Sep 10, 2024

Dr. Tara Walker, assistant professor of Communication, presented her paper titled "Complicated girls suck: A feminist autoethnography of media and outlaw emotions at the turn of the 21st century," at the national Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in August.

Walker won the Best Poster honor in the Commission on the Status of Women Division. 

The paper uses 30 years of personal journals as data. In it, Walker tracks her own development as a “complicated girl” in the 1990s and 2000s, alongside representations of complicated women in media, pop culture and literature. 

The autoethnography employs feminist theory, specifically Jaggar’s (1989) ideas about outlaw emotions to enhance understanding of the dichotomies around being a complicated woman in the post-Me Too world.

"For this poster, I used an interactive design where I asked people to write comments on Post-it notes in response to the prompt 'What makes you complicated?' I also asked people to leave their names and emails if they were interested in participating in follow-up interviews," Walker said.