Canva-ssing: Notes from the SIPASA Elections in the Aesthetic Age

(Computer Generated Image/Indiana University)

By Pranav Mehta

Something is happening in New York City politics—something unusually hopeful. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory may shift policy, but we will remember it as a cultural event. He was elected less on machinery and more on hope. His campaign materials captured a civic mood—the sunrise gradients, the hand-drawn fonts, the earnest typography—an appetite for belonging, softness, and care.

It’s no surprise that, as New York leans into this new visual language of politics, SIPA has followed. We want to be part of the moment, too.

Walk the corridors of IAB this month and it’s impossible to ignore the SIPASA election posters animating the corridors like Hogwarts portraits, each one practically leaning out of its frame with unbridled enthusiasm. It’s obvious that the same visual grammar that helped power Zohran’s campaign has drifted uptown.

If you squint a little, SIPASA elections are like a tiny mirror held up to a larger political ecosystem. Candidates absorbed visual styles, tropes, and moods from citywide narratives and reproduced them around IAB. Posters this cycle offered everything from sunrise salvation to globalized chai intimacy, featuring a smiling cartoon teapot inviting students to chat their way toward policy transformation. Others mounted full hero’s-journey narratives with illustrated scenes laid out like a graphic novel. Even the slogans feel shaped by the city’s left-populist current: connection, affordability, belonging, home. 

They look good. But the beauty is doing a suspicious amount of work.

There is a tension humming beneath the cardstock: aesthetic politics promises more than the institution behind it can deliver. WhatsApp campaigns glide into your phone like carrier pigeons. Forwarded posters arrive with no context. Emoji-heavy announcements condense platforms, policies, and personhood into something that fits neatly between your friend’s meme and your group project reminder. WhatsApp democratizes reach, but it also dilutes substance to the size of a preview bubble.

Are these campaigns just pretty, or will candidates actually be able to do something?

SIPASA itself has little defined power. Per its Constitution, SIPASA’s purpose is strikingly vague: it exists “to address the interests and concerns of SIPA students by direct student representation in the creation of policy and programming to further those interests.” The Constitution gives SIPASA a purpose broad enough to claim nearly any student concern, and power narrow enough to resolve very few of them. SIPASA’s formal powers are mostly procedural: room reservations, student-group approvals, funding allocations, event coordination.

Candidates are likely making promises they can’t keep, or ones that will not make a real difference for SIPA students even if they are kept. If “chai diplomacy,” listening tables, or invitations to “burn like the sun” come to fruition, what will happen? A warm beverage cannot undo program-wide tuition pressures or mid-semester policy changes. The images are soothing, but the institution does not bend with them.

But when SIPASA harnesses student voices, it can implement real change, aesthetic or not.

This semester, the SIPA administration reduced the credit cap from 18 to 16.5, and the change landed forcefully. Announced mid-program, this administrative move reshaped academic plans, cohort expectations, and financial realities for hundreds of students. By changing degree rules halfway through, the administration forced students to absorb the cost: more semesters, higher tuition, tighter schedules. The decision made unmistakably clear who holds real power here—and who doesn’t.

Yet, students didn’t seek solace in slogans, but instead turned to one another. In less than a day, more than a hundred students signed a meticulously-organized letter that clearly laid out the stakes of the decision: disrupted degree planning, added strain for MIA students with language requirements, and financial risk for international students and veterans. More importantly, it also called for practical remedies, like restoring the prior cap, honoring existing academic plans, and providing accommodations that would prevent students from bearing the financial and administrative burden of a midstream policy change. 

Student initiative revealed the difference between the politics we perform and the politics we practice. In the face of a real policy shock, governance at SIPA looked like collective action; a community doing slow, procedural work because no aesthetic would do it for them. This drew a sharp contrast with the campaign promises that drifted into the realm of harmless fiction: slogans that sounded good, felt good, and photographed well, without any real path to enactment. 

Governance, in the city or at SIPA, lives in the boring parts: rent caps, bus routes, credit limits, degree audits. These small, technical decisions decide whether people can actually live their lives without being blindsided. At SIPA, the distinction between representation and power becomes even clearer. Campaigns generate visibility: who’s present, who’s charismatic; but institutional power lies with offices that manage accreditation, budget priorities, and compliance obligations.

Aesthetic politics can energize us, but institutional politics tests us. The former tells us what we want to build; the latter reminds us what we are allowed to shape. SIPASA campaigns live in the space between those two truths. They are hopeful in tone, constrained in mandate, and confused in intent. And maybe the task ahead—for candidates and voters alike—is to carry both realities at once: the desire for a more connected, equitable SIPA, and the recognition that meaningful change often begins in places with no gradients, no slogans, and no QR codes.

The next meaningful change at SIPA probably won’t fit on a poster.