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• 1 2020-12-07T04:00:04+00:00 Plastic Consumption and its Effect on the Environment 37 Adrienne, Carissa, and Gloria plain 2020-12-23T20:11:15+00:00
  Helpful Links' from the Last Page on Pamphlet Above:
  Reduce Plastic Waste
  Tips to Use Less Plastic
  100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life
  Why Should You Care About Preventing Waste?
  
  ABSTRACT 
  The majority of global climate change is caused by human activity and its relationship with the planet. The economic system behind our The majority of global climate change is caused by human activity and its relationship with the planet. The economic system behind our way of life is really to blame. Consumerism is one of the world's most dominant contributors to Earth’s rising temperature and is a result of our capitalist society, in which the expectations of wealthy corporations are met prior to facing the harsh reality that if we continue this way, there will not be a planet for us to inhabit. So the big question is: What can we do to help? One of the biggest examples of corporate exploitation of consumerism is the plastics industry. Put into simple terms, the more plastics are consumed, the more pollution occurs, the more our environment suffers. Our focus of this project is to create a graphic novel with the message of raising awareness for the harmful effects of plastics consumption caused by our capitalist society while also incorporating other visual forms like pictures to help convey our message. High plastics consumption results from powerful companies and businesses promoting that plastics are cheap, versatile, lightweight and an “irreplaceable” material. One example is plastic water bottles. Corporations have capitalized on our lack of clean drinkable water and have literally bottled and sold it in plastic bottles which adds to the issue of plastic pollution. Our reckless use of plastics has not only contributed to a high increase in pollution, but also has had a detrimental effect on our environment; mainly, our oceans and marine life.
  
  We believe that the high plastics consumption is due to lack of awareness on the impact, and the alternative sources of plastics. We must find a way to reconsider our options regarding plastics waste such as using reusable water bottles and taking our own bags to grocery stores. And on a larger scale, consider what we must do to significantly slow the rise of plastics consumption.
  
  
  Adrienne's Reflection
  This project is one that is near and dear to my heart. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, preserving the Earth has always been something that I’m passionate about but I’ve never had time to really delve in and pursue it. I would 100% like to continue this project, whether that is continuing to use art as activism and make more pamphlets, or simply continue advocating on a bigger scale by voting for people in politics who care about the environment.
  
  Working on our research based poster was fairly similar to making our creative project as they flow into one another. Being the author of both have made me extremely proud of the products. Our research poster project contained elements of design because it needed to be visually intriguing in order for people to easily comprehend the contents. Despite this, the main factor of this poster was information and research with a more academic focus. For our creative project we wanted to almost completely focus on the artistic aspect and design first and then incorporate some of the information we learned about through our research poster. Being an author of both has shown me how important both design and information are to any persuasive project.
  
  Both this class and our projects have emphasized to me the importance of various artistic mediums in conveying a message. Essentially, art has the potential to create a huge impact on an audience and can be used as a form of activism. This semester we’ve studied the idea of using visuals as a form of rhetoric and how visuals/art can have a bigger effect on an audience than just words upon words. This is a concept that I can utilize in future projects and in other classes. As a dance major, I have the ability to use my artform as a way of activism. Choreography can convey some pretty serious socio-political issues and I can now use what I've learned in this class and from our project in future dance projects.
  
  Collaboration in any project can be either really helpful, or it can be a challenge. Overall, I would say the collaboration on this project went pretty smoothly. Usually I typically like to do projects by myself because then I have free range as to what my vision is or how to make sure it comes out the way I want it to. However, for this project, our ideas and our concept for our project shifted many times over the course of making it. It was extremely helpful to have other people and minds to bounce ideas off of both in a creative way and an academic way. This project probably would not have come out as good as it did if I had been working alone. Art is such a collaborative thing by nature and for an art based project it was actual an integral part of creating our work.
  
  I think this class has allowed me to widen my thinking and my willingness to speak my ideas on important subjects. It has allowed me to articulate my thoughts and bounce off of others with similar values and even finding ways to discuss certain disagreements. I’ve grown so much with these projects. I love working on design and color schemes and both our poster project and creative project have allowed me an outlet to practice different design skills. I would love to continue finding my voice on a larger scale as well. Like I mentioned earlier, this could mean many different things like expanding on this project, creating new projects, voting, or protesting. Overall this project has been a wonderful experience and I would love to continue expanding on it and its accompanying concepts and ideas.
  
  Carissa's Reflection
  The course of creating and developing our abstract and creative project was a learning journey. The first topic we chose was a broad focus on capitalism and consumerism on our environment. We then narrowed our topic down to how consumerism and capitalism leads to plastic pollution which is detrimental to our environments, specifically marine life. In creating and revising our abstract, I learned that displaying a clear and concise topic is the most efficient way to make our point come across and pinpoint a solid stance. In specifying our topic, we more thoroughly dove into methods of how we can go about raising awareness and finding solutions to this pressing issue.
  Throughout the entirety of creating the abstract poster, I learned ways to attract and sustain an audience's attention. In keeping our information concise, we found this was the most efficient and clear way to get our argument across. Visually, we utilized earthy-toned colors to match our theme of promoting the safety of our oceans and environment, and included diagrams to emphasize the impact of plastic usage on our environment. We didn't quite connect our creative and poster projects so we added a methodology section to reference how they correlate.
  
