Grand Parents of Media Literacy

Who are your intellectual grandparents? Who has influenced your work in media literacy? They are the people you have encountered, whose ideas resonate deeply with your own experiences, dreams and ideas. Their work speaks to issues that capture interest and engage imagination.

The Grandparents of Media Literacy Gallery is the website companion to a book edited by Renee Hobbs entitled Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative, which was published by Temple University Press in 2016. The Grandparents of Media Literacy Gallery is a crowd-sourced narrative approach to intellectual history. Anyone can upload an intellectual grandparent, providing information about their work that will enable readers to understand their key ideas and contributions. Anyone can share a story about any grandparent, explaining “how they influenced you.” As an transdisciplinary topic, media literacy scholars and practitioners come from many backgrounds and fields, and we possess different kinds of foundational knowledge. We do not all rely on the same canonical texts that “tell the story” of our shared values and beliefs.

Media literacy, therefore, has innumerable intellectual and metaphorial grandparents due to its transdisciplinary nature. On the website you can explore the many people who have influenced the field of media literacy through their work, ideas and creative contributions. These intellectual grandparents may come from fields including philosophy, sociology, literature and more. You can contribute to the website by uploading information about an author, scholar or creative individual whose work influenced your own. You can also share your own story of how an intellectual grandparent influenced your work in media literacy.