Watching news coverage of the Orlando nightclub shootings earlier this year, graphic design student Raeanne Nuzzo ’17 (SFA) observed how the media often uses scapegoating to focus on an unidentified fear.<\/p>\n
She noticed that in covering Orlando, some news organizations used photos from the 1999 Columbine High School shootings when 12 students and a teacher were killed. She read how the shock-rock musician Marilyn Manson was at the time mistakenly singled out in news reports as an influence on the two students responsible for the Columbine shootings.<\/p>\n
As she thought about developing a proposal for an undergraduate IDEA grant, Nuzzo began to focus on fear culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was looking further into fear culture in general, and I got to Donald Trump and his language,\u201d Nuzzo says of comments made the Republican candidate during the early part of the 2016 presidential campaign. \u201cI read this fantastic New York Times<\/em> article about how Trump\u2019s language is extremely vague, and that he says a lot of things you can\u2019t really disagree with. It plays into the natural fear that everyone feels. I did a lot of research reading headlines and looking at magazine covers.\u201d<\/p>\n After earning a 2016 IDEA grant for her proposal, Nuzzo began to design a series of posters incorporating images and language from this year\u2019s presidential election that are on display from Oct. 25 to Nov. 5 in the Arena Gallery of the Art Building, 337 Mansfield Road, just across from the Contemporary Art Galleries.<\/p>\n The UConn IDEA Grant program, launched in 2013, awards funding to support student-designed and student-led projects, including creative endeavors, community service initiatives, entrepreneurial ventures, research projects, and other original and innovative projects. Students from the School of Fine Arts have received 28 of the grants awarded.<\/p>\n Nuzzo\u2019s poster exhibition will also include supplementary information from her research into fear culture, including details about the source of the images used, where the quotation incorporated into the design is from, and why she selected that statement.<\/p>\n \u201cI could make one of these posters a day, just from what I was seeing on the morning news,\u201d Nuzzo says. \u201cI took my interest in how the media can steer people\u2019s thoughts just on biased images, and found it\u2019s far more widespread than I thought. For my project, I decided to dissect that and try to show the mechanics of it.\u201d<\/p>\n She selected three comments Trump uses often during his campaign remarks: \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to be politically correct anymore \u2026 We can\u2019t let this happen \u2026 Something really dangerous is going on.\u201d She then paired each Trump statement with an excerpt from Marshall McLuhan\u2019s book \u201cThe Medium is the Message\u201d \u2013 which he often punned as being pronounced \u201cmess-age\u201d \u2013 that was a follow-up to the media theorist\u2019s landmark book \u201cUnderstanding Media: The Extensions of Man.\u201d The earlier book first focused attention on how a \u201cmedium\u201d for communication is embedded in any message it would convey.<\/p>\n