rosie Anderson  18:41

What about the disabled? Because I hardly ever see them being represented.

 

18:41

people hated those boohoo advertisements, right. They said they were sexualizing. And then we would get like responses, like, you know, and this was a survey of 2000 people. So you know that it isn't actually like being used to sell the product. And also just like the failure of the advertising to represent Londoners. They felt very unrepresented. And the groups that felt them, the least represented were black Londoners, and older women. Out there basically said they felt like completely invisible and not represented at all.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  19:22

I mean, that definitely came out in our qualitative research.

 

Jessica Ringrose  19:25

Yeah, it came out stronger. I think in the qualitative. Maybe statistically, there just wasn't enough respondents. But it was definitely one of our recommendations, because when we went around making our binder of prompts, we couldn't find a single image of a disability. So we took some images. No, there was not a single one than the entire TfL. So we ended up going and taking some from online online just to sort of say, Okay, this is what the numbers look like, but we couldn't find a representation in 2018

 

Rosie Anderson  19:59

It's Something I mean, so just to put my nerdy researcher hat on for a moment, it's very interesting, because you're right, usually, quite often people will do a big quantitative survey, and then they'll, they'll add a little, a little bit of spice, a little bit of texture with some with some personal stories, which illustrate some things that they found from that big, big picture, quote, unquote, you flip that on its head. And from, from a research point of view, that's taking an approach, which is about building your own theory, up to a point or building your own framework, at least. And there's something very powerful in doing that, I think. And as I as I was listening to both you, Amelia, but I've also been wondering about you, Naomi, because you have a creative practice of your own, you know, what is so powerful about, about being able to start asking the questions in your own words, as opposed to answering other people's questions and telling your story, because that's what has been described here.

 

Amelia Jenkinson  21:02

I think the methods really allow the conversation to be student led, and I suppose the images that they're seeing are changing, and a lot of ways as we've spoken about. So I suppose we're able to keep the conversation fresh and contemporary by giving them some images, but then inviting them to offer their kind of ideas and contributions around the people that they see the bodies that they see how that affects them. And obviously, so much of that is social media now, which, yeah, as we've said, there's a whole new, a whole different, different area. But this really creates that kind of Launchpad, for discussion, and hopefully kind of discussion in the wider school as well. And we have had students creating sort of group Instagram accounts and things afterwards to raise to sort of raise awareness of body positivity and things like that. So really feeling empowered, by having the opportunity to put their voice out there. I think especially as classroom spaces can often be quite hierarchical and structured, it's a real flipping of that.

 

Naomi Peter  22:07

So, okay, we've started a new company, right? That I'm part of this new company, and until and even though we are consciously and every week being, wanting to be representative wanting to be mindful, wanting to be diverse in all of the aspects and areas, we're now finishing branding, right? And if the guy's really lovely, he's a white male. But whenever we saw the examples, that they'd always be straight white men, and it's, it was like, which part of diversity and inclusion are you just not getting? And he's lovely guy, and he definitely wants it. And then that's when I also realised how much more difficult it is to actually implement these things. Because even with intention, we have an inbuilt bias, right. And if you've been doing something one way for so many years, then it's going to be really hard for you to teach yourself how to get outside of that. But that's also why I think it's important to have an actual diverse table, so that you can continuously work together,

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  23:09

is brought up so well is this idea of what neutral is right? That there is a neutral and that is, you know, white and male, or it's it's white and female that fits into a very, very specific box, very, very specific set of criteria. And I think when we did the report and then launched this advertising campaign, that's what we were really trying to get people to challenge is like, we really need to expand with this so called neutral

 

Jessica Ringrose  23:42

is absolutely and it wasn't just about representing more white women, it was about having lots of different diversity and inclusion. But it's interesting going back to the survey, because we also asked of course, you know, who did feel comfortable and the people that felt the most comfortable with the advertising landscape of London was 25 to 30 year old white men. And everyone else feels you know, crappy so that just kind of like the survey really bore out a lot of really kind of like uncomfortable truths. I you know, we really put forward in the report and we're like, this is like not okay, these things have to change because you're making people feel uncomfortable. And you're actually ending up making a lot of women feel unsafe when you're hyper sexualizing the space through these types of advertisements, like Kaitlyn said that you can't get rid of you're standing there with your children. You're on the tube you're at the bus stop is not okay. We have to hold public advertising to a higher level of accountability.

