The Uses of Media Literacy

Revisiting Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart’s framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy’s various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new ‘mass literacy’ for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful were seizing the opportunity also to use this expansion in literacy, through the new popular culture, for commercial and political ends. Working in the intersection between education, cultural studies and literacies, the authors write about media literacy as a contested, under-theorised field through Hoggart’s ‘line of sight’ to provide a perspective on media literacy and working class culture today. This reimagining of a classic work, piercingly relevant to studies of class in Britain in 2019, will be of key interest to scholars in Media Studies, as well as interested readers in Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Sociology.

1. Who are ‘the Working Classes’? 2. Landscape with figures – a setting 3. ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ 4. The ‘real’ world of people 5. The full rich life 6. Unbending the springs of action 7. Invitations to a candy-floss world: the newer mass art 8. The newer mass art: sex in shiny packets 9. Unbent springs: a note on a scepticism without tension 10. Unbent springs: a note on the uprooted and the anxious 11 Conclusion 12 Afterword by Kate Pahl

Pete Bennett is Senior Lecturer in post Compulsory Education at the University of Wolverhampton, where he runs a top-up degree and jointly leads the MA in Professional Practice and Lifelong Education. He writes textbooks and is involved as writer and editor in the fields of media, education and culture including Barthes’ Mythologies Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture (Routledge 2013), Doing Text: Media after the Subject (2016) and Identity and Resistance in Further Education (2018). He is co- editor of the new Routledge Research in Media Education and Literacy research series (with Julian McDougall). Julian McDougall is Professor in Media and Education, Head of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He edits Media Practice and Education, runs the Professional Doctorate (Ed D) in Creative and Media Education at Bournemouth University and convenes the annual International Media Education Summit. He co-edits the Routledge Research in Media Literacy and Education series (with Pete Bennett). John Potter is Associate Professor (Reader) in Media in Education at the University College London Institute of Education. His research, teaching, supervision and publications are in the fields of: media education, new literacies, creative activity and learner agency; the changing nature of teaching and learning in response to the pervasive use in wider culture of media technologies in formal and informal settings. He is the author of a number of books and papers in the field, including Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising third-space literacies with Prof Julian McDougall, shortlisted for the UKLA Academic Book of the Year award, 2018.