The campus magazine as an aesthetic experience in a transnational university in China

ABSTRACT

This paper explores students’ involvement in an extra-curricular journalistic activity set up in a transnational university in China, by drawing on the connection between art, emotions and experience postulated by the philosopher John Dewey. The article will show how undergraduate students verbalized their experience of writing news features and other items for a campus magazine, their motivations for taking part in the magazine, their expectations, the obstacles they had to overcome, and the ways in which they felt rewarded by this experience. This study argues that looking into students’ reflections on a magazine production can help broaden our understanding of student media practice as an aesthetic dynamic and structured endeavor characterized by the following traits: novelty, instinct, emotion, struggle, and transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Student media
• magazine production
• John Dewey
• aesthetics
• emotion

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Thanks also to David Frear, Charlie Reis, and Yanning Huang for their useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Finally, the author would like to thank the students who contributed to the student media project and the magazine for their illuminating views.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 UK Framework for Higher Education Qualifications.

2 All 36 students were invited to participate in individual interviews.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Garrisi

Diana Garrisi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University with expertise on journalism, rhetorical analysis and media history. Diana has published in international peer-reviewed journals including Journalism Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture and Public Understanding of Science. As a freelance feature writer she has published in several mainstream news outlets including: BBC History Magazine, The New Statesman, The Times Higher Education, The Big Issue and The Huffington Post. She is co-editor of the book Disability, Media, and Representations: Other Bodies (Routledge, 2020) and she is currently writing a monograph titled Reporting Skin and the Wounded Body in Victorian Britain, to be published with Palgrave Macmillan.