El Colectivo de Escritores Jóvenes: Cultural Resistance to the Chilean Dictatorship

Mie Inouye, International Letters and Visual Studies & Political Science (Class of 2009)

Research Advisor: Professor Nina Gerassi-Navarro

Between 1973 and 1990, Chile experienced a military dictatorship unlike any previous or subsequent political regime in its history.  With the abrupt transition to dictatorship on September 11, 1973 came a corresponding cultural transformation.  Along with the wider cultural changes that took place after 1973, Chile’s literary scene was drastically altered due to the policy of censorship, the military intervention of universities, the realities of political exile and imprisonment and the dismantling of the state-run publishing house. Paradoxically, despite the many impediments to writing and publishing, Chilean writers of the generation of the eighties attest to the fact that there had never been more literary production.  The Collective of Young Writers (Colectivo de Escritores Jóvenes), which formed in Santiago in the early eighties and united writers who were beginning their literary careers under emergency political conditions, is one example of the type of cultural movement that flourished under the dictatorship.  This group operated based on the objectives of generating cultural activity, promoting solidarity among increasingly isolated writers, creating a space for democracy within the dictatorship, and resisting the dictatorship from its members’ positions as writers.  Drawing from a series of interviews with former members of the collective, I present the group’s history and examine its relationship to cultural and social movements that unfolded post-1973. I also tell the stories of the generation of writers that began their careers during the dictatorship and analyze their writing in relation to the unique set of political circumstances that accompanied their development as writers. 

2. Psychology: This abstract is a good example of how to explain the significance of findings that did not match the researcher’s hypothesis.

Can nonverbal behavior in popular media influence social category learning?

Molly Lorenzo, Psychology, Multimedia Arts Minor (Class of 2009)

Research Advisor: Nalini Ambady

Social categories (e.g., race, gender, and nationality) have tremendous social consequences for individuals within those categories. This study investigates whether arbitrary categories, like shirt color, can be learned and integrated as a meaningful social category. It was hypothesized that people will be more likely to make distinctions of shirt color only if they are exposed to repeated instances in which one shirt color is nonverbally favored over another. Participants viewed screen shots of popular television shows to induce nonverbal favoring of one of two shirt colors, or neither in the control condition, and all were then given a memory task using a “who said what” paradigm to measure if shirt color was established as a new social category. I expected confusions in “who said what” to occur more frequently within a shirt color than between shirt colors and that this confusion should be more prevalent in the experimental conditions than in the control condition. Contrary to hypotheses, the number of within and between category errors did not depend on the experimental condition, F (2, 60) = 2.02, p = .14. Thus, the shirt color was not processed as a social category. The results reinforce the mystery of why certain social categories like race have greater consequences than others (e.g., ear size or shirt color).

3. Biology: Even though this abstract uses language specific to biology, an educated reader can understand the significance of this study by reading the first and last sentences.