  In exploring the ways of modality that we could utilize, we decided to center our creative project around the visual aspect in the form of a graphic pamphlet filled with engaging comics, art, and photos. Through our project, we are hoping to break down the stereotype of having purely text being the most valued academic approach to sharing and projecting important information. We utilized the visual rhetoric aspect of literature through photography, art, and cartoons to portray our argument. Resources wise, we heavily researched the validity of all of our sources and made sure all of our information is accurate. We are breaking academic 'rules' in a sense that we are relying on visuals to bring about our stance on our topic and persuade our audience to acknowledge the weight of our impacts on the environment. Our original idea was to create a comic book to showcase plastic consumption in the ocean and then write a description about it as well as a call to action. As we were brainstorming, we decided to add even more to our creative project turning it into more of a pamphlet with multiple pages showcasing art that I created, short comic strips, and photos raising awareness for the cause.
  
  If time allowed, I would love to receive more feedback from my peers with constructive criticism regarding our project. Editing and revising our project with helpful notes would be an eye opening experience for me and my teammates since we can gain various perspectives for bettering our project. I would enjoy adding even more persuasive information and making our project more visually appealing to our audience if time permitted. The biggest skill I gained from this project was teamwork and keeping each other accountable regarding the division of the work. If I were to do this project again I would add more elements such as a video or audio component to create more depth in our topic. Being able to take credit for being author to both a creative and scholarly work for two different public audiences is something I take pride in now and for years to come. In future resumes I will most definitely include this experience because it has taught me valuable lessons in creating a rhetoric visual piece and working as a team. The ability to present our abstract in a scholarly environment such as the Symposium and present the efforts and process we went through to collect and analyze data increased my own abilities to speak in a professional way. In integrating the visual aspect in our creative project, we were able to engage a whole other audience through a compelling, appealing means.
  
  Within and outside of Chapman, I view myself as a persuasive writer and speaker. Regarding this project, I did my best to eliminate bias, in including some positives of plastic usage, but overall convincing our audience that in the bigger scheme of things, plastic consumption is detrimental to our planet. As a researcher, my main responsibility is providing reliable, accurate information that can compile that data into a persuasive argument. If there is a lack of verifiable data, this can lead to many issues in the authenticity and sincerity of our project affecting the trust of our audience. In my everyday life, I will continue to use my voice to speak on pressing subjects that need to be addressed by our society and urge for change in my own community.
  
  
  Gloria's Reflection
  If time allowed, I would work more to enhance and to create the comic as we planned to do so in the beginning of the class. Different from our original plan, for our creative project we created the informative pamphlet instead of creating the comic book. The reason behind creating the pamphlet was because we did not have enough time to build a stronger storyline to create the longer comics, we created the short informative comics (two square comics).
  
  Regardless to the fact that we could not create the creative project that we intended to create in the beginning, creating and presenting the creative project for two different public audience allowed me to experience the collaborative work and preparation for formal presentation. From the First-year Focus Course, I had an idea and experience with student symposium, however, creating a scalar and preparing as a team allowed me to think and plan more according to follow the plan and time period that us as collaborate together.
  Presenting in student symposium did not meet the expected number of audience due to the fact that it was held over the online, however, it allowed us to prepare mentally and physically for the formal setting of the presentation.
  
  Outside of Chapman, or any academic setting, I did not compose any of the writing or rhetorical thinking besides sharing my opinion on the social network services. However, preparing for this project, as part of the research and to gather idea on how to compose a rhetorical creative project, I read many sources and composers who would use rhetorical and creative literature to deliver the idea and information they are intending to deliver. Since I only thought blog and podcast to be the space only to share the opinion or to carry the personal experience side rather than informative, I was surprised to discover all the genres and how big the whole rhetorical literature environment was.
  
  Throughout this semester, not only from this course I was engaged into the creative projects from the class settings. From Rhetorical Thinking course, I was encouraged and engaged into the formal setting of presentation with the creative project and from my Women’s Study class I was engaged in creating the Zine for the open audiences. Both  project help me to realize how I am interested in creating and sharing the opinion and information in the larger group and or community scale. I am willing to engage into other community where I found interest in, in order to create different form of rhetorical literature or informative project with others who share interest with me.
  Collaboration with peer students with similar interest while we were creating the project made the process and creation more exciting and enjoyable. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to learn more and take opinions on the creation. Each other spared the time out to discuss about the idea and opinion in each other’s progress and helped us to stay engage within the timeline.
  
  I have grown from keeping the opinions and knowledge as simple in the short paragraph or sentence to think out of box and to engage in thinking of helping more audience to be accessible to my ideas and opinions. Before, I only shared my opinions and knowledge on certain topics in pretty closed and small scale of the audience with small age range. However, after this project, I think more on how to make the information more accessible to everyone, and I want to learn more by looking at others’ work out of my comfort zone.