International Critical Media Literacy Conference Features Weave News Projects
Four members of the Weave News team participated in the 2021 Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas (CMLCA), held virtually from October 15-17, 2021. With sessions in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, the conference celebrated the life and work of the Brazilian scholar-activist Paulo Freire (1921-1997), widely considered the “father of critical pedagogy.”
“Teaching is not transferring knowledge, but creating the possibilities for its production or construction. Those who teach learn by teaching and those who learn teach by learning.”
Amanda Barreto Salgueiro and Mariam Waqar Khattak, both St. Lawrence University students who have been Weave News staff members and interns, led a session on Thinking Tuesday, an Instagram series launched by Weave News in July 2020 with a mission to unpack key aspects of the “normative cultures” that help frame “the unspoken rules and structures of our societies.” They described the history of the series, discussed the process of researching and designing the posts, and led a dialogue about how projects like Thinking Tuesday can be used to promote social justice in educational and activist contexts.
A slide from Amanda Barreto Salgueiro and Mariam Waqar Khattak’s conference session on the Thinking Tuesday series.
To date the series has spotlighted more than two dozen terms and concepts ranging from Anthropocentrism to the White Savior Complex.
Each post offers a critical contextualization of the term along with links to relevant resources.
Editorial Director John Collins and Contributing Editor Cassandra Kunert led a session on Weaving the Streets & People’s History Archive (WSPHA), a collaboration between Weave News and the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery. The project, which includes an article series and digital archive, explores how ordinary people express themselves political and culturally in public space throughout the world. Contributors to WSPHA have produced multimedia reports on social movements, street art, political demonstrations, and other uses of public space in a variety of global locations.
In their session, Collins and Kunert explored “how citizen journalism can help build critical consciousness and contribute to transborder, solidarity-based politics” and also reflected on some of the ethical and practical challenges associated with this work. The session spotlighted work produced by contributors reporting from Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Spain, and Costa Rica.
Each of the sessions at the CMLCA 2021 conference was recorded, and all recordings are available on the CMLCA’s YouTube channel. Below are the videos of the sessions organized and presented by Weave News.