Bruin Walk Observation

In order to contextualize this intervention imagine this scenario: you are walking along your normal path to class approaching Bruin Walk, you see the usual array of students in Bruin Plaza. Some of which, might be waving flyers in your direction, others modeling Krispy Kreme Donuts for one dollar! You are used to seeing and experiencing this on your usual Monday/Wednesday walk to Royce, but there is something unusual going on. Something different in the air, too. After passing the uphill path on Bruin Walk flanked by rows of tables set up with food and posters by club organizations, your usual stride is quickly slowed down by various individuals, some in groups or pairs, stopped in the middle of the path. “This is annoying”, you think as you

Looking down at your feet you see a little pair of shoes on the ground, laid above it a pair of little shorts and a little shirt covered in dust marks, stained with seemingly real blood. You look around in horror to see numerous pairings of clothing, some for youth and some for adults, all laid out the same way on Bruin Walk to symbolize an apparent massacre of deaths. Prospectively, a student who experiences this type of a protest, will surely seek answers to questions such as, “What is this? What happened? Why? Who did this?” This would be a success in our public protest efforts. We want to present something shocking and out of the ordinary that would ultimately prompt students to stop and question the event. In correlation with the symbolic clothing representing the many diverse lives of victims to real-life tragic killings in current news, hand-written hashtags with a string of vague words would be displayed everywhere in prospective effort to signal

Meaning, even if you want to get away from this protest, you cannot. The hashtags marking this protest would find you throughout campus, even on the steps you walk up to class. This of course symbolic of the way in which we are able to expose students at UCLA to news stories sadly although not prevalent in our own news outlets, should should not be overlooked. Students are bound, trained, to be curious. They don’t have to go searching for a classroom of strangers to find out more, or sign up for anything. All they have to do is simply search our hashtags from campus on the social media platforms that they are already using. This would lead them to our own page, be it twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., where students would be able to scroll through and learn more about the protest they encountered. A feed of current world events, without an American bias and a separate from pop culture would be available to read through. By infiltrating popular social media platforms of the present, the issues and inadequacies associated with using traditional forms of news are addressed. Failure to inform students of what is going on around the world, outside is of our ethnocentric bubble, is not due to lack of accessibility, instead successful communication requires putting the right information in the right contexts. If we did not intrigue students