SOCIAL ISSUE CLOCKS

Jackson Beenenga

Problematic Screen Time

Our growing reliance on screens raises the question: are our phones still just tools, or have they become a part of who we are?

Matea Bernales

The Reading Regression

The child literacy gap has widened after the Covid-19 pandemic as students had to quickly adapt to online learning, diminishing the foundation and fundamentals of reading and writing.

Abi Betancourt

ADHD: Sensory Overload

Sensory overload occurs when the brain receives too much information at once, causing stress, confusion, and anxiety. It affects focus, emotions, and perception, often leading to overwhelming mental fatigue.

Julia Bognar

Toxic Boundaries: A Poisoned History

The deliberate placement of industry near marginalized communities has caused lasting contamination and severe health effects, revealing the generational consequences of systemic inequality.

Brooklyn Braaten

Tuberculosis: The Preventable Disease That Still Kills

Every 20 seconds, someone dies of tuberculosis. Despite having a cure, limitations to access will cause over a million people to die this year from the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

Paris Burtner

The True Cost of Gold

Luxury gold stays in high demand despite natural ecosystems and communities around the globe suffering from the effects of gold mining and its production.

Paris Cepkauskas

Erasure of Queer History

As hundreds of anti-LGBT legislation continue to be pushed in the U.S., queer history is systematically being erased from American life to justify the government’s victimization of queer people.

Kelly Chen

The Girl Next Door

Hidden within everyday homes, domestic servitude is relentless labor often marked by abuse and exploitation. It exposes the quiet injustices that persist in the private spaces society chooses not to see.

Deona Del Brocco

Clothed in Consequences

Rapid fast fashion trends and overconsumption are shortening clothing lifespans and generating massive amounts of waste that overwhelms landfills, polutes the environment, exploits labor, and exposes the true cost of constantly chasing trends.

Kayla Diekelman

Gateway Violence

Dogfighting has been routinely neglected due to its cost
compared to investigations of human violence, underground
match organization proving difficult to infiltrate.

Emalee Doss

School or Prison

Excessive surveillance and force in low-income schools punish rather than help. These schools should prioritize accountability, emotional healing, and mental health support for struggling students.

Justin Espinoza

What Remains After the Burn

Millions of acres of land are destroyed by wildfires every year, crippiling ecosystems and displacing thousands. As our climate continues to increase due to global warming, the damage will only get worse.

Jordan Estrada

Mexico City in Motion

It highlights Mexico City’s gentrification issue, featuring a city map where affected areas are shaded from dark to light red, indicating severity from most to least impacted

Vanessa Fabry

Cataclysmic
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Hurricanes hit marginalized communities the hardest, and these groups often struggle to recover due to inequal distributions of resources and aid. The displaced and vulnerable often develop debilitating physical and mental disorders from the ongoing trauma endured, which is a more unseen yet enduring remnant in the aftermath.

Rylie Fitzmaurice

Breaking Barriers

5 million children in the American public school system speak Spanish as their primary language. Schools are failing to give students that speak limited English, an equal level of education.

Yaniv Golden

Porndemic

In the internet age, widespread porn access affects viewers’ brains, rewiring neural pathways and influencing decision-making, especially among those who watch compulsively.

Trysten Huang

The Digital Divide

Social media algorithms amplify division by feeding users emotionally charged content, creating echo chambers that deepen political and cultural separation, weaken civic discourse, and distort collective understanding of truth.

Jayden Hubbell

Threads That Poison the Tide

In a conventional families home, one load of laundry releases an average of 700,000 microplastics into the ocean. Fast fashion has grown rampant across the world, polluting our oceans through unsafe practices.

Alec Israelski

Alone in the World: A Forgotten Epidemic

In the recent years a new epidemic has been emerging, that being loneliness, often going unseen, loneliness creates a feelings of hopelessness, anxiety and even depression due to a lack of meaningful connections.

Pranav Jain

The Mars Flyby

Symbolizing the Mars Flyby, the clock transforms time into trajectory, where the Psyche spacecraft’s minute-long orbits around Mars reveal and conceal its ongoing journey toward discovery, across interplanetary space.

Celeste Jamin

Time Served

Reflecting the realities of mass incarceration, this piece explores how systemic inequities and bureaucratic barriers perpetuate cycles of confinement—where justice is delayed, innocence is doubted, and freedom becomes conditional.

Kaitlyn Kim

Caged in the Feed

The rise of social media has glamorized owning exotic pets, encouraging illegal trafficking. Behind each heart, like, and post lies exploitation, where animals suffer for attention, profit, and fleeting digital fame.

Everest Lanning

The Fourth Grade Syndrome

By the time they hit fourth grade, curriculum fails to support black boys. Their self-perception and school success suffers, overlooked by a system that wasn’t made with them in mind.

