Teaching Critical Media Literacy in the Age of Trump

Biographical Sketch

Jennifer Beech, Heather Palmer, and Matthew Guy are professors of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Type of Presentation

Panel submission

Brief Description of Presentation

This panel explores how teaching critical media literacy in the age of Trump presents kairotic challenges with respect to how people digest and—perhaps—produce discourse: differentiating between fake and credible news, grappling with a supposed post-fact era, engaging with/producing new political and activist media, producing and consuming satire, etc. We discuss how as teachers of literature, rhetoric, and writing, we respond to the imperative of helping students become ethical consumers and producers of rhetoric.

Abstract of Proposal

Speaker #1: Laughing, Crying, and Fighting Back: Helping Students Develop Satiric Literacy: As Mark Twain once remarked, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it’s because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” Rhetorical theorists bemoan that we are living in a post-fact era where the lines between real and fake are more blurred than ever. This observation led the Conference on College Composition and Communication to issue a recent positon Statement on Language, Power, and Action, which calls “for the use of fact-based reasoning, writing, and communication to build a better, more ethical, more engaged nation.” While this panelist agrees with the impetus behind that position statement, we can also recognize satiric spoof news as a form of what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls the extra-curriculum of writing pedagogy. As critical pedagogues, we would be remiss to ignore a genre which our students regularly consume and are now desiring to produce. As Michelle Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, argues, satire affects the way we think and plays an important role in how we get our news. This panelist discusses the challenges posed in teaching a writing workshop on Humor, Parody, and Satire in an age where McSweeney’s publishes Donald Trump’s entire Black History Month speech as a humor column. Speaker #2: “Pod Saves America”: Managing Affect with Pedagogies of Sound:This presentation will consider the challenges of teaching and creating podcasts in rhetoric courses as a means to civic media literacy amidst a media ecology of fear and anxiety. As Jonathan Sterne asks the introduction to Sound Studies, "how might we use sound to ask big questions about cultural moments and the crises and problems of our time?" In our visual media saturated culture, the political valence of sound itself is often ignored despite the overwhelming popularity of sound texts such as podcasts. Sound studies offers us a way to redescribe the importance of what “sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world.” Further, as rhetoric scholar Casey Boyle explains, “Talk radio, ambient music, mobile device alerts, animal and human voices, and random noise all combine to form an ever-present sonic backdrop with and through which we engage our media ecologies.” These sounds help write our experience of an entertainment event, a political campaign, an educational venture, and the rest of the activities that fill our daily lives. And yet,students often report an overwhelming helplessness, an affect of anxiety brought on by networked relations of digital media ecologies in which they have no real agency or voice, in a climate marked by global environmental and economic precarity, and the threat of natural, technological, sociopolitical, or economic disaster. In this context, this presenter will explore how students might use podcasts as a way to negotiate these affects of anxiety brought on our current political climate. Using 2018’s top 10 “podcasts for resistance” as case studies, we will explore how to harness digital technologies such as podcasting to effectively move from a reactive to a proactive state of resistance. As one of the founders of “Pod Saves America” explains, “What changed with Trump’s election was us thinking—instead of us being purely reactive to political punditry, instead of us talking about what might happen—we should talk more about what should happen.” This presentation will explore how to engage students with such sonic possibilities of podcasts by listening, discussing, recording, editing, and distributing them as a form of writing to resist in an age of Trump. Speaker # 3:

“Laughter Demolishes Fear and Piety”: Power, Laughter, and Social Media in the Age of Trump:

It has become a truism of this Age of Trump that America is divided, and the gap, or actually chasm, between Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, or even neighbor and neighbor has never been wider. Distance in this time is ironically absent, given the proximity of social media and other shared outlets, as well as having a President who tweets out advice for MLB teams in the World Series, but also more present than any other time in recent history. And maybe that is the problem. Mikhail Bakhtin notes that the political upheaval towards the end of the classical period necessitated the “removal of an object from a distanced plane,” the “uncrowning” of the sacred. Such dismantling of distances was, as he notes, fundamental to the rise of the modern novel, with its multiple perspectives and multiple voices. Essential to such uncrowning in the novel was the earlier genre of satire, which he says provides the “laughter” which “destroys any hierarchical…distance.” He writes that “laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.” Can satire help us today to demolish distance instead of expanding it? Do we have what can be called satire? This paper looks at the implications of power and politics within the genre of satire, as laid out within the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, and looks at how satire is or can be used in one of the most dependable avenues for overcoming the distance between Americans, that of social media.

