Media Literacy of the Oppressed: An Emancipatory Pedagogy For/With the Marginalized

This book offers an alternative approach to developing media literacy pedagogies for marginalized communities and people in postcolonial countries, especially in the Global South, tackling unexplored issues such as media literacy of war, terrorism, pandemics, infodemics, populism, colonialism, genocide, and intersectional feminism.

With an emphasis on developing critical and emotive consciousness -- or unveiling the oppressor within -- the book provides a unique perspective that fits the needs of people at the margins and challenges mainstream media literacy approaches that are mainly designed for the center and the Global North. The book offers a framework for designing curricula at and with the margins through an emancipatory media literacy approach. This approach directs energy toward resistance and praxis, focuses on local priorities of the margins, contextualizes issues within a postcolonial historical moment, and concentrates on fighting oppression structures and social injustice.

This book will be an important resource for scholars, educators, and students of media literacy, communication, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, health communication, postcolonialism, Arab studies, feminism, and human rights.

Jad Melki, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies and the Director of the Institute of Media Research and Training at the Lebanese American University. He is also a visiting faculty at the Salzburg Academy, an affiliated researcher with ICMPA at the University of Maryland. In 2015, Melki won the UNESCO-UNAoC International Media and Information Literacy Award for advancing media literacy education in the Arab region through founding the Media and Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut. His research is at the intersection of media literacy, journalism, war, feminism and health communication. He won the 2020 Shoman Arab Researchers Award for his impactful research on media in the Arab World. Previously, Melki was founding director of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and was affiliated with the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Towson University, Bournemouth University, and the Jordan Media Institute. As a former journalist, Melki was part of a team that won a Webby Award and a National Press Club Award for covering the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon.