Media Literacy Certificate Faculty

Senior Lecturer & Associate Chair; Media Literacy Certificate Director
N318 Integrative Learning Center
413-545-4609
@email

My research interests are focused on critical media literacy, especially integrating media literacy into K-12 classroom. I co-run Mass Media Literacy, a grassroots organization the supports teacher education and application of critical media literacy. I serve as the VP for the Board of the Media Freedom Foundation. My upper-level Comm classes all come with a civic engagement component where students have the opportunity to work with and on behalf of young people and their media learning. I have written multiple books on critical media literacy, including Educating media literacy: The need for critical media literacy in teacher education (2020), Key scholarship in media literacy: David Buckingham (2021), and co-authored the only critical media literacy book for young readers, The media and me: A guide to critical media literacy for young people (2022), and co-authored the open-source media literacy guide, Critical media literacy and civic learning (2022). 

Sut Jhally
Professor Emeritus
@email
http://www.sutjhally.com/
Research interests include popular culture and media from the interdependent perspectives of critical cultural studies and political economy. While my focus is advertising and consumer culture, I am broadly concerned with ideology, consciousness, and politics. I have been involved in many book projects as author and editor, though currently my research is expressed in the form of educational video through my work with the Media Education Foundation.

Claudio Moreira
Professor & Chair
N312 Integrative Learning Center
413-545-1311 (leave message)
@email
From the intersection of race, gender, and class, to name a few, I write Performance Autoethnographies looking at words, knowledge, concepts, and actions, which expose differences and also shape, marked bodies into the world. From a present space created by a deep immersion in the past, I attempt to challenge the white man's ideology, trying to create a transformative action, a performative space, whose goal is to bring more justice and dignity to more people. My work can be found in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, International Review of Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, and Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies. My book, co-authored with Marcelo Diversi, Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis (Left Coast Press, 2009), is a postcolonial and polyvocal construction of a scholarship committed to combat racism, sexism, and classism in modern America society. This is what I want to do with my scholarship; to engage in other postcolonial/polyvocal projects with his students, colleagues in and with the community where I live and labor.

Joel Saxe
Lecturer
N355 Integrative Learning Center
413-545-1311 (leave message)
@email
Research interests include critical pedagogy, media literacy, contemporary and historical movements for social justice, the cyber-commons and links between grassroots and online activism, blogging and YouTube as classroom curricular outcomes, youth and the entertainment industries, Indy media, and the ethnography of Yiddish culture and Jewish radicalism. Through artist-educator media literacy residencies, I’ve worked with students and teachers in DYS youth detention facilities and local middle and high schools.

Erica Scharrer
Professor
S330 Integrative Learning Center
413-545-6339
@email
My research interests involve the study of media content, opinions of media, media effects, and media literacy, particularly regarding gender and violence. My work has appeared in Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Media Psychology. I've co-authored three books with first author, George Comstock, including Media and the American Child (Elsevier, 2007) in which we provide a critical synthesis and review of the children and media literature. My edited collection Media Effects/Media Psychology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), part of the International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, provides a state-of-the-art review of the field. Particular emphases in my work include media depictions of masculinity, the third-person effect and other opinions about media influence, and the effectiveness of media literacy curricula.

Emily West
Associate Professor
S324 Integrative Learning Center
413-545-6345
@email
http://works.bepress.com/emily_west/
My research interests are in the areas of promotional culture, media and cultural studies of health, qualitative research methods, and gender and performance. I'm the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (Routledge, 2013), and my publications about consumer culture appear in Popular Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. A collaborative project on American cheerleading has been published in Social Problems and Text & Performance Quarterly. My current research considers how health care is framed as a consumer issues, particularly in the United States in reform discourse.