Faculty/Staff Detail

Kathleen Lawrence, Communication Studies Department, had her paper, “A World without Limits: Living in a Barbie Reality as Pop Culture Ambassador” competitively selected for presentation in San Jose, Costa Rica, on July 26 at the International Popular Culture Association annual conference. The theme of the conference was global issues related to popular culture. Lawrence’s paper discussed how Mattel, one of the world’s largest toy companies, has promised generations of children and their parents that girls should boldly “dream, discover and explore their world” through Barbie. Lawrence explored this pack-and-go approach to international relations in the doll world. A rhetorical analysis of the “cultural” narratives, “authentic” artifacts, and “ethnic” costumes provided for each doll in the “Barbie Dolls of the World” series was included along with illustrations.