Peace and Justice Research Group

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Peace and Justice Studies Members

 

• Dr. Andrew Abernathy, Media and Strategic Communications

• Dr. Sarah Foss, History

• Guilen Ngongpah, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies/Africana Studies

 

Social Media as an Instrument of Peace and Destruction: Peace Pedagogy & Social (Dis)Connection in the University Classroom

 

Abstract:

This interdisciplinary honors add-on examines historical and contemporary perspectives on the uses and abuses of social media. Students will critically engage with concepts such as peacebuilding, the loneliness epidemic, social media addiction, and social media as an empowering tool for grassroots organizing, opportunity, and equity building. Through peace-building pedagogy and experiential learning, instructors will challenge students to denaturalize their use of their smartphones and critically evaluate their understanding of meaningful social connection, community engagement, and relevant implications on modern-day citizenship.  

 

Project Description: 

We are an OSU Center for the Humanities research group with home departments in History, Media & Strategic Communications, and Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. Given these disciplinary backgrounds, in Fall 2024, we decided to spend time reading literature from our respective disciplines on peace building, conflict studies, and pedagogy. In doing so, we created our working definitions of conflict and peace, respectively, and determined what issue we wished to address through our project. We think of conflict as natural and not inherently negative but rather as potentially constructive. Peace, then, is the process of productively addressing conflict in a way that triggers social change.  

 

From this starting point, we questioned what variables prevented peacebuilding, using the OSU campus community as our community of study. The question of social media use and the related loneliness epidemic captured our interest, as we see students struggling to form meaningful human relationships and as a result, less capable of discussing their differences (i.e. conflicts) in productive ways that might generate peace. After reading scholarship on these topics, we determined to design a project that would enable us to guide students in denaturalizing social media usage, constructively evaluating their social media practices, and rethinking human connection and what it means to be a citizen in various communities.  

 
To this end, our group designed an honors add-on course titled “Social Media as an Instrument of Peace and Destruction.” Honors add-on courses are 1-credit hour courses that meet once weekly for a 15-week semester. They pair with general education courses. After meeting with Associate Dean Richard Frohock,  we anticipate that this course could be paired with U.S. history surveys (HIST 1103 and 1493) and introductory media courses (MC 1143 and SC 2183). However, the contents of this class would be relevant for any OSU undergraduates regardless of major and would be particularly beneficial to the Honors college given its emphasis on active learning.  

 

We plan to teach this course from a peace pedagogy perspective. This means that one of the learning outcomes is to generate peace in the classroom, and we aim to do this through experiential learning.