Critical Media Literacy and Environmental Pedagogy: Children’s Books, Hip-Hop, Fake News and Hell

This panel consists of four presentations focusing on multiple literacies and their relationship to issues centering on critical environmental pedagogy and the global climate crisis. The presenters provide in-depth critical analysis of various forms of media from widely varying philosophical and theoretical perspectives. These various analyses help us formulate critical questions in unquestioning, authoritarian times. How are our understandings of the current global climate crisis influenced and developed through these various forms of media?

The first presentation, The Power of Discourse: CML and The Tantrum that Saved the World . This research project uses both critical theory and Michel Foucault’s notion of power to analyze a new children’s picture book titled The Tantrum that Saved the World. Published in 2018 by World Saving Books, the e-version’s 64 colorfully illustrated pages tell of a little girl who stares down the climate crisis, channeling tantrum power into positive action. Equally important, the analysis brings media literacy into dialogue with discursive practices that cannot take hold in the absence of critical theory.

The second presentation, Biased Coverage: How The Flint Water Crisis was Covered and Where We are Now . will focus on the media coverage immediately following the Flint water crisis and how it not only tapered off in the year that followed, but also was full of discriminatory, biased reporting and practices.

Hip Hop and Climate Change the third presentation will focus on the texts and activist work of several hip-hop artists who are committed to eliminating oppressive conditions that are responsible for environmental degradation at today’s historical juncture.

The final presentation, Hell: Critical Environmental Pedagogy through Popular Dystopic Films situates the critical analysis of popular fictional dystopic climate disaster films within the current historical dystopic-like milieu in which climate change is relegated to the status of hoax and the ways in which these films perpetuate the cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) of the neo-liberal moment. Films such as The Day after Tomorrow and Hell are analyzed using a number of theoretical perspectives from Klein (2014) to Hedges (2015). Many documentaries have been produced on climate change but this presentation will focus on popular films.

Brian Lozenski --Chair

Derek Ford -- Discussant