Poster Session (Asynchronous Session)
How Art as a Vehicle for Ideas-based Ideologies Can Facilitate the Understanding of Climate Change and Help People Explore a Speculative and Sustainable Future View Digital Media
Poster Session Wenwen Liu
Climate change is impacting on all aspects of contemporary life. Many artists provide a compelling vision for speculative futures awakening a creative consciousness using imagined worldviews. This paper presents my practice-based research that aims to establish how visual art can engage with issues-based concepts and ideologies through presentation, re-presentation, and interpretation as a framework for engaging with issues of climate change and realigning society to sustainable futures. This paper takes theory and artistic practice as methods means to respond to themes and issues of climate change. In the context of practical research, arts-based approach and art theory research alternate between planning, theoretical research, practical action, reflection, and evaluation. Through digital art, this study creates a discursive space that relates to daily life, where people can deeply understand the interconnecting relationships between humans and the planet; simultaneously, it also shows people an achievable ecological future and encourages people to think and find an existence conducive to all. This existence is not the present, but a possibility for human beings to explore the future through the reshaping and re-imagining of the present.
The Whole Country Is Reading: Framing Analysis of Print Media Coverage in the March for Our Lives Movement View Digital Media
Poster Session Mason Brooks
This paper examines the influence of March for Our Lives (MFOL) on national conversations about, and/or coverage of gun safety legislation in two national print media outlets, and one local print media outlet, following numerous murders across American schools, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School. In February 2018, MSD High School students ignited a major Twitter campaign, which challenged existing debates around gun safety legislation aimed at and beyond American Schools. MSD teenagers used Twitter as a central online space for mobilization and named this space “Never Again” or #NeverAgain and #MarchForOurLives.Gun safety legislation was one aspect of a broader American national conversation addressed by MFOL. This paper is important because among other things, MFOL established a significant movement for democratic change and tightening gun safety legislation. This followed the “curious absence” of a popular movement for gun control after mass shootings at Virginia Tech University and Sandy Hook. The research upon which this paper is founded continues to be of importance, as confronting the daily problem of gun violence “remains overlooked” across American print media. MFOL has been credited for influencing public opinion, and galvanizing support for gun control legislative achievement. This paper investigates MFOL discourse in American print publications in relation to achieving stricter gun safety legislation in the United States, using a media studies-oriented researching technique called framing analysis, first implemented by Todd Gitlin in his book The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left.
