ABSTRACT
Over the last 30 years media literacy education (MLE) has been increasingly advocated, theorised and practised as a pedagogical strategy for the making of critical and active citizens in contemporary media-saturated societies. Documents and actions concerning citizenship education do not systematically refer to MLE. And yet, the latter generally considers its action as an essential component of citizenship education. At the same time, MLE has been often recognised as an educational practice comprising both media analysis and media production. The reflection on the role of digital media to support participation has become central in recent years to much of the debate about young people, civic engagement and political participation as testified by the proliferation of expressions like e-engagement, engagement 2.0, online community engagement and online civic engagement. As a consequence some scholars caution against the risk for MLE of becoming just a further undesirable practice of governamentality' in twenty-first-century capitalism.
