Media witnessing and storytelling for environmental justice (EJ) provide an avenue to understand the relationships between “multiple realities of environmental injury” and to analyze “fleeting phenomena with lasting form; thereby transforming phenomena that are experienced in a plurality of lives into publicly recognized history” (Houston, 2012, 419, 422). This creates opportunities to challenge and eradicate the oppressive structures that deem certain individuals and groups disposable and ultimately protect the possessive investment in whiteness. Therefore, for the purposes of EJ, media witnessing creates space for dynamic, citizen-based storytelling which can undermine narratives that promote the life versus economy framework that has perpetuated oppression, injustice, and state sanctioned violence. Media witnessing in an EJ context demonstrates the potential for collective understanding and action, political opportunities, and healing.<br/>This paper is an analysis of the process of media witnessing in regards to the Flint Water Crisis and the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and will apply an EJ lens to this phenomenon. It will discuss how media witnessing in response to these two crises can be used as a precedent for understanding and utilizing this framework and digital storytelling to address the crises of 2020, primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice. It will then examine how the intersectionality of race, gender, and age has implications for future media witnessing and storytelling in the context of EJ movements. Finally, it will explain how media witnessing can motivate holistic policymaking in the favor of EJ initiatives and the health and wellbeing of all Americans, as well as how such policymaking and initiatives must acknowledge the double-edged sword that is social media.

This Thesis presentation and book review is on social media manipulation and the issue of media algorithms developing a close minded perspective in individuals. It discusses the mechanics of these algorithms, the definition of social media manipulation, and the neutral negative impacts on the polarization of our country. It also goes into detail on how I applied this research to design projects throughout 4th year of the Visual Communication Design Program.

The term “Iraqi American” defines any person of Iraqi origin who is residing in the United States. From 1960 until 2014, Iraq experienced numerous armed conflicts and international sanctions. As a result, a great surge of Iraqis migrated out of the country to seek refuge elsewhere. The United States alone currently houses about 400,000+ persons of Iraqi descent, many of whom identify as its citizens. Despite that, Iraqi Americans remain severely understudied. Therefore, this study aims to understand the cultural barriers Iraqi American women face while seeking healthcare in the United States, and how these barriers can impact their behaviors. I collected data via semi-structured interviews with eight Iraqi American women. In this study, I identified five major themes that contributed to women’s healthcare seeking behaviors: societal/familial pressures, staying “pure,” shame associated with performing medical procedures, taboo surrounding discussions of female health conditions, and issues regarding being in the presence of male doctors. Many of these themes involved cultural stigmas and pointed to potential pathways to destigmatize women’s healthcare in the community. This study acts as an initiative to understanding Iraqi Americans better and lays groundwork for further research.

With the dissolution of the old forms of power has come a new heteronomy: that of the screen. The individual is in stasis, caught between the old forms of control and the new, but unable to imagine a better, liberated future. What is responsible for this interregnum? The answer lies in analyzing these new forms of control, their effects on the subject, and the material, historical processes behind them. This paper looks specifically at social media and how it has come to limit autonomy and commodify human experience and personhood. Drawing from Theodor Adorno’s Theory of Pseudo Culture, it seeks to describe the ways in which social media both erodes and administers subjectivity. Culture, now subject to the economic imperatives of capitalism, no longer contributes to the development of individuality. By referencing Karl Marx’s Capital and C. Wright Mill’s “The Competitive Personality”, this paper describes how social media expands commercial imperatives outside of the bounds of the workplace and into everyday life. The paper concludes by drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man in order to describe how social media neutralizes oppositional sentiments. Even the seemingly spontaneous expressions of dissent found on social media become a conservative force, stymieing real world organization through the repressive desublimation of revolt. In addition to understanding the dominating effects of the screen, this paper seeks to map the contours of neoliberal subjectivity.

Refugee women face many challenges to obtaining maternal, reproductive, and sexual health post-resettlement including the language barrier, navigating the healthcare system, finding childcare to attend appointments, and cultural mismatches between their beliefs and practices around the prenatal, childbirth, and postpartum periods and that of the healthcare system in which they resettle into. This cultural barrier poses a challenge to healthcare providers as well as it necessitates that they respect their patients’ cultural beliefs while still providing them with the highest standard of care. Cultural competency training has been used to assist providers in understanding and responding to cultural differences, but gaps still exist when it comes to navigating specific scenarios. The objective of this research was to conduct a literature review of studies pertaining to refugee maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare post-resettlement to investigate the following questions: how tensions between biomedically accepted best practices and cultural norms present themselves in these healthcare fields, how healthcare providers take into consideration their patients’ cultural beliefs and norms when providing maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare to refugee women, and what can be done to continue to improve the provision of culturally appropriate care to refugee women. Findings from twenty different studies that focused primarily on eight cultural groups identified that Cesarean sections, inductions, and certain family planning methods are significant points of contention regarding cultural norms for refugee women and that they prefer certain foods, birthing positions, and other cultural practices during the delivery. Healthcare providers consider their refugee patients’ cultural beliefs by creating relationships with them built on trust, utilizing community liaisons, and through attempts to accommodate cultural practices when possible. Some potential improvements offered to improve cultural competency were improved cultural competency training that focused on how healthcare providers ask questions and interact with their patients, increased partnership with refugee communities, and an emphasis on patient education surrounding interventions and procedures related to maternal and reproductive health that could cause hesitations. The results of this literature review accentuated the importance of relationships within the field of refugee women’s healthcare, between both refugee patients and their providers and refugee communities and the healthcare systems. Providing refugee women access to more culturally competent healthcare can increase their trust in the healthcare systems of the countries they resettle in and healthcare utilization that can contribute to improved health outcomes for refugee women and their children.