This keynote from Koen Leurs positions media literacy not merely as a set of technical skills, but as a civic and ethical practice concerned with questions of in- and exclusion, social justice, voice, and listening. An inclusive approach to media literacy in education builds on insights from critical pedagogy, postcolonial and decolonial theory, indigenous thinking.
Such an approach understands multiculture not as an exception or problem that has to be managed, but as an ordinary and constitutive feature of social life. Inclusive Media Education therefore call for reflexivity, dialogical engagement, and structural awareness, enabling publics to critically navigate and reshape mediated public spaces.
Drawing from recent research projects – including Co-designing a Fair Digital Asylum Procedure - Leurs grounds the talk and reflects on the structural power relations (politics) and aesthetical demands ( poetics) of co-creative methodologies and how they may allow researchers to shed light on how digital infrastructure function as inclusion and exclusion mechanisms.
The keynote will be based on the coming book Inclusive Media Education: Critical Media Literacies for Diverse Societies (Routledge), written in collaboration with Dr. Çigdem Bozdag (digimig.nl) and Dr. Annemaria Néag (rug.nl), both from the University of Groningen.
Koen Leurs is an associate professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His interests are digital transformations in migration, borders and youth culture, research ethics and co-creative methodologies. His most recent books are Digital Migration, published with Sage in June 2023; and Doing Digital Migration Studies, published with Amsterdam University Press in March 2024.
The keynote is hosted by the research project Søndre Media.
