Instructor: J McClearen

This course gives students theoretical and practical experience in critical media literacy— a framework for assessing, evaluating, creating, and participating with media content. I teach the class from a cultural studies perspective, which is a critical intellectual lineage that understands media as a complex cultural system. The cultural studies tradition asserts that power, privilege, difference weave together at the levels of production, representation, reception, consumption, and identity. In this vein, media artifacts are not good/bad or right/wrong, rather they reflect and reproduce ideologies that circulate in society more broadly. In this course, you will gain skills in critical analysis and media literacy in order to better understand how ideologies of difference (such as gender, race, and sexuality) operate in media culture.

The major assignments for the course (the blog posts and the Wikipedia project) focus on building digital media literacy skills. Digital media literacy is an essential competency for many 21st century jobs, but knowing how to write blogs, convey meaning with photos, and create publically accessible scholarship also allows you to share the insights you gain from this class with audiences outside UWB. There will be dedicated course time for learning and developing these skills, so students unfamiliar with these types of formats will have an opportunity to practice using these important tools.