Location

Session 3A (Grand Salon, DoubleTree)

Start Date

2-22-2019 3:00 PM

End Date

2-22-2019 4:30 PM

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Feb 22nd, 3:00 PM Feb 22nd, 4:30 PM

Teaching Critical Media Literacy in the Age of Trump

Session 3A (Grand Salon, DoubleTree)

Speaker #1: Laughing, Crying, and Fighting Back: Helping Students Develop Satiric Literacy: As Mark Twain once remarked, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it’s because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” Rhetorical theorists bemoan that we are living in a post-fact era where the lines between real and fake are more blurred than ever. This observation led the Conference on College Composition and Communication to issue a recent positon Statement on Language, Power, and Action, which calls “for the use of fact-based reasoning, writing, and communication to build a better, more ethical, more engaged nation.” While this panelist agrees with the impetus behind that position statement, we can also recognize satiric spoof news as a form of what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls the extra-curriculum of writing pedagogy. As critical pedagogues, we would be remiss to ignore a genre which our students regularly consume and are now desiring to produce. As Michelle Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, argues, satire affects the way we think and plays an important role in how we get our news. This panelist discusses the challenges posed in teaching a writing workshop on Humor, Parody, and Satire in an age where McSweeney’s publishes Donald Trump’s entire Black History Month speech as a humor column. Speaker #2: “Pod Saves America”: Managing Affect with Pedagogies of Sound:This presentation will consider the challenges of teaching and creating podcasts in rhetoric courses as a means to civic media literacy amidst a media ecology of fear and anxiety. As Jonathan Sterne asks the introduction to Sound Studies, "how might we use sound to ask big questions about cultural moments and the crises and problems of our time?" In our visual media saturated culture, the political valence of sound itself is often ignored despite the overwhelming popularity of sound texts such as podcasts. Sound studies offers us a way to redescribe the importance of what “sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world.” Further, as rhetoric scholar Casey Boyle explains, “Talk radio, ambient music, mobile device alerts, animal and human voices, and random noise all combine to form an ever-present sonic backdrop with and through which we engage our media ecologies.” These sounds help write our experience of an entertainment event, a political campaign, an educational venture, and the rest of the activities that fill our daily lives. And yet,students often report an overwhelming helplessness, an affect of anxiety brought on by networked relations of digital media ecologies in which they have no real agency or voice, in a climate marked by global environmental and economic precarity, and the threat of natural, technological, sociopolitical, or economic disaster. In this context, this presenter will explore how students might use podcasts as a way to negotiate these affects of anxiety brought on our current political climate. Using 2018’s top 10 “podcasts for resistance” as case studies, we will explore how to harness digital technologies such as podcasting to effectively move from a reactive to a proactive state of resistance. As one of the founders of “Pod Saves America” explains, “What changed with Trump’s election was us thinking—instead of us being purely reactive to political punditry, instead of us talking about what might happen—we should talk more about what should happen.” This presentation will explore how to engage students with such sonic possibilities of podcasts by listening, discussing, recording, editing, and distributing them as a form of writing to resist in an age of Trump. Speaker # 3:

“Laughter Demolishes Fear and Piety”: Power, Laughter, and Social Media in the Age of Trump:

It has become a truism of this Age of Trump that America is divided, and the gap, or actually chasm, between Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, or even neighbor and neighbor has never been wider. Distance in this time is ironically absent, given the proximity of social media and other shared outlets, as well as having a President who tweets out advice for MLB teams in the World Series, but also more present than any other time in recent history. And maybe that is the problem. Mikhail Bakhtin notes that the political upheaval towards the end of the classical period necessitated the “removal of an object from a distanced plane,” the “uncrowning” of the sacred. Such dismantling of distances was, as he notes, fundamental to the rise of the modern novel, with its multiple perspectives and multiple voices. Essential to such uncrowning in the novel was the earlier genre of satire, which he says provides the “laughter” which “destroys any hierarchical…distance.” He writes that “laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.” Can satire help us today to demolish distance instead of expanding it? Do we have what can be called satire? This paper looks at the implications of power and politics within the genre of satire, as laid out within the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, and looks at how satire is or can be used in one of the most dependable avenues for overcoming the distance between Americans, that of social media.