Working Group Media

The Center for Diversity, Media, and Law understands media technology as integral to power relations and promotes practices of critical media literacy. The media pedagogical approach brings critical and intersectional media analysis and transformative action to education. Mass media communication functions as a “structured process” of articulating and establishing knowledge about society through representation and the lack thereof, thereby functioning as a site for the discursive contestation of hegemony (Stuart Hall 2018). Furthermore, media-saturated, modern societies are fundamentally permeated and structured by digital media phenomena. On the level of design as well as that of technical infrastructure, digital media inherit dominant societal norms and biases and thus reiterate social inequalities (Ruha Benjamin 2019; Safiya Umoja Noble 2018)

The representational structures of mass media communication, the opacity of digital media functions, and assumptions about digital media’s “neutrality” and “objectivity” – all of these factors pose significant challenges to societies and their citizens and demand critical skills. A central concern of the Center for Diversity, Media, and Law is then to extend the critical media literacy approach to the how(s) of mediating diversity in social media images, narratives, and design and infrastructure.