October 28, 2022

Omega Mart Ad Analysis
by Salvatore Fontana

Swintern
by Chloe Minieri

Environmental Justice in Animal Crossing New Horizons
by Mica Meader

Queer Today: How to Queer a Capitalist Life
by McKenna Foley, Mia Gebrowsky, and Steph Wong

Editors’ Introduction to Issue 12.1

Welcome to Issue 12.1 of the JUMP+! This issue centers on matters tied to work and living in a capitalist society. The student authors featured here have created projects that address and respond to the ways in which people and products are represented and how particular behaviors and practices are valued or devalued. And ultimately, all the pieces speak for ways of thinking, being, and living that are both aware of and perhaps resistant to the norms of a capitalist culture.

Salvatore Fontana’s “Omega Mart Ad Analysis” looks at the ways representations of food and consumerism are used for commentary by Meow Wolf, an immersive art experience. Fontana’s piece analyzes the commercial-style advertisements created for the Omega Mart art installation in Las Vegas by interrogating the ways the ads play on desire for nostalgia and applying the theoretical work of Fagerjord (2010) and Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006).

While Fontana’s piece is focused on the representation of things, Chloe Minieri’s “Swintern” showcases an app prototype designed to help both companies and people represent themselves. The app prototype repurposes the matching functionality of many popular dating apps to facilitate internship matches.

In the third piece, “Environmental Justice in Animal Crossings New Horizons,” viewers get a tour of Mica Meader’s island in Animal Crossing designed to highlight problematic behaviors built into the game—behaviors that drive negative actions for which the player is rewarded. The tour points out the natural features present on the island and provides commentary about the structures within the game, like the ranking system and ease of building and destroying structures, that promote problematic behaviors including deforestation and eco-terrorism.

Finally in McKenna Foley, Mia Gebrowsky and Steph Wong’s “Queer Today: How to Queer a Capitalist Life,” the authors e-zine provides extensive commentary on living a life that resists some of the behaviors normalized by capitalist culture. With pieces like “Demon(et)ise” and “The Secret Life of a Forgotten Plastic Bag” they encourage readers to be comfortable with being outside the norm and to actively challenge consumerism.

We hope these pieces will both cause you to contemplate some of your own practices, and also encourage you to consider new ways of being and living in our current context.

Justin Hodgson
Crystal VanKooten
Alison Witte
Sean Zdenek