Papers by Catherine Burwell
The Routledge Companion to Media Education, Copyright and Fair Use, 2018
Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies
English Journal, 2017
This article explores three ways critical literacy educators might use Let’s Play videos in the h... more This article explores three ways critical literacy educators might use Let’s Play videos in the high school classroom: as texts for analyzing video games, as models for media production, and as starting places for conversations about power and profit in the gaming industry.
M/C Journal of Media and Culture, 2017
This paper analyzes the use of captions in Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) news videos. In particular, it l... more This paper analyzes the use of captions in Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) news videos. In particular, it looks at those videos created in response to Facebook's autoplay feature. Analysing two recent AJ+ videos, I show how captions add new layers of meaning to the already multimodal form of the video, and how they change the way that news stories are communicated. I also take a political economic view of captions, considering the role they play in audience engagement, branding and profit-making within current " economies of attention. " I end with a brief inquiry into the implications of captions for our understanding of literacy in an age of constantly shifting media.
E-Learning and Digital Media, 2017
This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let's Play videos (or LPs) on YouTub... more This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let's Play videos (or LPs) on YouTube. A hybrid of digital gaming and video, LPs feature gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. Players may set out to promote, review, critique or satirize a game. In recent years, LPs have become hugely popular with young audiences, and currently make up over half the top hundred channels on YouTube. The authors identify LPs as emerging videogame paratexts with pedagogical potential. In particular, they ask how LPs function as sites of new literacies. They answer that question by discussing two key characteristics of LP practices: their emphasis on processes of meaning-making within games and their mobilization of literacies associated with remix and appropriation. The final section of the article explores how LP practices might inform literacy instruction in schools.
Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2015
This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of “linguistic landscapes.” We colla... more This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of “linguistic landscapes.” We collaborated with a group of Humanities teachers to design and implement the “Word on the Street” project, in which Grade 10 students took on the role of researchers to explore the linguistic, visual and spatial texts of their neighbourhood. We show how the concept of linguistic landscapes fits especially well with a pedagogy of multiliteracies by encouraging the critical study of multimodality and linguistic diversity in context. We then describe the design and implementation of the project, which combined visual analysis with the production of place-based documentaries. Reading two of the documentaries, we illustrate ways that students used the project to identify and investigate the gap between how their community is represented, and how they experience it in their daily lives. In the end, we argue that linguistic landscape analysis provides a unique pedagogical tool for recognizing the complexity of meaning-making in urban landscapes, one with the potential to confront the inequities that shape the lives of many youth living in contemporary global cities.
The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2010
In this paper I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop cu... more In this paper I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I ask how corporate media producers and young users interact and negotiate their relationships with one another, and I analyze the circulation of power between the two. After outlining key concerns around commodification, agency, labour and copyright, I present two case studies of young people’s appropriation of the television programs Gossip Girl and The Colbert Report. I note the ways in which youth undertake activities such as renarrating, remixing and customizing popular culture content, and, correspondingly, the ways in which commercial media have enabled, controlled, prohibited or profited from these kinds of interactions. After addressing this emergent set of concerns, I finish with a brief reflection on ways that we might use these examples to help us frame our own curricular projects, particularly in teaching new media literacies.
Feminist Media Studies, Jun 2, 2014
In this paper, I analyze young women’s video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emph... more In this paper, I analyze young women’s video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emphasis on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers within neoliberal regimes, Gossip Girl bears many of the marks of postfeminist media. Drawing on an archive of videos posted to YouTube during the program’s first two seasons, I show how young video makers reimagine the program’s postfeminist aesthetics. Gossip Girl fan videos frequently seek to create emotional intensity through repetition of close-ups on the female face. They also use innovative digital editing techniques to alter television’s realist aesthetic and portray split, fragmented or contradictory subjects. This focus on the face and amplification of affect cuts out the source text’s emphasis on the teenage body as a vehicle for product placement, and challenges the neoliberal privileging of economic success and independence. At the same time, the videos also contain their own limitations, reproducing the young female body as a site of spectacle.
