Projecting their voices

Regan Widergren — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:38:14 +0000

Projecting their voices Regan Widergren Tue, 11/18/2025 - 15:38

Joe Arney

As part of the project, professors Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Patrick Clark projected messages the students collected about sustainability outside the University Memorial Center and on buffalo cutouts at the Business Field. Photo by Patrick Clark.

At CMDI, “comm” is often shorthand for the communication major. But for one of its most recent graduates, it also means “community.”

Alysia Abbas (Comm’25) put that into practice in the spring, when she interviewed her peers as part of a project to understand how college students define sustainability.

“Communication gives you the opportunity to connect with people and create a community that moves them,” Abbas said. “In the classes I took on storytelling and climate, it was more engaging—people looked for ways to bring context to the science. When you just study the statistics of climate change, it leads to a sense of powerlessness about an individual’s inability to create impact.”

That’s why she was at the University Memorial Center the night before Earth Day, digitally projecting statements from her classmates into the plaza as night fell. The messages also appeared on cutout buffaloes around campus.

The project was a collaboration between CMDI’s Sustainability and Storytelling Lab and its Immersive Media Lab. Abbas interviewed students from across disciplines—engineering to economics—to ask what sustains them and how the story of a sustainable future begins. Answers ranged from the typical (The Lorax) to more surprising—like moms, equal access to parks and true farm-to-table agriculture.

It’s refreshing to hear from my classmates that not everybody is OK with what we’re doing to our environment.”

Alysia Abbas (Comm’25)

“Doing those interviews made me more hopeful,” Abbas said.

A major influence on Abbas was her arctic studies certificate. Mathias Nordvig, an associate teaching professor and head of Nordic studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, recalled Abbas’ analytical mindset and the perspectives she brought to discussions in his Arctic Society and Culture class.

“It is hard to hear those big-picture statistics and be able to relate to them as an individual human being,” Nordvig said.

“Stories are how I first came to care about these things. And with the type of mind Alysia has, she’ll be able to take the lessons from these stories and make them more visible and meaningful to people.”

The stories and cultures of arctic people, like the Sami and Inuit, are core to the course. Abbas said the class focused her sense of environmental justice as she learned how native people were dispossessed of their lands and ways of life.

That perspective, alongside her communication degree, has her eager to change attitudes around sustainability.

“At the core, it’s community that ends up sustaining people and making them feel connected to what’s around them,” Abbas said. “Sustainability doesn’t happen without community.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

As part of a class project, a communication student interviewed her classmates about sustainability. Their answers were projected onto public spaces.

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10 for 10: Centers making an impact

Amanda J. McManus — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:20:40 +0000

10 for 10: Centers making an impact Amanda J. McManus Mon, 11/17/2025 - 14:20

Centers and labs at CMDI are important not just because of the insights discovered by the researchers and creatives working within them, but because of the impact they offer to the public.

Here are some signature labs and centers from CMDI’s first decade.

Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement: Aims to learn from deliberation, dialogue and educational events tied to communication and democratic practice.
Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media: Creates opportunities for the public to engage with documentary films, especially through the signature Mimesis festival, in Boulder.
Center for Environmental Journalism: Journalists who complete a fellowship from the center have been responsible for award-winning work on environmental issues.
Center for Media, Religion and Culture: Studies the complex relationship between media and religion in an entangled world.
Community Engagement, Design and Research Center: Partners with communities at home and abroad to build resilient, equitable cities and neighborhoods.
Immersive Media Lab: Invites people to explore augmented and virtual reality environments to develop different perspectives on emerging challenges.
Media Archaeology Lab: A peerless collection of obsolete, but functional, technology to experiment with and imagine roads not taken in tech and society.
Neuro D Lab: Explores the intersection of design, neurodiversity, equity and innovation to ensure designs—from products to wayfinding—work intuitively for all users.
Sustainability and Storytelling Lab: Aims to understand how stories influence the ways we practice sustainability and shame unsustainable methods.
Visual Evidence Lab: Studies how the legal system can be better equipped to handle video and photographic evidence presented in court, including deepfakes and generative A.I.

Here are 10 centers and labs that have created public impact in the college’s first decade.

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