Geographic media literacy: an introduction

Abstract

Why is it important for us to consider the history of media literacy? Beyond forging connections of the past to the present, exploring the history of the field can deepen intellectual curiosity and understanding for those who work in media literacy education, ignite interest in others, and drive investigation into understanding the relationships of the facets and fundamentals of media literacy from past to present and into the future. The theme of leadership emerges from questions such as: How do people build programs? How does information get disseminated? What were the challenges? Who were the learners? Who were the teachers? What were the tools? The discussions borne from these themes lead to questions about the influence of changes in society and technology over time to media literacy education. Just as our individual experiences shape and define our personal identities, a community's past and present shape how the field sees itself today and shapes a vision for the future.

YouTube: fragments of a video‐tropic atlas

“…It is a commonplace to remark on how textually‐centric the social sciences and humanities continue to be and we see this in the many studies of YouTube that have concentrated on the commentaries made on videos rather than the videos themselves (Reilly ; Uldam and Askanius ). However human geography has had a video‐tropic thread from the outset, in other words, human geographers have turned toward video itself, following a trajectory established by its approach to the visual (Rose ), to media (Lukinbeal and Craine ) and embodied and bodily practices (Simpson ). The theme issue that this article is part of, captures the video‐tropic as a method and a presentational medium.…”

The evolving narrative of the Darfur conflict as represented in The New York Times and The Washington Post, 2003–2009

“…Lukinbeal and Craine (2009) argue that news media should be engaged with other forms of material evidence, and encourage geographers to draw on academic texts to analyze popular representations. Intertextual analysis can help identify and contest colonial forms of knowledge masquerading as conventional wisdom (Blunt and Willis 2000).…”

“…Intertextual analysis can help identify and contest colonial forms of knowledge masquerading as conventional wisdom (Blunt and Willis 2000). Scholarly media are not objective 'truth' nor privileged over other media, but provide alternative representations of geographic reality that may be used to evaluate meanings presented elsewhere (Potter 2009;Lukinbeal and Craine 2009). We review scholarly research on Darfur's geography in the next section, preceding our analysis of NYT and WP coverage.…”

“…Campbell (2007) and Parks (2009) explicitly focus on visual media, and thus provide little textual analysis. Yet for geography as a discipline, it is crucial to situate media in geographic discourse (Sui and Goodchild 2003;Lukinbeal and Craine 2009). Postcolonial geographers have identified and analyzed a broad range of textual discourses on Africa and the Global South more broadly.…”

“…Postcolonial geographers have identified and analyzed a broad range of textual discourses on Africa and the Global South more broadly. On a theoretical level this project of de-colonizing geographical and cultural narratives is necessary to re-construct foundations of knowledge (Peet and Watts 1996;Mercer et al 2003); more practically, the exposure of problematic discourse and imagery is necessary to improve geographic and media literacy (Moseley 2005;Lukinbeal and Craine 2009). By identifying multiple discourses to which NYT and WP coverage of Darfur contribute, we provide building blocks for (re)presenting the conflict in a more accurate geographic context.…”