Radical Digital Media Literacy in a Post-Truth Anti-Trump Era

Abstract

I have engaged in a series of linked pedagogical experiments—one woman’s pedagogic resistance, aligned with many others through making poetry together, by way of digital media literacy—over the duration of the Trump administration. These have been acts of engaged, enraged intellectual citizenship in three parts: 1. an online digital media primer about fakenews, #100hardtruths-#fakenews, produced over the first 100 days of the administration; 2. nine Fake News Poetry Workshops held over the spring semester of 2018, these making use of that online primer and co-facilitated by poets in different locations and communities, and 3. an action plan to further mobilize the primer, poems, and workshops to a scale larger than my own personal pedagogy, still in process. These experiments are first and foremost acts of civic engagement qua pedagogy, art-making, and community-building. They are organized to create and make use of responsive formats, processes, and places to better express our keen knowledge, concern, and curiosity about inter-related phenomena given the current crisis of fake news: self, community, and the world, the fake and real, our own power and that of (social) media.