Students Imagine a 'Better World' in Media and Movements Seminar
The CCI course Media and Movements explores social movements of our time through storytelling, strategy and advocacy. In this semester’s seminar, themed “Building a Better World,” students were required to select a specific human rights or human dignity issue that impacts their Kent State peers and then reimagine a better future based on primary and secondary research.
Here's a look at the issues our students examined and the engagement events they planned for the campus community:
The concept of reproductive rights is often reduced to abortion and birth control — an exclusionary view, as it doesn’t consider other essential issues like the rights of men and the rights of transgendered individuals. A team of students advocated for the concept of reproductive rights to be replaced with reproductive justice, a more holistic, inclusive, intersectional concept that recognizes reproduction is as complex as any other healthcare or social justice issue. The team working on this issue invited their Kent State peers to join them to contribute to a manifesto on reproductive justice.
The pandemic has added to the economic problems of many Kent State students while also intensifying their resistance to working at jobs that do not pay a living wage. The lack of a living wage ($15/hour) has clear consequences: Many students must work more than one job, which affects their academic performance and physical and emotional health. Students working on this issue hosted a living wage simulation that enabled their peers to assume personae that help them experience the differences between an $8.80 hourly wage and a $15 hourly wage.
Food insecurity is about more than uncertain access to food. A team of students created a “plating project” that enabled peers to share their own definitions of food insecurity, which included: life-threatening dietary restrictions that make eating in dining halls a high-risk proposition, eating disorders, social anxieties related to eating in public and more. The implications of these things are serious; students learned through secondary research that it can lead to poor academic performance, unhealthy binge eating, weight gain, malnourishment, anxiety, depression and more. In response, students hosted a workshop to create an expanded, Kent State definition of food insecurity.
Media and Movements is part of the Media Advocacy minor, which prepares students to explore advocacy as both a professional discipline and an act of engaged citizenship.