Media Literacy Summit
The Jacobson Center for Comprehensive Literacy will host a 2.5-day media literacy summit focused on the Balkan/Eastern European region, to be held in Minneapolis in May 27-29, 2025.
Our conversations will focus on the Media and Power media literacy handbook – an open education resource available for anyone to build upon, translate, and share.
Six international scholars and media literacy practitioners, to be named at a later date, will be invited to participate.
Those six participants will join U.S.-based communication scholars Bettina Fabos, Christopher Martin, and Catherine Palczewski, all at the University of Northern Iowa; UNI Fulbright scholar-in-residence Arta Berisha from Kosovo, Iowa State University professor of journalism Daniela Dimitrova, and JCCL Director Lori Norton-Meier for this invitation-only media literacy summit.
Media and Power offers a revolutionary new approach to understanding media literacy.
As a free, Open Educational Resource, the handbook is customizable for global examples, translations, and other adaptations.
The Media and Power handbook offers three modules on which to build
- Module 1: Construction of Meaning: Composition, Meaning, and Beliefs
Chapter 1: The Power and Delight of Picture Composition
Chapter 2: Semiotics: The Study of Signs and Symbolic Meaning
Chapter 3: Narrative: The Stories People Tell Help Them Make Sense of the World and Their Place In It
Chapter 4: Ideology and Hegemony: How Ideological Positions are Articulated Through Discourses and Our Media System
Chapter 5: Interpretation: Polysemic, Dominant, and Oppositional Readings
- Module 2: Construction of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity
Chapter 1: Exploring Residual Discourse
Chapter 2: Construction of Sex/Gender: Masculinity
Chapter 3: Construction of Sex/Gender: Femininity
Chapter 4: Construction of Race and Ethnicity
- Module 3: Construction of Truth [will be completed by December 2024]
Chapter 1: Construction of Truth: Verifiable Knowledge, Models of Expression
and The Fourth EstateChapter 2: History of Fake News: Fake narratives, fake visuals, and strategies of disinformation
Chapter 3: The Politics of Fake News: What’s behind the rise of fake news in the U.S. and world
Chapter 4: Identifying and Analyzing Fake News: How to Know Fake News By Knowing Real Journalism
Media technology alone doesn’t make an ecosystem of fake news; there has to be a purposeful intention for making and distributing fake news. That’s the “power” part of this handbook’s name: Media and Power.
Media and Power authors
The authors of the Media and Power handbook are critical scholars who have written the leading textbooks in their fields. Drs. Bettina Fabos and Christopher Martin are co-authors of Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age and Media Essentials: A Brief Introduction, both published by Macmillan. Dr. Catherine Palczewski is co-author of Gender in Communication: A Critical Introduction, published by Sage.
The Media and Power Handbook is aimed at making critical media literacy accessible around the globe.
Summit planner,
Arta Berisha
Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Arta Berisha from Kosovo is bringing her expertise in journalism and disinformation analysis to the Jacobson Center for Comprehensive Literacy and UNI’s Department of Communication and Media over the 2024-2025 academic year.
Berisha is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Leicester and was selected for the Fulbright award by the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Her research critically examines how external factors such as social media and the internet are transforming journalism, focusing on changes in news routines and the detrimental effects of fake news on the profession.
In UNI’s Department of Communication and Media, Berisha is assisting with the Media and Power course on campus. She is also collaborating with UNI professors Drs. Bettina Fabos (emeritus), Christopher Martin and Catherine Palczewski on the final module of their "Media and Power" handbook that concerns media disinformation and the construction of truth. The new textbook is a product of UNI's Open Educational Resource initiative, which encourages instructors to develop free textbooks and other pedagogical content licensed with the permission to reuse, adapt and share widely. To this end, Berisha is adapting “Media and Power” for a Balkan audience.
Summit Participants (to come)
Summit Location: Minneapolis, USA
Minneapolis
Minneapolis has a thriving downtown with a vibrant arts scene, diverse neighborhoods, numerous parks and is nested within an abundance of rivers lakes. The city is consistently ranked as one of the best places to live for its high in quality of life, and has a rich cultural offering, including theaters, museums, music festivals.
Photo of Stone Arch Bridge by Chad Davis, CC-BY. Photo of Minneapolis skyline by Bobak Ha'Eri, CC-BY-SA, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008-0712-MPLS-panorama.JPG
Open Book Bookstore and Cafe
Our participants will gather at a meeting venue above the Open Book bookstore, located at 1011 Washington Avenue South. Open Book is a literary and arts community. And the bookstore is close to many amenities and walkable Minneapolis attractions, such as the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River. The FRGMNT cafe operates downstairs. 
Our Meeting Room
Our meeting space will give us lots of room to think, talk, and collaborate.
An upstairs outside patio is a perfect opportunity to step away in small groups or individually.
Minneapolis
Minneapolis has a thriving downtown with a vibrant arts scene, diverse neighborhoods, numerous parks and is nested within an abundance of rivers lakes. The city is consistently ranked as one of the best places to live for its high in quality of life, and has a rich cultural offering, including theaters, museums, music festivals.
Photo of Stone Arch Bridge by Chad Davis, CC-BY. Photo of Minneapolis skyline by Bobak Ha'Eri, CC-BY-SA, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008-0712-MPLS-panorama.JPG
Open Book Bookstore and Cafe
Our participants will gather at a meeting venue above the Open Book bookstore, located at 1011 Washington Avenue South. Open Book is a literary and arts community. And the bookstore is close to many amenities and walkable Minneapolis attractions, such as the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River. The FRGMNT cafe operates downstairs.
Our Meeting Room
Our meeting space will give us lots of room to think, talk, and collaborate.
An upstairs outside patio is a perfect opportunity to step away in small groups or individually.
CONTACT
Arta Berisha, Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence: arta.berisha@uni.edu
Dr. Bettina Fabos: bettina.fabos@uni.edu