Katherine Bischoping

Interpreting social influences on holocaust knowledge

The effects of generation, eduation, ethnicity, and gender on Holocaust knowledge are explored, using data from a United States national survey, a university student survey and qualitative interviews with university students. Knowledge levels are greatest among more educated respondents, respondents whose political coming of age was during the Holocaust, and among Jewish respondents. Results for gender are sample-specific. Indepth interviews, which complement survey data, indicate that social psychological processes of identification with Holocaust victims influence knowledge and underlie demographic effects. Thus, public knowledge about the Holocaust is not determined statically by individuals’ social structural characteristics. Rather, public knowledge is flexible and could be enhanced by Holocaust education that emphasizes identification. Implications of the results for theories linking generation to knowledge and for methodological issues in sample design are identified.

RESPONSES TO HOLOCAUST DENIAL: A CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN*

Three elements of discourse about Holocaust denial after a Holocaust denial advertisement appeared in a campus newspaper are studied using a survey of a convenience sample of students and in-depth qualitative interviews. First, the level of acceptance of the Holocaust denial message was found to be minimal, despite findings that knowledge about the Holocaust among students is also low. Second, many students believed that a Holocaust denier had the right to free speech and to advertise in the campus newspaper. The bases for these statements and their relation to civil liberties discourse were found to be somewhat confused Since approaches to Holocaust denial that might be interpreted by students as censorship are therefore likely to backfire, strategies and rationales students themselves employ to reject denial are explored third. Students had strong emotional motivations to dismiss Holocaust denial, rooted in both their unwillingness to feel betrayed and in an array of unexpectedly positive associations and identities that the Holocaust evokes.

Revisiting a Boy Named Jim: Using Narrative Analysis to Prompt Reflexivity

Using examples from qualitative health research and from my childhood experience of reading a poem about a boy devoured by a lion (Belloc, 1907), I expand on a framework for reflexivity developed in Bischoping and Gazso (2016). This framework is unique in first synthesizing works from multidisciplinary narrative analysis research in order to arrive at common criteria for a “good” story: reportability, liveability, coherence, and fidelity. Next, each of these criteria is used to generate questions that can prompt reflexivity among qualitative researchers, regardless of whether they use narrative data or other narrative analysis strategies. These questions pertain to a broad span of issues, including appropriation, censorship, and the power to represent, using discomfort to guide insight, addressing vicarious traumatization, accommodating diverse participant populations, decolonizing ontology, and incorporating power and the social into analyses overly focused on individual meaning-making. Finally, I reflect on the affinities between narrative – in its imaginatively constructed, expressive, and open-ended qualities – and the reflexive impulse.

The Emergence of an Elder-Blaming Discourse in Twenty-First Century China

To people familiar with Confucian teachings about revering elders, it may be surprising that, over the last decade and a half, a discourse has emerged and spread widely in China in which elders are denigrated as out-of-date and corrupt. Using newspaper articles, commentaries and videos, this paper first traces the emergence of intergenerational conflicts over bus seats, along with related phenomena that have become flashpoints in the new elder-blaming discourse. Second, this paper delineates and challenges popular and academic notions that intergenerational differences in values and dispositions entirely account for intergenerational conflict. Specifically, it criticizes a notion, popular in China, that the older generations became corrupted through a series of historical misfortunes from the 1959–1961 famine onward. Aided by the tools of cross-cultural comparison, historicization, and media studies, it offers alternative explanations for intergenerational conflict, including underdeveloped infrastructure, lack of public resources, occupational pressures on the younger generations, and a decline in social trust. Third, this paper discusses why an elder-blaming discourse has been so possible to propagate. Owing to their greater illiteracy and lack of internet access, China’s older generations can rarely make their voices heard amidst sensationalist reporting that over-represents their offenses. Further, that the Chinese population is concerned with starkly increasing and profound social problems, yet is given few opportunities to comment on these problems’ structural roots, contributes to elder scapegoating.

Reframing generations scholarship through the eyes of ordinary Chinese

Scholars studying China’s generations have shown keen interest in devising new generational labels to identify characteristics of particular age cohorts. This analysis, based on 41 interviews with ...