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SoSe 20: Media & Information Literacy: Climate Crisis, Sustainability and Public Discourse

Tong-Jin Smith

Kommentar

This explorative course will be taught primarily in English. As we will be working with external partners some of the communication and research will take place in German. In our current network society journalists and legacy media compete with pundits, bloggers, influencers and prosumers for attention. Especially on social media, news, information and entertainment are intertwined and sometimes hard to distinguish. What is relevant for democratic opinion building and what is distraction is no longer obvious. And yet, through all the noise, one topic seems to prevail: the climate crisis. So who is setting the agenda regarding the climate crisis? Who determines what “sustainable development” actually means? How is public discourse taking place in the digital sphere? In this course we will be following journalists as they report on the climate crisis, influencers as they attempt to set the media agenda and politicians and corporations as they surf the climate agenda. We will use media and information literacy skills to identify key narratives and speak to those who are trying to shape public discourse. Requirements: interest in hands on research, firm in both English and German as well as qualitative research methods, willingness to conduct field work outside of class and present research results in class as well as to external partners. Dare to think outside a box. Attendance & Grading: Please, be present for the first session and continue to participate regularly. Grading will take place via oral presentations as well as written reports or a term paper. There will be several semester projects to choose from, e.g. Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft, 3-day workshop “reporting on bio diversity”. Schließen