Critical Media Literacy in Interdisciplinary Spaces: Teaching and Learning about China
Biographical Sketch
Dr. Amy Mungur is an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at Green Mountain College. Dr. Mungur’s research focuses on representation in both popular and educational media and explores historical foundations into our ways of knowing and engaging with the world outside of the United States, with a specific focus on China. In her teaching, Dr. Mungur uses her research on National Geographic and critical media literacy as a way to engage her pre-service teachers in a range of theories, as well as the movement between theory and practice. Dr. Mungur’s most current research project investigates her own course East Asia in National Geographic Perspective, examining students’ responses to and engagement in historical and contemporary photographs of people, culture, and events as re/presented in National Geographic.
Type of Presentation
Individual presentation
Brief Description of Presentation
This will be an interactive presentation with film clips, advertising clips, and movie/television trailers illustrating what I have done in my courses on representation, teacher education, and critical media literacy.
Abstract of Proposal
Representations of China, and the Chinese, have been present in the media since the mid-19th century. The question of the “assimilability” of the Chinese during the early period of Chinese immigration (1850s-1882) played out through a “selection of cultural representations” (Tchen, 1999, p. 265). Associations of the Chinese eating rats, cats, puppies, etc. had been circulating in children’s books since the mid-19th century, and these associations were then commercialized to sell products, which served to perpetuate a particular primitivism of the Chinese. Tchen (1999) argues that the association of the Chinese eating rats was an “undeniably powerful image in the Victorian imagination” (p. 266). More significant, however, was the power of this particular representation as “not only a manifestation of public opinion, but also as having the power to forge a coherent working-class and middle-class consensus about Chinese exclusion and containment.” While this presentation will not address at length the history of representations of China in the media, it will explore more contemporary representations of Asia/ns in popular culture. The series of clips are intended to build out discussions of race, class, and gender, and to explore the normalization and entrenchment of orientalist narratives.
Location
Session 3B (Summit, Double Tree)
Start Date
2-22-2019 3:00 PM
End Date
2-22-2019 4:30 PM
Recommended Citation
Mungur, Amy, "Critical Media Literacy in Interdisciplinary Spaces: Teaching and Learning about China" (2019). International Critical Media Literacy Conference. 18.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2019/2019/18
Critical Media Literacy in Interdisciplinary Spaces: Teaching and Learning about China
Session 3B (Summit, Double Tree)
Representations of China, and the Chinese, have been present in the media since the mid-19th century. The question of the “assimilability” of the Chinese during the early period of Chinese immigration (1850s-1882) played out through a “selection of cultural representations” (Tchen, 1999, p. 265). Associations of the Chinese eating rats, cats, puppies, etc. had been circulating in children’s books since the mid-19th century, and these associations were then commercialized to sell products, which served to perpetuate a particular primitivism of the Chinese. Tchen (1999) argues that the association of the Chinese eating rats was an “undeniably powerful image in the Victorian imagination” (p. 266). More significant, however, was the power of this particular representation as “not only a manifestation of public opinion, but also as having the power to forge a coherent working-class and middle-class consensus about Chinese exclusion and containment.” While this presentation will not address at length the history of representations of China in the media, it will explore more contemporary representations of Asia/ns in popular culture. The series of clips are intended to build out discussions of race, class, and gender, and to explore the normalization and entrenchment of orientalist narratives.