Leonard Baehr went all the way at LU Leipzig: he started with a BSc in Business Management and continued with the MSc in Management. The thesis he wrote for his Master’s degree was now accepted by one of the most prestigious conferences in Management. In this interview with us he explains how he developed his thesis together with his supervisor Dr Jose M. Alcaraz.
LU Leipzig: Your thesis is named Unpacking performative female representation: a critical multimodal analysis in two German NGOs. What area of research is this thesis located in?
Leonard: Basically it’s it’s all about gender as a performative: How we enact it, how we behave, how we showcase our gender – through various forms of speech and gesture, e.g. the way you walk.
LU Leipzig: How did you develop on this research topic within your thesis? What did you actually examine?
Leonard: Well, so we looked at videos, images and texts of two NGOs – all kind of promotional material presented on their websites, their YouTube channels, and their social media. And we wanted to see how they represent and how they showcase the female gender.
LU Leipzig: Before we go into more detail on what you found out, what made you think: ‘I want to do research on this topic with this specific approach?’
Leonard: My lecturer in Management, Jose, inspired me, because he was talking a lot about multimodality. He’s very interested in this research method, where it’s all about camera angles, positioning of the camera, lighting, sound, gaze, gestures. Jose is fascinated to look into all these things to find nuances. He did his entire own research and wrote a paper with some collaborators on multimodality to find societal issues like gender discrimination or gender inequality. And that’s where I decided, I also want to do something on that topic with multimodality – this super interesting approach, in my opinion.
LU Leipzig: So take us into your thesis now. How did you develop it?
Leonard: We started off with around 30 NGOs. Then I ranked them by website traffic, Instagram interactions, YouTube views to see which ones were gaining the most engagement online. Besides that I did another section of exactly those NGOs and linked them to their industry or sector that they belong to, e.g. animal care. In the end, we decided to go for two NGOs with lots of promotional material to examine and within the same sector of social work to compare them better. Those two NGOs are Deutscher Caritasverband e. V. and Diakonie Deutschland.
LU Leipzig: Ok, so once these two NGOs were selected, how did you analyse all their imagery they publish?
Leonard: I scoured everything! I went through their entire Instagram history of the past 5 to 10 years. I collected all this data, this massive amount of images and videos. This was the most fruitful in terms of what they showcase. Basically it’s about introducing people to the organisation and showing what good they have done.
LU Leipzig: That a huge database! So what were your findings and what was the most memorable example?
Leonard: One interesting example is the image film from Caritas on YouTube: They show the director. He’s one of three board members of Caritas – two male and one female. So they didn’t choose the female director to represent the company or what we call the agent of change. The organization acts as a change-maker. And the male director represents this and he gets the audience’s credit. He’s the face for the message ‘We make change possible’. And in comparison with the following image, it’s even more interesting: We see a classroom with female people at the front, blurred in the background are all the male characters. So after the male director thanked the people who work for him, or rather for the organization, we now see the women as the ones who actually have to be the people who care, who are nurturing, who are responsible for loving and caring – which is often assumed to be stereotypically feminine.
LU Leipzig: Interesting! And is this something you found more times in other imagery or in the other NGO as well?
Leonard: There’s of course always a level of interpretation, and it’s obviously not fully representative to this entire NGO because in the end they are doing good things. It’s the nuances we see, and it’s not really them to be blamed for it, but rather this is what our society may think of females. It showcases that we are able to still reproduce these gender stereotypes constantly, even if we don’t intend to actively reproduce them. That’s basically the takeaway. From my point of view, this was actually the interesting part: You have to be very open and very thoughtful of your words, your actions and everything you do to not fall into this trap. With my thesis I really found my niche topic where I want to exist in academia: gender studies. I’m definitely planning to continue that, hopefully with a PhD.
LU Leipzig: Nice to hear, that after all your intensive research, you still have more motivation to continue your academic journey.
Leonard: I mean, I did not do it all by myself. There were all these people in the back helping me, especially Jose. When we went through these videos, we didn’t look at them once, we looked at them hundreds of times. After the 10th viewing, we said ‘Can we find something more here? Can we look at this from a different angle? Is this all we have here?’ For me it was perfect because, I could just basically fire anything at him that I had in my mind. And he would give me honest critical feedback. I valued his intellect a lot because I really think very highly of him as a person, but also his academic level, because I think he has very good insights and he’s very on point – especially when we’re talking about gender discrimination.
LU Leipzig: And now that your thesis is being published, it’s actually quite successful, right?
Leonard: Yes, it has been accepted by the Academy of Management Conference in Copenhagen this year. Jose and I plus another researcher refined the thesis in terms of format and made it a bit more actual, so it becomes a proper research paper. And we just sent it in out of curiosity to see what would happen. And yeah, it got accepted!
LU Leipzig: Congrats. So, we’ll see you in Copenhagen soon!
