L.O.V.E. Part Two

Last year I vlogged about what I loved about L.O.V.E. as a way to show the Arcadia community the awesome conversations we had in the program and what amazing work we ended up completing. This semester, not too much has changed in that regard, but change has blossomed in many other areas of L.O.V.E. that I’d like to share. 

In the fall, our program focused a lot on having important conversations around the complexities of bias. We did a lot of working group sessions, capacity building meetings, and work on our installations. These moments allowed L.O.V.E. students to grow on a personal and academic level, but were focused on campus. We were left with our thoughts dedicated to the future: the spring GCR101 class. 

Now that we are at our halfway point, I wanted to share with the community an update on the moves we have been making as a program. This semester, we narrowed our focus to two of the working groups that we formed last semester: policing and prosecution bias and media bias. I co-facilitate the media bias group alongside community member Lisa Desphy (Director of Sales for WURD radio) and staff member Gail Lankford from MarCom. We are working to turn our meaningful discussions into meaningful work. 

So far, we have participated in two field work days, and are planning our third. For our first, we visited the MarCom house on Forsythe Avenue to meet with Emily Horowitz, the Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications at the university. She prepared an interactive presentation for our group using her past experience working in media and current work with MarCom. Our group had such a great conversation with Emily about what biases we see in the media we consume and how we define what bias is within the media. This field work day gave us a better understanding of some real world applications to our understanding of media bias.

Our second trip was to the CASAA House. CASAA is the Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action, located on Church Road. Our group met with CASAA Director, Dr. Christopher Varlack, to discuss what CASAA’s work is achieving outside of the Arcadia community, as well as to discuss our personal experiences with bias in a safe and welcoming environment. This trip was incredibly emotional for a few of our members, but ended with an amazing discussion of how our personal lives intersect with our activism. 

There are a few more weeks left for us to do more field work, and our group is excited at the many possibilities that we can fulfill in that time. We cannot wait to further explore what work we can immerse ourselves in as a way to understand how media bias affects every facet of our life.