@article{c2c9c0daefe5480f88655cf7476e5464,
title = "Funding the American Dream: On the Biographic Mediation of Aid and Institutional Change in Horatio Alger Scholarship Narratives",
abstract = "This article offers a theory of biographic mediation to explain how life stories become the default mode of accessing institutional support for education. The case study explores the technical process that links ideological and personal narratives in the development of the Horatio Alger scholarship program, while also accounting for institutional change provoked by applicant disclosures.",
author = "Coletu, {Ebony E.A.}",
note = "Funding Information: But even as the bootstrap narrative-with-verification now wins an expansive level of assistance through communication feedback loops that eventually recognized environmental obstacles, the program has grown in another way. In 2016, a new initiative, the result of a robust fundraising campaign, generated additional funding for vocational and technical scholarships at community colleges. The narrative arc of capitalist drive and survival of difficult circumstances serves as a functional bridge to scholarship funding aimed at replenishing the technical workforce. Biographic mediation matters here to the extent that it helps suture a legitimation crisis by funding opportunity-seeking life narratives to fill gaps in the labor market.21 Echoing a federal effort under the Obama administration (“America{\textquoteright}s College Promise”) to make community college programs that cater to immediate market needs free, the Horatio Alger Association highlights the ways biographic mediation bridges financial and human resource transactions between organizations, from business and university partnerships to internship programs through the vetted community of scholars. Institutional change, whether reform toward a welfarist expansion of benefits or a vocationalized understanding of college scholarships, is routed through thousands of brief biographies. In this case, an intersubjective dialogue with Horatio Alger (the brand) and selected Americans who model the ideal of business success renders life writing a functional vector for financial transfers not only to scholarship recipients, but also between organizations. From scholarship funding to fundraising, interorganizational partnerships, and employment agreements, biographic mediation as a communication infrastructure for funding covers a complex set of tasks. As the program broadens its scope, advertising support through competition, it also demonstrates how applicants become a resource for institutional expansion and survival. We can see how formal demands for life narrative mediate financial transactions not only for scholarship recipients, but between institutions that receive multi-year payments for tuition. These institutional partnerships communicate with each other financially, but only after biographic mediation justifies the transaction. As I have noted in another issue of a/b, “biographic mediation is a metareflexive term that calls attention to the uses of life writing within institutions” and, as such, it demands inquiry into competing protocols for self-disclosure that distribute resources, communicate institutional missions, and forge cross-institutional ties (Coletu, “Biographic” 385). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 The Autobiography Society.",
year = "2018",
month = jan,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1080/08989575.2018.1389841",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "33",
pages = "83--108",
journal = "a/b: Auto/Biography Studies",
issn = "2151-7290",
publisher = "Taylor and Francis Ltd.",
number = "1",
}