Contemplative Photo-collage in Media Studies Pedagogy

Abstract

This project demonstrates an arts-based photo collage exercise developed in the context of an undergraduate seminar on Contemplative Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire. While it is readily adaptable for non-educational contexts, the primary goal of the exercise is to slow down, interrupt, and move beyond students’ habitual patterns of social media-based news consumption. By integrating both analog and digital arts-based elements, the exercise serves as a type of counter-practice to the ideological biases of commercialized digital media systems. The news content featured in this demonstration involves a family of asylum-seeking Honduran refugees who were caught in a tear-gas exchange with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Tijuana, Mexico in November 2018. A primary goal of this project is to critically reflect upon the limitations of news reporting and consumption in the context of the digital economy. A secondary goal is to develop new, more embodied and/or material ways of producing and disseminating fact-based content. By integrating arts-based and contemplative methods, these exercises enhance mindful news consumption by moving beyond the binaries of the personal and the collective, the mind and the heart.