Gramsci and Media Literacy

In their important new book, scholars and professors Erika Engstrom and Ralph Beliveau provide a crucial wake-up call along with a thoughtfully devised action plan for recognizing and combating ideologically manipulative media power. Through well-developed clear arguments and convincing evidence (underscored by dynamic prose), they wed Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and social justice to an approach to media literacy education firmly grounded in critical activism. The authors’ in-depth, exemplary close analysis of hegemonic masculinity in the all-time highest grossing film (as of July 2019)—Marvel/Disney’s Avengers: Endgame—is a brilliant and inspiring penultimate chapter.

-- Mary-Lou Galician, Arizona State University

In this engaging work, readers are introduced to the work of a grandfather of media literacy, Antonio Gramsci. Engstrom and Beliveau ably demonstrate the power of critically analyzing representations of race, class, and gender to elucidate shifts in contemporary media culture. In framing cultural studies as a form of media literacy, readers learn how the act of interpreting media may transform our own understanding of power as it impacts many aspects of everyday life.

-- Renee Hobbs, Harrington School of Communication and Media, University of Rhode Island

Gramsci and Media Literacy is grounded in three key concepts—hegemony, media literacy, and semiotics—in the pursuit of demonstrating how the study of Gramsci is still relevant in mass media studies. Co-authors Erika Engstrom, professor and director of the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, and Ralph Beliveau, associate professor of Creative Media Production at the University of Oklahoma, apply a Gramscian/hegemonic lens to the disciplines of cultural studies, media studies, education studies, and gender studies that coalesce quite nicely as the book progresses.

* Journalism & Mass Communication Quarter