All illusions are potential ways of ordering reality. The goal of criticism should therefore be not to destroy illusions but to make us more sensitive to their workings and their complexity.
Pam Steager
The Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island advances media literacy education through research and community service. We emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship and practice that stands at the intersections of communication, media studies and education.
All illusions are potential ways of ordering reality. The goal of criticism should therefore be not to destroy illusions but to make us more sensitive to their workings and their complexity.
- Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, 1977
108 Davis Hall
Media Education Lab
Harrington School of Communication and Media
University of Rhode Island
Davis Hall
Kingston, Rhode Island 02881 USA
© 2017, Media Education Lab, University of Rhode Island. All rights reserved.
Developed By Young Globes
Jean
It was during my career in
It was during my career in prevention, probably in the mid-80s, when I first heard Jean Kilbourne and her Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women presentation in Boston. I'd been having my own personal love-hate relationship with advertising and women's magazines for some time already by then, but Jean focused in on a number of aspects I hadn't paid much attention to and made some strong connections between the totality of images of women in advertising and our place and treatment in American society. One of my favorite definitions of media literacy is that it makes the invisible visible, and that's exactly what Jean did for me that day, and that sparked a lifelong interest in the critical analysis of media messages.