Enacting Social Change Through a University-Community Multimodal Magazine

• In Event: Praxis for Racial Justice: Undergraduates as Activists and Engaged Scholars

Abstract

Many liberal arts colleges boast a social justice culture on their campuses or mention their social justice-orientation in their admissions information sessions—but what does social justice really look like at small predominantly white institutions located in urban neighborhoods with Black and Brown residents? In the name of “university partnerships,” private universities and colleges often hinder the growth of urban community spaces and people (Jang, 2020). My praxis project explored the potential of communally created art to enact social change. Specifically, I (as a queer white woman) aimed to leverage art in order to shift the separation between the university and neighborhood – a neighborhood that the city’s deputy police chief once said, “There was no good reason to be here except for those poor souls who had to live here because they couldn’t afford to live any place else.” I led a small team of students at my university to create a multimodal art magazine, with content and contributions by community members. Underlying this project is the view that multimodal and communally-created magazines can transcend the corporate boundaries enforced by the white patriarchal art world (Das, 2019).
My research had two main areas of focus. The first used ethnographic methods to examine six university students who organized the magazine and their experience in this communal art project and the complexities of navigating aesthetic and identity-based differences in communal art creation. The second relied on data in the form of feedback and digital artifacts from the magazine’s contributors (namely neighborhood-based artists) to explore their perspectives on the impact of the magazine on themselves and the neighborhood. My findings suggest that the university-based participants, most who identified as white, developed connections with each other, learned about and strengthened their relationship with the wider community, and gained new skills from their involvement in a communally constructed art project. But my findings also point to the challenges associated with creating long-lasting and mutually beneficial ties between BIPOC community members and predominantly white university students, who typically only reside in the community for a few years and are often socialized to accept the university’s discourses on the surrounding neighborhood.
My praxis project makes several contributions to the theme and questions of the conference. First, it argues that social change work done at the university has to account for, and address the university’s relationship with the neighborhood/community. Second, it explores the role that accessible art and multimodality can play in critical praxis.

References
Das, S. (2019). What’s in a Zine: A Very Brief Overview. Critical Collective. https://criticalcollective.in/CC_ArchiveInner2.aspx?Aid=1279&Eid=1523
Jang, A. (2020). University-community relations in urban regeneration: A study on the conflict between students and residents and the role of the university. Journal of Asian Sociology, 49(2), 163–192. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26921156.

Author

• Sophie Gill, Clark University