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Mainstream media reports on the rise of “nepo babies” have brought renewed attention to the advantages that famous and well-connected parents can provide. Drawing from a sample of 331 in-print and online articles, we apply a cultural frame analysis to study news media discourse around nepotism with a focus on how celebrity children are represented and whether these representations support or refute an ideology of meritocracy. We find that nepotism is often framed in one of four ways. First, and most commonly, nepotism among celebrity children is rendered defensible through allusions to hard work and sensationalized accounts of celebrities’ lives and lifestyles. Second, nepotism is objected to for the uneven privileges that celebrity parentage can provide. Third, a minority of articles contextualize privilege and produce order. The remaining frames presented a degree of indifference, which functioned to normalize nepotism. Together, most frames reinforce the American ideology of meritocracy, suggesting that hard work and talent explain the success of celebrity children, while hiding structural inequalities and the insidiousness of privilege from view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic created a period of social and economic crisis that introduced two distinct problems for social media influencers. At the same time that the pandemic made their work economically precarious, it also made their work morally hazardous, as large-scale human suffering made influencers' lifestyle promotions appear out of step with their audiences' day-to-day experiences. How did influencers and the personnel they work with organize their labour to navigate uncertainty and avoid moral criticism? Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with fashion influencers as well as the industry personnel they work with, I explain how influencers and those close to them respond to and combat issues of uncertainty and change during a period of crisis. I pair this interview data with a year-long online observation of influencers' labour online. In a calibrated move from aspiration to authenticity, influencers stressed the 'ordinary' and 'everyday' qualities of their lives during the pandemic, evading moral sanctions against profit-making. Throughout, they leveraged their tentacular connections with audiences to refine content in step with shifting demand and desire online, maximizing their market reach and annual revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite advances in clinical science, the burden of mental health problems among youth is not improving. To tackle this burden, clinical science with youth needs methods that include youth and family perspectives on context and public health. In this paper, we illustrate how community-engaged research (CEnR) methods center these perspectives. Although CEnR methods are well-established in other disciplines (e.g. social work, community psychology), they are underutilized in clinical science with youth. This is due in part to misperceptions of CEnR as resource-intensive, overly contextualized, incompatible with experimentally controlled modes of inquiry, or irrelevant to understanding youth mental health. By contrast, CEnR methods can provide real-world impact, contextualized clinical solutions, and sustainable outcomes. A key advantage of CEnR strategies is their flexibility—they fall across a continuum that centers community engagement as a core principle, and thus can be infused in a variety of research efforts, even those that center experimental control (e.g. randomized controlled trials). This paper provides a brief overview of this continuum of strategies and its application to youth-focused clinical science. We then discuss future directions of CEnR in clinical science with youth, as well as structural changes needed to advance this work. The goals of this paper are to help demystify CEnR and encourage clinical scientists to consider adopting methods that better consider context and intentionally engage the communities that our work seeks to serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic boundaries shape how we see and understand both ourselves and those around us. Amid periods of crisis, these boundaries can appear more salient, sharpening distinctions between 'us' and 'them' and reinforcing inequalities in the social landscape. Based on 50 in-depth interviews about pandemic experiences among Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions, we examine how this community distinguishes between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving', and how emotions related to blame and resentment inform the boundaries they draw. We find that people with disabilities and chronic health conditions drew boundaries based on unequal health statuses and vulnerabilities and between those who are and are not legitimately entitled to government aid. Underlying these dimensions are a familiar set of moral tropes that respondents use to assert their own superiority and to inveigh their frustrations. Together, they play an important role in solidifying boundaries between groups, complicating public perceptions of policy responses to crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity in the fashion industry, it seems, is on the rise, with recent efforts poised to address the exclusion of people with disabilities. Based on a content analysis of editorials, advertising campaigns, and 213 online consumer comments between 2014 and 2019, we examine how diversity is showcased: specifically, whether images of disability serve to challenge or reinforce negative stereotypes. We find that market logics constrain the use of models with disabilities and shape their posturing in advertisements and fashion images. While consumers respond favorably to these images, demanding disability be more regularly and prominently featured, they are often responding to images that are sanitized and naïvely conceived. Nonetheless, we show how consumer feedback interacts with the production process, which in turn can challenge market logics, providing opportunities for increased representation. We shed light on how cultural representations reflect, shape, and challenge broader sociocultural norms and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]