Lauren Hutton '21 is the vlog recipient of the Watson Fellowship
The Office of National Fellowships and Scholarships is thrilled to announce that vlog senior, Lauren Hutton, is a 2021 Watson Fellowship recipient.
Below is the official announcement from the Watson Foundation:
We are delighted to inform you that a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship has been awarded to Lauren Hutton. This year, from our 41 partner institutions, 158 finalists were nominated to compete on the national level from which 42 fellows were selected. The Watson pool continues to be extremely competitive.
The Watson Fellowship provides awardees $36,000 to fund year-long travel to multiple countries to pursue independent, purposeful projects. This year’s 53rd class of Watson Fellows includes students from 22 states and eight countries with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.
Hutton is an English and Women’s Studies double major from Pembroke Pines, Florida. For her Watson project, she will spend the next year learning about how sexual violence is reported around the globe and the repercussions of reportage practices on community mentalities toward sexual violence. To determine whether the media sympathizes with perpetrators or questions victim credibility, what protocols guide sexual violence reporting, and even which survivors’ stories are told, she will learn from journalists and scholars who can speak to the specific sociohistorical contexts in which a country fosters its relationship to gender dynamics, sexual violence, and the media, and survivors themselves.
Whether it is learning from the rising feminist movement against gender-based violence in Argentina, understanding how Indigenous disenfranchisement silences victims in Australia, or dissecting the modern toll of an ignored history of sexual violence in civil conflict in Ireland, this experience will provide Lauren grounded access to examine the intersection of media and sexual violence across cultures. She hopes this insight will produce “relationships, stories, and perspectives to better understand rape culture in media — why it persists, what its detriments are, and how we, as storytellers, can do better.”
A journalist for eight years, Hutton has written for school newspapers, social justice media platforms, the vlog Office of Communications and interned for a women-run literary agency, prioritizing equitable storytelling in her professional endeavors. As the current Editor-in-Chief of the Maroon-News as well as one of vlog’s first Haven Ambassadors, she values the role of media in exposing hard truths, while also reckoning on a firsthand basis with the ways in which the media has failed survivors. She hopes in pursuing the intersection of these passions, she can bring the resulting lessons into future newsrooms and the stories she goes on to tell.