Kathleen Le

The Ideal of Aging

Women have always faced unrealistic expectations of remaining forever young. The beauty industry exacerbates this by weaponizing ageism to facilitate consumerism at the expense of women’s mental well-being.

Aretta Lorenz

Data Dependency that Destroys

Data centers, essential for modern society, have emerged as a threat to communities’ resources around the country. But data isn’t going anywhere as the demand rises—so how can we make coexistence sustainable?

Amy Ortega

Where Now?

The deep struggles low-income families go through to afford a roof over their heads, that can cause stress and deepen into depression and unhealthy habits, creating a painful cycle of survival and hardship.

Karen Oviedo

Do You Dare to Cross?

The dangerous journey immigrants face while illegally
crossing the border, where every moment embodies risk,
resilience, and the pursuit of a safer future.

Evan Parker

Constructed Morbidity

Beneath the ordinary surfaces of the city, design turns discomfort into control, quietly shaping who may rest, move, or belong through the mechanisms of hostile architecture.

Abigail Pavao

Blood on their Hands

In the Marange District of Zimbabwe, thousands of men, women, and children are trafficked to mine blood diamonds. These mines provide many companies/ jewelers with diamonds despite the alternatives like lab grown gems.

Ridge Peterson

Overexposed

Harsh artificial lighting defines modern environments, from offices to classrooms. Its constant glare strains the body and mind, disrupting circadian rhythms, dulling focus, and revealing how neglecting design impacts health.

Sierra Poole

The Silent Killer

Heart disease and stroke is the leading cause of death of women, accounting for one in three deaths in the United States. As less than 20-30% of heart disease research is focused on women, the lack of knowledge of women’s bodies suggests how misogyny permeates medicine.

Quoc Vinh Khuu

Risk on Your Plate

Pork is Viet Nam’s most consumed meat, yet food safety remains a major concern. From farm to vendor, contamination can occur at any stage of the process.

Kennedy Rettew

Silent Siren

Undersea ecosystems are under attack, fueled by the continuous discard of operational fishing gear into the deep blue. Ghost gear now contributes to 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage patch, the oceans greatest marine pollutant.

Serena Riley

The Cost of Companionship

Puppy mills confine dogs to crowded, unsanitary spaces
with little attention to their needs, resulting in physical
And emotional strain and highlighting the risks of mass
breeding practices.

Anders Sabo

Targeted Violence

All around the world, Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming people are facing large amounts of hate and violence for living as who they are, often rooted in misogyny and bigotry.

Matthew Salvador

Lost Youth

Over 4.2 million young people face homelessness each year. Often unseen, they are caught between unstable housing, family conflict, and a system struggling to provide lasting support.

Garrett Samuel

De-Extinction

De-extinction is no longer science fiction. New research has produced three wolf puppies with direwolf traits. Which begs the question: With this emerging field should we be disrupting the natural order?

Ava Schwartz

The Age of Artificial

The brain is a powerful, creative, and complex machine. Ever-increasing dependence on artificial intelligence, however, is damaging and rewiring critical thinking as we know it.

Jamie Scott

The Unwinnable Game

Developers in the game industry are prevented from making the quality games they envision. Under constant threat of being fired, they continuously try to get an idea through.

Grace Sikorski

War of the Mind

PTSD affects 15-25% of U.S. veterans yearly, yet less than half seek treatment. Opening the discussion about military trauma is the first step toward widespread treatment and access.

Eva Solis

Separated by Borders

Deportation separates families, leaving children behind to face emotional trauma, fear, and poverty. This disruption causes long-term mental health challenges, educational setbacks, and deep instability in their lives and communities.

Madi Stutler

A Great Loss: Entering The Sixth Mass Extinction

The Anthropocene is triggering what scientists have called the sixth mass extinction. The species loss caused by human activity in recent history have far exceeded natural background rates of extinction.

Kriselle Tenorio

The Unseen War: Cyberattacks on the Aviation Industry

Amidst rapid technological progress, cyberattacks have become an invisible form of warfare, disrupting airports, airlines, and fuel systems. Modern aviation can be grounded by threats we never see.

Erika Angeni Wenceslao

Cultural Disconnection

Culture and heritage play a significant role in an individual’s identity. When one loses touch with them, this leads to the loss of language. Disappearance of language erases history, furthers isolation, and diminishes the human experience.

Maeve Woodson

The Price of a Pulse

In America, care depends on coverage; each passing second represents not only time, but the growing gap between patient care and corporate profit. This piece is meant to confront and critique America’s broken healthcare system, and to highlight the how success for insurance companies is not always success for the patient.