Science, gender and advertisers: Contextmarkers

The European Commission for Research and Innovation started an initiative on June 21st 2012 to get girls into scientific careers: “Science: It’s a girl thing!”
(See the link “questions about our videoclip?” for some background infos)

A video clip was produced by an ad agency for about 100.000 Euros. This clip was meant to raise interest in the age group of 9-13 year old females.
It worked exceptionally well as a viral campaign on what context markers not to use to create the context “Women as sciencists”.
With other words: The video – unintentionally – succeeded as discussion starter because it failed to use the right contextmarkers (whatever these are).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA[/youtube]
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/28/stupid-eu-video-psa-shows-how.html

Again: Two approaches to initiate education, one obvious to inform and integrate; and one to question invisible medio-cultural givens.

Addendum (July 5th 2012):
On July 4th 2012 the german newspapers are all posting articles on the campaign. It had thus been highly successful as awareness-raiser. See e.g. this (google translated) article from “Die Tageszeitung” (taz): “Failure is Pink”

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About Wey

My name's Wey-Han Tan, I graduated 2007 as Diplompädagoge (educational scientist) in Hamburg, and 2009 as M.A. in ePedagogy Design. Currently I work at the project "Universitätskolleg" as scientific assistant at the Faculty for Educational Sciences, Psychology and Human Movement at the University of Hamburg. My research interests are game based learning, second order gaming, media theory and (radical) constructivist approaches. I like pen-and-paper-roleplaying, especially in contemporary horror settings like "KULT" or "Call of Cthulhu".
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