ABSTRACT
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell notably contradicted popular discourses that celebrated the possibilities of social media activism by claiming that social movements are instead most successful when they emerge from activists who have strong social ties, meet face-to-face, and take risks. Feminist media pedagogies take power as their key analytic, addressing questions of equity and justice, with gender as just one of intersecting sites where power is enacted. This chapter highlights case studies that focus on the importance of relational aspects of feminist media pedagogy, in traditional classrooms, across innovative community-based teaching methods, and within digital environments. Participation in contemporary networked media requires attention to questions of publics and publicness. Like ross, Carmen Gonzalez also describes a feminist intervention into legacy media, but with a digital media twist. In complicating and dismantling perceptions of participatory media as inherently liberatory, the chapter trims away the excesses of such claims, allowing us to focus on those pedagogical methods and processes that hold liberatory potential.
