ABSTRACT
This chapter begins from the premise that critical media literacy (CML) scholarship's ability to navigate the shifting ground of the twenty-first century university would be enhanced by a social epistemological understanding of its location in the academy, developed via a reflexive analytic framework. To that end, it borrows Marshall McLuhan's “Laws of Media” to examine the university as a medium in McLuhan's terms—as a set of historically situated social and material practices. It then similarly discusses CML to conclude that CML offers a narrative of the academy that decenters the faculty and connects the university more integrally into democratic life.
