Tag: digital media

Posted on

What can the playful voice teach us about media literacy? – Jacqueline Vickery

Friday 18 October, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

MECO Seminar Room, S226, John Woolley Building A20, University of Sydney

RSVP via Eventbrite

Media education is often built upon democratic ideals of empowering young people to creatively express themselves and “find their voice.” However, youth do not always share these same values, or rather, they may not express them in the same ways as adults. Drawing from experiences leading media workshops for teens in foster care, this talk explores assumptions that both adults and youth make about the value of youth-produced media. At a time when young people are just as likely to learn media codes and conventions from professionally-produced commercial media as they are from memes and amateur digital culture, how does their playful resistance and appropriation of media challenge frameworks of media literacy?

Dr. Jacqueline Ryan Vickery is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of North Texas and Director of Research for the Youth Media Lab, a unique collaboration between media researchers and media creators that helps young people use media to create more inclusive and just communities. Drawing from qualitative, feminist, and ethnographic methods, she researches the media practices and representations of marginalized youth, with a particular focus on informal learning, equity, and media literacy. She is the author of “Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital World” and co-author of “The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality.” In the summers she facilitates a storytelling and media workshop for teens in foster care.

Posted on

Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age

Friday May 18, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

S226 Seminar Room, Department of Media and Communications, John Woolley Building, (Level 2 entry off Manning Road), University of Sydney

Imagine walking into WH Smiths or Barnes and Noble where mainstream print magazines are placed under accepted industry categories, and where sales are generally in decline. Now imagine an alternative magazine store where categories are challenged, subverted and invented, and where new titles proliferate and have a growing audience. These stores exist in the ‘creative cities’ of the West and are a vital element for the indie magazine community of makers and readers to thrive.

Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age investigates the reasons behind the surprising proliferation of indie magazines in print being made in the digital 21st century, a time when print was expected to become obsolete.

These magazines are a critical and creative response to the speed and distractions of digital media. And yet, while slow magazines are produced as beautiful printed objects, they use the affordances of digital culture (software, websites, social media) to create a breathing space of quality independent journalism, editorial and design creativity, with the aim of providing alternative representations of the ways we live, think and create.

Insights gained from interviews with a broad range of indie makers in the UK, Europe, US and Australia will be integrated within a discussion of the philosophy of ‘slow’, the democratisation of critique, neoliberalism and the DIY/DIWO/DWYL nexus, the discourse and analysis of creative labour, the connection between independent media and the Utopian question ‘what if?’, in an attempt to explain this phenomenon.

Megan Le Masurier is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She has been collecting print indie magazines for more than a decade and is working on a book to explain her, and others, obsession – Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age.