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 57(3), 205-213, 2013
Appropriation, transformation and remix are increasingly recognized as significant aspects of dig... more Appropriation, transformation and remix are increasingly recognized as significant aspects of digital literacy. This article considers how one form of digital remix – the video remix – might be used in classrooms to introduce critical conversations about representation, appropriation, creativity and copyright. The first half of the article explores the opportunities that remix presents to reflect on mainstream media ideologies, emerging modes of collaborative creativity, and the complexities of intellectual property. The second half illustrates this potential by examining the use of one popular video remix, Buffy vs. Edward, in a secondary school English class and an undergraduate popular culture course. Throughout, the article argues that critical discussion of digital texts and practices opens up the possibilities for students to analyze their everyday lived media experience. This is an important undertaking in a context in which young people's identities and world views are increasingly shaped through digital texts and interactions.
Education Canada, Sep 2012
Remix is the practice of re-assembling, recontextualizing, and creating new meanings out of music... more Remix is the practice of re-assembling, recontextualizing, and creating new meanings out of music, sound, images, and words. Increasingly, youth are using remix as a powerful tool for bringing their concerns into the public domain. In an educational context, producing remix gives students the chance to act simultaneously as readers and writers, consumers and producers, a stance many media scholars say is indicative of today's new media environments. In an age in which the ability to participate in creating, critiquing, and manipulating digital texts is a means of belonging and social power, schools committed to equity need to educate students in the practical aspects of symbolic meaning-making.
The Electronic Journal of Communication / La Revue Electronic de Communication, 2008
Abstract: In this article we consider the relationship between fandom, politics and parody throug... more Abstract: In this article we consider the relationship between fandom, politics and parody through an examination of fan practices related to The Colbert Report. We begin by recounting the way in which a project intended to analyze online political activism took an unexpected turn into fan culture. We then undertake two case studies. In the first, we focus on one example of Colbert Report fan participation to demonstrate the ways in which audiences’ online activities complicate theories of irony as simple acts of encoding and decoding. In the second, we revisit two interviews with prominent bloggers writing about The Colbert Report and The Daily Show to suggest that fan practices not only overlap with political practices, but demonstrate a convergence of imaginative performance, cultural consumption and collective engagement that blurs the boundaries between affect and activism. We conclude by suggesting that fan cultures hold significant insights into meaning production and civic engagement in mediated worlds, and that they cannot be separated from questions about contemporary modes of online political expression.
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (Editors Matt Ratto and Megan Boler), Feb 2014
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014
""This article traces tensions between participants and producers on the official Colbert Report ... more ""This article traces tensions between participants and producers on the official Colbert Report discussion boards. Employing critical discourse analysis, it examines the flow of power between the program’s producers and fans as they struggle over how the parody’s meanings will be interpreted, and how fans’ digital labor and content will be used. I begin by recounting the conflicted history of the message boards, and then analyze a sample of discussion threads in order to illustrate the vibrant and boisterous community created there. Finally, I explore strategies of migration, refusal and offline communication used by participants to express agency and power in relation to the boards’ producers. Throughout, I argue that theoretical approaches to participatory culture must take into account the corporate drive to centralize, manage and profit from users’ communicative desires, as well as audiences’ corresponding efforts to resist such control.
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Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy (Editors Lisa K. Taylor and Jasmin Zine), 2014
Intercultural Education, 2007
Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Iranian women's memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular ... more Iranian women's memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular of these has been Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. But in a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran cannot be read as neutral. We begin this paper by analyzing the ways in which discourses such as "the clash of civilizations" and "global sisterhood" shape the reception of Nafisi's autobiography. We then examine how the autobiography is being taught, providing both a framework for problematizing current approaches to the text and a case study centred on teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a group of preservice teachers. We argue for a continuing interrogation into our own pedagogical practices and desires.
Study Guides by Catherine Burwell
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Papers by Catherine Burwell
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Study Guides by Catherine Burwell
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