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MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE<br />
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices<br />
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from society, but rather we can proceed from the idea that ‘society inhabits each<br />
individual’” (p.6). Here lies the importance of teaching through pop culture,<br />
connecting theory and practice and the world of the classroom with students’<br />
experiences and lifestyles. Henry Giroux and Roger Simon (1998) maintain, “it<br />
is precisely in the relationship between pedagogy and popular culture that the<br />
important understanding arises of making the pedagogical more political and<br />
the political more pedagogical” (cit. in Giroux; McLaren, 1989, p.238).<br />
Understanding the politics of how meaning is produced and transmitted through<br />
pop culture coincides with a project of civic education where students may think<br />
about their roles as citizens and participants in their political and cultural<br />
spaces.<br />
In political theory, the concept of citizenship is related to membership, rights<br />
and responsibilities in a particular political community. In mediated communities<br />
made available through the Internet, cultural citizenship is related to<br />
membership to both deterritorialized and physical spaces, rights of freedom of<br />
expression and information, shared cross- cultural practices and the<br />
responsibility of being self- reflexive in knowledge production. Hermes (2005)<br />
defines cultural citizenship as “the process of bonding and community building,<br />
and reflection on that bonding, that is implied in partaking of the text- related<br />
practices of reading, consuming, celebrating and criticizing offered in the realm<br />
of (popular) culture” (p.10). The videos presented embody the notion of cultural<br />
citizenship in both the ways they were produced and shared and the responses<br />
they received by the world. As a matter of fact, YouTube often allows people to<br />
both upload and share their cultural artifacts on the Internet and respond to<br />
what is being shown to them. Newark State of Mind, for instance, has been<br />
viewed until today by 457.089 people and has received 1.384 comments.<br />
Reading the comments and critically analyzing what people (citizens of Newark,<br />
visitors or members of the participatory culture) have said about this city allows<br />
us to participate and reflect on that process of bonding and community building<br />
that Hermes locates as the basis of cultural citizenship. Through YouTube,<br />
people worldwide and from different cultural and social backgrounds respond<br />
and comment without restraints of time and space. Their dialogues, sharing of<br />
ideas and experiences are an act of cultural resistance and may mobilize<br />
collective actions to speak differently and creatively about issues in the world<br />
and find solutions to them.<br />
Abowitz’s (2000) definition of ‘resistance as communication’ is in line with our<br />
notion of cultural resistance. “As an impetus of social and political<br />
transformation, resistance communicates; that is, it is a means of signaling,<br />
generating, and building dialogue around particular power imbalances and<br />
inequalities” (p. 878). Effective media literacy strategies must promote dialogue<br />
and critical engagement with learners. We acknowledge that digital divisions,<br />
social struggles, injustices, discrimination and exclusions exist both in offline<br />
and online spaces. We are also aware that valorizing individuals’ lived<br />
experiences, bringing them into the classroom and learning to engage with<br />
difference in a productive way will encourage people to build dialogue around<br />
inequalities and power imbalances. As bell hooks (1994) maintains, “if<br />
experience is already invoked in the classroom as a way of knowing that<br />
coexists in a non- hierarchical way with other ways of knowing, then it lessens<br />
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