Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Abstract

Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. As a critical intervention in mainstream media literacy education, CML education integrates a cultural studies lens with a critical pedagogy orientation. In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography and personal reflective narratives or “anti-biography” to explore the dynamics and tensions of teaching CML in the posttruth era. We locate the shift to posttruth in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump, which produced a resurgence in far-right discourses promoting distrust of media and state institutions. We show how this shift created openings to criticality that made teaching CML easier in some ways; however, as we look deeper, what appears as an opening may in fact be an impasse. Through personal narratives, we illustrate what these openings and impasses looked like, how they felt and how they played out, to theorize about the possibilities and tensions of teaching CML in the current political moment. We argue the posttruth era necessitates a change in how we teach CML but not, as commonly argued, by teaching students how to fact-check or identify reliable sources. Instead, we must learn and teach about how the right uses media in transgressive ways to promote and normalize a racist, sexist, and authoritarian political agenda. We must also work to better understand students’ experiences of economic precarity and the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism.