Research & Action Report, Fall/Winter 2015
Acceptances, Appointments & Recognition
Ellen Gannett, M.Ed., director of the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), is serving on a committee organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to plan a workshop on character education. The purpose is to review the literature on character education focusing on out-of-school programs, identify promising practices from the research, and explore the challenges of measuring the efficacy of character education programs.
Jennifer Grossman, Ph.D., WCW research scientist, Sumru Erkut, Ph.D., senior research scientist, and their WCW research team received the Association for Planned Parenthood Leaders in Education 2015 Douglas Kirby Apple Award. This honor is given to those whose work evaluating interventions to improve sexual health has helped to advance the field, or whose research on sexuality has provided new insights that are critical to improving sex education programs. The research team was recognized for its work conducting the impact evaluation of the Massachusetts’ Chapter’s Get Real: Comprehensive Sex Education That Works, making it the first Planned Parenthood-authored curriculum to be added to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ list of evidence-based programs.
Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., WCW senior scholar, is featured in The Illusionists, a new film about the globalization of beauty, which examines how global advertising firms, mass media conglomerates, and the beauty, fashion, and cosmetic surgery industries are changing the way people around the world define beauty and see themselves. From the halls of Harvard to the galleries of the Louvre Museum, from a cosmetic surgeon’s office in Beirut to the heart of Tokyo’s Electric Town, the film explores how these industries saturate society with narrow, Westernized, consumer-driven images of beauty that show little to no respect for biological realities or cultural differences. Duke University recently acquired Kilbourne’s Papers, 1918-2014 and undated as part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture. The collection includes: clippings, tear sheets, correspondence, research reports and other printed materials; slides and slide presentation texts; audiovisual materials in multiple formats; book drafts and research files used for teaching and production of Kilbourne’s books and films.
This past spring, Layli Maparyan, Ph.D. the Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), named Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., founder and senior associate of the National SEED Project, the Susan McGee Bailey Research Scholar named in honor of the Centers’ longtime director, beginning July 2015. Maparyan, in announcing the award, noted that McIntosh has been engaging in groundbreaking work for 36 of the 40 years of the Centers’ existence—work that has contributed intellectually not just to WCW, but to the wider world. Maparyan noted that McIntosh’s “contributions to research have been of a unique kind—often, theoretical insights that grew from rigorous ‘research on the self’—a careful and close self-inspection that yielded transformative insights about society and social change… These insights were then translated many times and many ways across many audiences and into many forms of action, making Peggy’s work accessible and widely circulated and making Peggy herself a household name.”
Celebrating Peggy McIntosh
In October 2015, hundreds of colleagues, supporters, and academics from across the U.S. joined WCW in recognizing Peggy McIntosh during special events on the Wellesley College campus to mark her retirement and legacy of social justice work and visionary leadership: in Inclusive Curricula and Teaching Methods, around Feelings of Fraudulence, on Privilege Systems and her Interactive Phase Theory, and for the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum. The Peggy McIntosh Fund for Educational Equity and Social Justice was also established to honor her legacy of cutting-edge work and visionary leadership. See photos and learn more about making a gift in her honor at www.wcwonline.org/CelebratingPeggy.