 

Naomi Peter  24:47

You know, when you think about hypersexuality, hypersexual space space is it something that you guys want to completely erase eradicate or what left Who is acceptable? What levels? Okay?

 

Jessica Ringrose  25:03

I mean, I think it's a very complicated dynamic, and it's not sexuality. That is the issue. It's like sexuality being used in a particular way hypersexual, using particular bodies, to sell products. The human body is not inherently problematic in any way. It's just like, what is being done to it for what means like the male gaze, right? It's like being presented in a particular way to create certain conditions of, like, we were discussing, like shame, like, I don't fit into this box, I'm not good enough, I don't look at like this, I'm not going to be able to let you know we're in a hierarchy where certain people are rewarded for particular ways they look and don't look or whatever. So I think it's like, all of that, and maybe trying to, like, critically challenge that and maybe if it was like, the production of those images was even more with the agency of the person in the image, maybe even but we don't get that sense when we see some of those images like the American Apparel, you know, models her legs, splayed open with like her flesh, underwear, right? Like it's doing a particular thing. It's meant to kind of like provoke

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  26:15

like, I am, I am, I'm pro sex. But but what I what I think is important, and what we're trying to get across in this project is that this is public space in London that is accessible to everyone and should feel safe and comfortable for everyone. But the sexualization of space was one of the big in our survey was one of the biggest things that people had a problem with.

 

Rosie Anderson  26:47

So this might be an interesting moment to bring in you again Amelia, because I'm very keen to talk about the difference between sex education and sexuality education. I mean, I grew up with sex education, which was very mechanical, and I'm hoping has changed. But for right now it seems in that public space, the people who are maximum comfortable are men, white men, aged 25, to 30. And everybody else has been asked to make themselves acceptable to that demographic, or to imagine that they are that demographic and produce content that would be that would speak to them. And that is the sort of way that you find a platform. But there are so many different sexualities, including that one for it for a culture to venerate one at the expense of the others, is really, really kind of one of the things which this research is partly about what is it like to put the tools in the hands of young people who feel they're underrepresented in those depictions of desire, beauty, love, lust, whatever. Because that's what you all have in common. You use methods which give people the tools that allow them to do that.

 

Amelia Jenkinson  28:06

So yeah, I guess in sort of UK policy, sex and relationships, education is the term that's used more internationally, there's sexuality education, which essentially aims to take a more holistic look at young people in their and their needs. So moving away from the mechanical, biological, reproductive, traditional sex ed that we probably all had. And obviously, a lot of the time young people in the UK are still offered. But we are obviously a relationships and sex, sexuality, education, charity, and would cover body image as part of that, the idea being that you can't really extrapolate these kind of different into interlinked aspects of, of an individual, in terms of young people's reactions to doing the collaging, for example, I think you definitely see that positionality that we've been talking about in terms of identity and your relationship to, to images. And I think that the strength of the activity is that there will be some people who will feel very passionately about the topic about body image about certain aspects of representation that we've been talking about, are able to create something that shows that they can work with whoever they feel comfortable with, or they can work individually to put their thoughts and their ideas down on paper in whatever way kind of feels right for them creatively. And then for other people in the class, who maybe have never thought about the fact that a certain image might make people in their peer group feel angry, and for people to say like, I don't want to see this, and this is how it affects me, that's been there for them to see. So there's that opportunity for kind of learning and developing those sorts of skills of empathy, I suppose and thinking about the fact that you won't react in the same way to certain topic. And then your peers and I guess about yes kind of privilege and things like that as well. But in quite a gentle way in in a in a sort of peer to peer learning sense.

 

Rosie Anderson  30:10

Turning back to the GLA, and turning back to the original sort of impetus for this research, why, why it got commissioned, you know, it's very interesting to think of a government of any kind starting to work with this treasure trove of stories and really rich, really layered stuff and then making decisions based on that. But that's what happened. And do you want to tell us a little bit about what did happen? What What were some of the recommendations, perhaps we could start with? And then what did they do with them?

 

Jessica Ringrose  30:40

Well, I mean, I do have to say that the people at the mayor's office are amazing, like they knew about intersectionality, they wanted an intersectional framework, which means that we know that everyone has a diverse positionality, everyone has a race, class, gender, ability, all of these intersecting factors that create people, and that these are based on power hierarchies, like they understood the theory, and that like, can't be underestimated, because then you have like a supportive, conducive environment to create change. So that was really incredible. They were really open to the recommendations, which were like, we need more inclusion, we need more diversity, people don't feel represented, you know, people want advertisements to be held to some kind of like, you know, accountability, they shouldn't be like, overly photoshopped or using bodies to sell products that have no relationship to the product type thing. So a whole bunch of different recommendations. Then we got into the cat, the competition, which was amazing. Trance Transport for London, sort of launched a kind of call for creatives in advertising to come up with a campaign that could kind of embody these recommendations. So that's incredible, because what was on the table for those brands was a lot of a lot of money. I won't say how much but you know, free advertising free advertising on the TFL for a sustained amount of time to the winning brand. And that was a huge moment, which is

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  32:17

the most valuable real estate for for public advertising in the world,

 

Jessica Ringrose  32:25

90 Creative brands, like 90, so it's like 90 teams responded, right? So think about all those brains trying to come up with something better, which is just amazing that they're like, Oh, my God, they're reading our report. So cool. From a personal perspective, the winning campaigns are quite interesting for both myself and Kaitlin. So the winner was Holland. And Barrett's 'Me No Pause', it was basically fighting the stigma of menopause. And in 2018, that was pretty cutting edge and pretty radical to be doing. It was drawing attention to the issue, right. And what was really cool about Holland and Barrett too, is that they actually trained their workforce to have menopause awareness. So they took a real holistic institutional or organisational approach to it, which is going beyond just a billboard, right? Like they're actually taking the issue seriously, personally, for me, I'm going through menopause. So it's been extremely interesting to see that campaign, and then the sort of the after effects of it.

 

Kaitlyn Regehr  33:27

And then the runner, the runner up was Mother care. And then it was a campaign about postpartum bodies. And I was actually pregnant at the time. And I you know, I always think it's the one of the most ridiculous things after you have a baby is that people, the nicest thing people can say to you is, you don't even look like you just had a baby. There's this kind of erasing, you know, we really want to erase the postpartum body, like the best thing that can happen to you is that people don't know that you created a life. Right? And so what was so amazing about the mother care campaign was that you had these postpartum bodies with you know, all their glorious stretch marks and caesarean scars showing while holding their babies. And I think there was just this real celebration of these bodies that had just birthed.

 

Rosie Anderson  34:23

And Naomi if you were to walk, your walking interview. Again. Now, you've already hinted that you feel like things are shifting a little bit, but do you feel like there would be a different walk now? Do you think that would be a different environment? In terms of the images of women's bodies?

 

Naomi Peter  34:43

Yeah, a lot of companies have taken out decided to hold the baton will be genuine or ingenuous.

 

Rosie Anderson  34:54

Facts.

 

Naomi Peter  34:56

So yes, you are seeing a lot more but also, I feel there is here shift due to individuals, like So social media is extremely powerful. And when you talk about stretch marks on, you know, after birth, makes so many women are showing off their natural body. And I've never seen so many of these images before my whole life until now. And I'm like, How is this not? Like, I'm a woman, right? I didn't really know what these bodies looks like. Just because they weren't represented and companies then they love to follow wave. So they'll, they'll listen to you lots of research, they'll they'll look at people who are making waves on social media, and they'll implement it. So yes, definitely, you do see change, I still obviously like more, a lot more. And I'd like it to feel a lot more authentic because it's not in most cases, when you are not part of a culture. It just never feels the same. You know, it's coming from other when you bring somebody in, that actually understands the walk of the life, that language, the tone, it really becomes reflexive you need to allow yourself to be open to letting others in even if it feels uncomfortable, because where where you have discomfort is also where you have the most growth. Yeah.

 

Rosie Anderson  36:22

That's all for now. I hope to see you next time where I will be talking to Professor Jess Dayton about her research into how best to support young people's mental well being at schools and in the wider world. If you can't wait until then, and want to hear more about the impact of UCL research on society in the world, then why not take a listen to Made at UCL presented and produced by our students. Finally, I want to thank Professor Jessica Ringrose, Dr. Kaitlyn Regehr, Naomi Peter and Amelia Jenkinson, our guests, and of course you our listeners. This podcast is brought to you by UCL minds, bringing together UCL knowledge, insight and expertise through events, digital content and activities that are open to everyone.

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