The campus magazine as an aesthetic experience in a transnational university in China

ABSTRACT This paper explores students’ involvement in an extra-curricular journalistic activity set up in a transnational university in China, by drawing on the connection between art, emotions and experience postulated by the philosopher John Dewey. The article will show how undergraduate students verbalized their experience of writing news features and other items for a campus magazine, their motivations for taking part in the magazine, their expectations, the obstacles they had to overcome, and the ways in which they felt rewarded by this experience. This study argues that looking into students’ reflections on a magazine production can help broaden our understanding of student media practice as an aesthetic dynamic and structured endeavor characterized by the following traits: novelty, instinct, emotion, struggle, and transformation.