Projecting their voices

As part of the project, professors Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Patrick Clark projected messages the students collected about sustainability outside the University Memorial Center and on buffalo cutouts at the Business Field. Photo by Patrick Clark.

At CMDI, “comm” is often shorthand for the communication major. But for one of its most recent graduates, it also means “community.”

Alysia Abbas (Comm’25) put that into practice in the spring, when she interviewed her peers as part of a project to understand how college students define sustainability.

“Communication gives you the opportunity to connect with people and create a community that moves them,” Abbas said. “In the classes I took on storytelling and climate, it was more engaging—people looked for ways to bring context to the science. When you just study the statistics of climate change, it leads to a sense of powerlessness about an individual’s inability to create impact.”

That’s why she was at the University Memorial Center the night before Earth Day, digitally projecting statements from her classmates into the plaza as night fell. The messages also appeared on cutout buffaloes around campus.

The project was a collaboration between CMDI’s Sustainability and Storytelling Lab and its Immersive Media Lab. Abbas interviewed students from across disciplines—engineering to economics—to ask what sustains them and how the story of a sustainable future begins. Answers ranged from the typical (The Lorax) to more surprising—like moms, equal access to parks and true farm-to-table agriculture.

“Doing those interviews made me more hopeful,” Abbas said. 

A major influence on Abbas was her arctic studies certificate. Mathias Nordvig, an associate teaching professor and head of Nordic studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, recalled Abbas’ analytical mindset and the perspectives she brought to discussions in his Arctic Society and Culture class.

“It is hard to hear those big-picture statistics and be able to relate to them as an individual human being,” Nordvig said. 

“Stories are how I first came to care about these things. And with the type of mind Alysia has, she’ll be able to take the lessons from these stories and make them more visible and meaningful to people.”

The stories and cultures of arctic people, like the Sami and Inuit, are core to the course. Abbas said the class focused her sense of environmental justice as she learned how native people were dispossessed of their lands and ways of life.

That perspective, alongside her communication degree, has her eager to change attitudes around sustainability.

“At the core, it’s community that ends up sustaining people and making them feel connected to what’s around them,” Abbas said. “Sustainability doesn’t happen without community.”