Critical Media Literacy

Catalog description

We live in a world in which we are surrounded with media messages that influence how we think and act. Since we are so immersed in media culture, it is important that we know how to analyze media content, production and reception, so that media can become tools for liberation and creativity, not control. In this course, we will learn to critically analyze work produced in different forms of mass communication. The course focuses on power, ideology and social inequality, analyzing relationships between media producers and audiences, and between information, the politics of representation, and power, including a focus on the crucial areas of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The course takes a dialectical perspective that focuses on both theory and practice, providing students with the opportunity and knowledge necessary to produce their own short film using the resources of Penn State's media commons.