EUGENE & PORTLAND MEDIA STUDIES
“What Is Life?” Conference Explores Media’s Relationship to Everyday Life In the digital age, media has become more than just something we consume. For most people, it permeates almost every aspect of life. In April, the SOJC collaborated with the UO College of Design and College of Arts and Sciences to examine media’s evolving role at the seventh annual “What Is?” conference at SOJC Portland. Building on last year’s “What Is Media?” conference, “What Is Life?” expanded the definition of media to include physics, biology, ecology, and the arts.
STUDENT PROFILE MEG RODGERS, CLASS OF 2018 As the daughter of two academics, research is in the blood of media studies undergrad student Meg Rodgers.
More than 150 regional, national, and international researchers presented their work in five public sessions and more than 30 panels. But the interdisciplinary conference is more than just an academic gathering. This year’s event included the LIFEWORLDS exhibit, featuring Leonardo da Vinci prints, multimedia work, bonsai trees, and photography. The conference closed with “The Experience,” which invited attendees to explore the Portland Japanese Garden’s newly opened Cultural Crossing expansion.
“I grew up on stories and around people teaching stories,” Rodgers said. “That definitely shaped me.” Rodgers’s plan to join the media studies quadrant of Allen Hall solidified after taking Assistant Professor Peter Alilunas’s Intro to Media Studies class.
Read more about the conference at sojc.co/whatis-life
“I was initially drawn to the SOJC because I really like the idea of working and collaborating with people,” she said. “But I tried PR and realized I was more interested in thinking about media than producing it.” Since that first media studies class, Rodgers has taken on a leadership role in her major and co-founded the Media Studies Student Group. She’s also writing a thesis about the antiheroine as an emergent TV character trope. “In a world that’s so media saturated, it’s important to have conversations and digest some of the things we’re seeing,” she said. “I no longer passively consume media. My major has changed my day-to-day life.”
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EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING