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 ֱ 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:
Reproductive Justice
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 ֱ State peers to join them to contribute to a manifesto on reproductive justice.
Living Wage
The pandemic has added to the economic problems of many ֱ 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.
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Food Insecurity
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, ֱ 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.