Design Academy Eindhoven, 2020-21
supervisor: Patricia Reed

The way we make sense of the world corresponds to the meanings we create. Language intervenes as the plaster of this process, through public acts such as journalism.


Within journalistic reports, events get encoded and communicated to the audience. The moment when the reality of the recipient meets a distant reality of someone else designates decision-making over accepting the response-ability of knowing.


This decision is sociopolitically situated; yet, highly affected by the ability of the journalist to appoint urgencies and sensibilities, naturally filtered by a subjective position. These are addressed by the published words, powerful enough to evoke empathy, sympathy, or simply pathos.


The mediator, though, does not stand alone but is integrated into societies of social bodies and social actors, by speaking for, speaking about, or speaking to them. What matters and what is meaning-full lay in the trembling surfaces of their representation, distribution, and reception. It is a vivid relationship between the mediator, the published words, and the receiver, that keeps beating from the three edges.


Within my research, I wonder what are the ethical responsibilities and the emotional implications of journalistic practices. I further question how published words could shake social bodies to challenge perspectives and activate engagements in the many surrounding realities.


Ultimately, an act of publishing is an act of disseminating, and therefore, responding to constitutive effective reconfigurations of public affairs. Nevertheless, since the responsibility is distributed among social bodies, the importance historically and culturally is allocated within the oscillating power of the three parts.

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