Unravelling the Black Box, Continued: Investigating Overseas Research and Honing Our Focus
Elise Freeman, the Humanities Correspondent, embarks on an exciting journey in Paris as part of a series titled "Demystifying the 'Black Box' Part I: Holy Moly I Have to Write a Thesis". Her goal is to research advertisements in museum archives and libraries, focusing on Public Service Announcements (PSAs) in French advertisements related to climate change.
To effectively narrow down a broad research topic, Elise follows a series of steps. Firstly, she specifies the type of climate change message in PSAs, choosing to focus on wildfire prevention awareness during the 2025 wildfire season. This focus ties PSAs to a specific aspect of climate change, a concrete event, and a measurable objective, making it manageable and meaningful.
Elise then defines her target audience or sector, selecting urban Parisians as her demographic. She chooses to analyze the effectiveness of a particular style, the emotional appeal, in these PSAs. Furthermore, she limits her research to recent PSA campaigns from the given year, aligning with major climate events in France.
Incorporating evaluation metrics, Elise plans to analyze PSA effectiveness by criteria such as public awareness, behavioral change, and policy support. However, her initial research question was about how PSAs subvert capitalist practices within traditional commercial advertising. Despite not having a corpus of ads, Elise visits Paris for thesis research, spending most of her time at the Bibliothèque Forney, a library specializing in design and the decorative arts.
Elise's research journey is not without challenges. She accumulates more and more information, notes, photos, and observations but struggles to narrow down to a key one. The librarian suggests that she needs to narrow down her research topic. After much contemplation, Elise's thesis argument is now focused on climate change print ads being subversive of the traditional capitalist practices of greenwashing ads.
Elise is excited about writing her thesis and looks forward to sharing her progress. This article is also related to the topics "A Letter to the Juniors on the Senior Thesis", "Senior Thesis", and "Junior Paper (JP)". Despite returning home not any more confident in the scope of her thesis than before, Elise is determined to continue her research and uncover the hidden stories within the advertisements.
Elise Freeman, in her pursuit of understanding the subversiveness of climate change print ads in relation to greenwashing practices, embarks on a journey of education-and-self-development, aiming for personal-growth and learning through her senior thesis. Alongside this research, she also plans to write a junior paper (JP) exploring the effectiveness of emotional appeal in recent urban Parisian PSA campaigns related to wildfire prevention awareness and climate change.
