Social Justice Zine

Social justice is something that I have been interested in throughout my entire high school career. At the beginning of the year, when I had first found out that we were going to be doing a social justice project, I was excited. I thought Mrs. Nuvia and Mrs. Hood-Esparza were going to be the ones assigning us a social topic, but it was the complete opposite. We got to choose our own topic. It was difficult for me to finally settle on one since I am passionate about different social issues. I went through at least 3 different topics until I was content with the one I had chosen. With our social topic, we had to create a presentation that explained why the topic we chose was personal to us, as well as what social/basic needs are not being met, and who is already advocating for our social topic. Just recently, I had realized that my little brother did a project that is very similar to mine.

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​His 7th grade class in middle school had to research about a social topic, create a zine regarding that topic, and also write a research paper. I went to his exhibition and as I was listening to the students present their finished products, I was amazed as to how their work was so nice. I know that if I had to do that project while I was in middle school, my work would have not have been as nice as theirs. That same week of the exhibition, our team took our 2nd field trip to MCASD (Museum of Contemporary Art). For this second field trip, we look at artworks from their exhibition “Memories of Underdevelopment” and we created a first draft of our zine cover about our social topic. Before I even started to create my zine, I knew that I wanted it to look nice and not have a lot of negative space. I started off with cutting out images that would be used as backgrounds and then I moved onto finding pictures/words that represented my social topic at the time which was “racism”. As I was cutting out images and pasting them onto the paper, I realized that they didn’t relate to the topic of racism, so at that point, I kind of wanted to change my topic. After finishing my zine cover and taking some time over the weekend to see if I wanted to change my social topic, I did. I ended up deciding on my topic which is now “body image/beauty standards”. I realized that this is something that hits home for me and although racism is something that I am very passionate about, I felt like I could relate more to body image at this current point in time.