ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we advocate for media literacy initiatives, at all levels of formal and informal learning, revisit and re-prioritize their civic responsibility. Media literacy is increasingly being called upon to respond to the heightened role of platforms and digital infrastructures on the fracturing of societies and erosion of trust. A focus on teaching skills and competencies alone, we argue, runs the risk of exacerbating social fragmentation and the erosion of trust. To develop our argument, we place emphasis within the context of an American culture enveloped in neoliberal realities, where giant tech companies and platforms are driven by the pursuit of market gain and revenue accrual over that of civic responsibility. We then reintroduce the work of three seminal scholars that emerged from the activist pedagogy tradition: bell hooks, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paolo Freire. While these three scholars are well known to the media literacy field and often evoked as thinkers that helped set a foundation for media literacy interventions, we place them together to show how we may consider refocusing the design and deployment of media literacy initiatives to have an explicit civic standpoint. Our intention is to start a robust conversation about the civic identity of media literacy, and to draw from the radical tradition to question the assumptions of media literacy initiatives that focus on skills and competencies over liberation, transgression, and critical consciousness.
