Leaning by Doing: Critical Media Literacy and the Politics of Gender

In CSW Research Scholar Rhonda Hammer’s course, “Critical Media Literacy and the Politics of Gender,” undergraduate students make video essays, documentaries, and other multimedia texts that grapple with the ways in which media informs and is informed by social issues related to gender.  Hammer has recently posted works from Spring 2013 on the web for public consumption.

The texts cover a wide variety of important topics, including media representations of women in medicine, popular culture’s exclusion of queer characters that don’t fit into a normative paradigm, the social implications of birth control marketing, and the rise of homeless students at UCLA.  The texts, injected with the great passion of the students who made them, demonstrate exciting ways in which academics can use current technology to expand beyond a pedagogical model based on research papers and exams.  Hammer’s course proves that one of the best ways for a student to become media literate is to create media herself.

To view the multimedia work produced in “Critical Media Literacy and the Politics of Gender,” visit http://women.ucla.edu/faculty/hammer/cm178/