Useful Links
Click on the areas below to access materials related to the identities and topics on this site. The materials include links to organizations and initiatives, media outlets, bibliographies, studies and reports, as well as some academic, college-level source material. Materials may be used as supplemental reading or source material for teachers and/or students. You may browse the list or search by identity or general topic (media criticism, media literacy, news literacy, visual literacy, data literacy, etc.).
Age
Class
The Billfold: a website under the Awl network that aims to create a space to have an honest conversation about how we save, spend and repay our debts, and further challenge the misbelief that talking about difficult money issues is uncomfortable.
Center for Study of Working Class Life: an interdisciplinary effort of faculty and staff at the State University of New York at Stony Brook founded in November 1999 and dedicated to exploring the meaning of class in today’s society.
Class Action: A national nonprofit founded in 2004, Class Action’s mission is to end classism.
danah boyd. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” This 2007 article reflects on the social class implications of youth participation in different social media platforms.
Economix: New York Times blog covering the social impact of economy and general economic issues.
Marketplace: a radio program and website produced and distributed by American Public Media (APM), in association with the University of Southern California focusing on the latest business news both nationally and internationally, the global economy, and wider events linked to the financial markets.
Media Education Foundation. “Study Guide for Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.” A companion to the documentary film, the key points of the guide provide an overview of central issues related to television portrayals and class.
David Newman. “Mass Media and Images of Social Class.” This brief article is an excerpt from an online textbook, providing a general overview of trends in media depictions of life among different socio-economic groups.
Pew Research. “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor.” This article from the Pew Research Center outlines American public opinion on a variety of topics related to economic inequality.
Planet Money: a twice-weekly podcast and regular blog featuring current issues in the economy.
Richard Butsch. “A half century of class and gender in American TV domestic sitcoms.” This article provides an historical analysis of sitcom portrayals of social class, focusing on both change and stability in terms of common representations over time.
Disability
ABC’s Ramp Up: Australian archive of the Ramp Up blog, which focused on critical issues of disability, society, and everyday life.
Ability Magazine: a magazine established in 1990 that strives to change public perception of what it means to have a disability and focuses on ability.
Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, David Serlin, eds. Keywords for Disability Studies
BBC’s Ouch!: UK-based blog and podcast on the BBC with a focus on disabled people and diverse stories.
Disability Visibility Project: online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability stories and culture.
Disabled Writers: resource to help editors connect with disabled writers and journalists, and journalists connect with disabled sources.
Elizabeth Elcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, Disability Media Studies
Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin, Disability and the Media
Beth A. Haller, “A Wish for Authentic Disability Representation on Television to Continue”
Beth A. Haller, Media and Disability Bibliography
Media dis&dat: database of media coverage about disability curated by Beth A. Haller, with a focus on disability representation in the media.
New Mobilities Magazine: magazine for wheelchair users.
Ramp Your Voice: blog promoting empowerment, education, inclusion, and self-advocacy for disabled people.
The Specials: reality television series about five friends with intellectual disabilities who share a house in Brighton, UK.
Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism: Autism news and resources from autistic people, professionals, and parents.
UN Division of Social Policy and Development Disability: UN branch that focuses on disability issues, promoting the rights and advancement of persons with disabilities
Gender
Annenberg Inclusion Initiative: a leading think tank out of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism dedicated to addressing issues of inequality in entertainment.
Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” This classic piece by feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky uses the theories of Michel Foucault to explain the way women are largely disempowered by adhering to certain “disciplinary practices” (smiling, crossing their legs, not taking up space, wearing makeup, etc).
bell hooks. “Feminism is for Everybody.” This classic text provides an overview of key concepts related to gender and feminism.
Jessica Bennet. “Picture Perfect.” This journalistic article discusses the common practices of photo retouching in magazines and entertainment media.
Bitch Media: A nonprofit feminist media organization best known for publishing the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Bitch Media’s mission is to provide and encourage an engaged, thoughtful feminist response to mainstream media and popular culture.
Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television: Research center at SDSU examining the representation and employment of women in film and television.
Feministing: An online community providing a forum for a variety of feminist voices and organizations.
The Feminist Wire: The mission of The Feminist Wire is to provide socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics pervasive in all forms and spaces of private and public lives of individuals globally.
For Harriet: An online community designed to raise the level of discourse surrounding Black womanhood.
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: Founded in 2004, the Institute and its programming arm, See Jane, are at the forefront of changing female portrayals and gender stereotypes in children’s media and entertainment by working within the entertainment industry to dramatically alter how girls and women are reflected in media.
Gender Spectrum: an organization whose mission is to create a gender-inclusive world for all children and youth, helping families, organizations, and institutions increase understandings of gender and consider the implications that evolving views have for each of us.
Rosalind Gill. “Super Sexualize Me! Advertising and the ‘Midriffs’.” This article explores the concept of “post-feminism” through an exploration of advertising featuring women’s bodies.
Identity Project: a photography project seeks to explore the labels we choose to identify with when defining our gender and sexuality.
Jezebel: A feminist blog (owned by Gawker media) aimed at women’s interests, under the tagline “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for women.”
Michael Kimmel. Excerpt from “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.” This chapter is an exploration of the social and cultural norms of young, heterosexual, mostly middle-class white men in America.
Name it. Change It.: A non-partisan project of She Should Run, Women’s Media Center and Political Parity, working to end sexist and misogynistic coverage of women candidates by all members of the press—from bloggers to radio hosts to television pundits.
Michael Messner. “Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender.” This article investigates how children form views of gender norms through participation in youth sports.
Stacy Smith et al. “Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT and Disability in films from 2007-2016”
Sundance Women Filmmakers Initiative: launched by Sundance Institute and Women in Film, this initiative is designed to promote the presence of females behind the camera. The initiative includes a mentorship program and a study examining gender disparity in independent film.
Women’s Media Center: Founded in 2005, the Women’s Media Center works to ensure that women’s stories are told and women’s voices are heard in the media through media advocacy campaigns, media monitoring for sexism, creating original content, training women and girls to participate in media, and promoting media experienced women experts.
Julia T. Wood. “Gendered Interaction: Masculine and Feminine Styles of Verbal Communication.” This article discusses the role of language and verbal communication in shaping ideas and practices related to gender.
Writers Guild of America. “The 2016 Hollywood Writers Report.” This report from the WGA outlines trends in employment for women and minorities in Hollywood.
LGBTQ
GLAAD. “Where we are on TV: 2017 Season.” This report by the advocacy organization, GLAAD, outlines representations of LGBT characters in mainstream American television.
GLAAD, “2017 GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index” a report produced by the advocacy organization, GLAAD, mapping the quantity, quality and diversity of LGBTQ people in films released by the seven major motion picture studios during 2016.
Larry Gross. “Gideon Who Will be 25 in the Year 2012: Growing Up Gay Today.” This article explores the implications of a contemporary media landscape in which LGBT issues have increased visibility compared to previous eras.
Julia Himberg, The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production. This book offers interviews with numerous industry workers in order to deepen our understanding of the intricate processes behind the creation of the LGBT representations that appear on television.
Regine Labossiere. “The Fact and Fiction of Being Transgender.” This journalistic article discusses issues related to the visibility of transgender individuals in media.
Diane Raymond. “Popular Culture and Queer Representation.” This chapter delves deep into queer representations in popular media, describing several common tropes in queer portrayals.
Katherine Sender. “Sex Sells: Sex, Class and Taste in Commercial Gay and Lesbian Media.” This paper analyzes the construction of the “gay media market”, focusing on economics, representations, and the implications for the broader public.
Race & Ethnicity
Annenberg Inclusion Initiative: a leading think tank out of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism dedicated to addressing issues of inequality in entertainment.
Asian Americans Justice Center: Founded in 1991, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC works to advance the human and civil rights of Asian Americans, and build and promote a fair and equitable society for all.
Banerjee, Mita. “Arab Americans in Literature and the Media.” This article contrasts mainstream Hollywood representations of Arab Americans with representations in Arab-produced novels.
Being Latino: A communication platform designed to educate, entertain and connect all peoples across the global Latino spectrum. Our aim is to break down barriers and foster unity and empowerment through informative, thought-provoking dialogue and exchanging of ideas. Being Latino seeks to give a unified voice to the multitude of communities that identify with the multidimensional culture that is Latino.
Citizenship & Social Justice: web resource dedicated to social justice and civic engagement in school curricula created by educator and writer Jon Greenberg.
Colorlines: a daily news site where race matters.
Covering Islam in America: an online course providing information designed to humanize, analyze and put news about Islam and Muslim communities into context.
Define American: nonprofit media and culture organization that uses the power of story to transcend politics and shift the conversation about immigrants, identity, and citizenship in a changing America.
Dixon, Tavis and Daniel Linz. “Overrepresentation and underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as lawbreakers on television news.” This quantitative research study explores biased representations of ethnic minorities in news media related to crime.
Equal Justice Initiative: a nonprofit with a mission to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenge racial and economic injustice, and to protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society
Every Single Word: This Tumblr site that highlights lack of diversity in film industry by cutting all dialogue spoken by white characters.
Free Press. “Out of the Picture: Minority and Female TV Station Ownership in the United States.” This report documents the imbalanced media ownership landscape.
Hunt, Darnell et. al. Ralph J. Bunche Center’s “2015 Hollywood Diversity Report: Flipping the Script“: This report examines relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry. It considers the top 200 theatrical film releases in 2012 and 2013 and all broadcast, cable and digital platform television programs from the 2012/13 season.
Immigration Nation Report: media content analysis conducted by the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project (MIP) in collaboration with Define American, a nonproft media and culture organization
Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.” This historical article describes the ways in which “whiteness” has led to economic privilege in the post-WWII United States.
Lopez, Lori. “Fan activists and the politics of race in The Last Airbender.” This piece investigates the Asian American fan activists who protested the casting decisions of a major Hollywood production.
Media Action Network for Asian Americans: The MANAA is dedicated to monitoring all facets of the media – television, motion pictures, print, advertising, radio, etc. – and advocating balanced, sensitive and positive portrayals of Asian Americans.
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” This well-known piece was written in the late 1980s to explore the often unspoken effects of “white privilege.”
National Museum of African American History and Culture: Talking About Race
National Hispanic Media Coalition: A non-partisan, non-profit, media advocacy and civil rights organization created to advance American Latino employment and programming equity throughout the entertainment industry and to advocate for telecommunications policies that benefit Latinos and other people of color.
Pence, Dan and J. Arthur Fields. “Teaching about Race and Ethnicity: Trying to Uncover White Privilege for a White Audience.” This article explores strategies and challenges of teaching about race and ethnicity within predominantly white schools.
Racialicious: a blog about the intersection of race and pop culture.
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA: Founded in 1969 as the Center for Afro-American Studies (CAAS), the Center was renamed after Nobel Prize winner, scholar, activist, and UCLA alumnus Ralph J. Bunche to develop and strengthen the field of African-American studies. The Center produces an annual Hollywood Diversity Report.
Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes: An online exhibit and blog whose mission is to challenge media portrayals of Arab Americans and demonstrate the integral role Arab Americans have played in U.S. society since its inception.
The Root: news, opinion and culture site for African-American influencers. Founded in 2008, under the leadership of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root provides smart, timely coverage of breaking news, thought-provoking commentary and gives voice to a changing, more diverse America. The Root is a subsidiary of The Slate Group which is owned by The Washington Post Company.
Seeing White (podcast and study guide): Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen explores “whiteness” in this fourteen-part documentary series, released in 2017.
Smith, Stacy et al. “Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT and Disability in films from 2007-2016”
UCLA Chicano Studies Center. “Looking For Latino Regulars on Prime-Time Television.” This report provides an analysis of Latino representation in prime-time television during the first decade of the 2000s.
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center: The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) was founded in 1969 with a commitment to foster multidisciplinary research efforts as part of the land grant mission of the University of California.
The Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race.
Zhang, Qin. “Perceptions of Asian American Students: Stereotypes and Effects.” This research brief outlines the interaction between media portrayals of Asian Americans and common stereotypes.
Religion
Covering Islam in America: an online course providing information designed to humanize, analyze and put news about Islam and Muslim communities into context.
Patheos: Founded in 2008, this online destination engages in global dialogue about religion and spirituality to explore and experience the world’s beliefs. Patheos brings together faith communities, academics, and the broader public into a single environment.
Pew Research Center, Many Countries Favor Specific Religions, Officially or Unofficially (October 3, 2017)
The Pluralism Project: a two decade-long research project at Harvard University that engages students in studying the new religious diversity in the United States, particularly exploring the communities and religious traditions of Asia and the Middle East that have become woven into the religious fabric of the United States in the past twenty-five years.
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly: A PBS show and accompanying website that provided news coverage and analysis of national and international events in the ever-changing religious world from 1997-2017.
LGBTQ
AfterEllen: Founded in 2002, AfterEllen.com quickly became the largest and most comprehensive website dedicated to the representation of lesbian/bi women in popular culture.
Everfest: a list of pride festivals, parades and other activities from around the world.
Fair Education Act: part of California’s education guidelines, ensures the inclusion of groups that have often been excluded from history in the curriculum: people who are gay or transgender and people with disabilities. These updated guidelines also prevent schools from adopting learning materials with a discriminatory bias or negative stereotypes based solely on ability or disability or sexual orientation.
Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network: a leading national education organization focused on ensuring safe schools for all students, working to address students who feel bullied, discriminated against and/or fall through the cracks.
Gay Straight Alliance Network: A national youth leadership organization that connects school-based Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) to each other and community resources through peer support, leadership development, and training.
GLAAD Formerly Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, this group leads the conversation for LGBT equality, and changing the culture. As the LGBT movement’s communications epicenter, GLAAD is the principal organization that works directly with news media, entertainment media, cultural institutions and social media.
Identity Project: a photography project seeks to explore the labels we choose to identify with when defining our gender and sexuality.
National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association: stylebook supplement on lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender terminology
Project 10 a nonprofit organization, was created in 1986 to provide funding for programs and projects to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. They consult with school districts throughout California and with community groups to assure that public schools (and schools that receive public funding) are in compliance with state and federal laws regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
General Resources & Media Criticism
Aca-Fan Professor Henry Jenkins’ blog that walks the line between academia and fandom. Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative.
Antenna: A collectively authored media and cultural studies blog committed to timely yet careful analysis of texts, news, and events from across the popular culture spectrum. The site regularly responds to new works and developments in television, film, music, gaming, digital video, the Internet, print, and the media industries.
Critical Commons: a public media archive and fair use advocacy network that supports the transformative reuse of media in scholarly and creative contexts. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online platform for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating curating and spreading media.
Cultural Studies Podcast: podcasts featuring conversations with artists, writers, intellectuals, workers about the politics of culture.
EDIT Media: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media is a faculty-driven initiative dedicated to researching, developing, and educating about best practices in inclusive teaching in college-level media production.
Flow: An online journal of television and media studies launched in October 2004. Flow’s mission is to provide a critical forum where scholars, teachers, students, and the general public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves.
In Media Res: website dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship, and to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media. The site presents theme weeks curated by media scholars.
Political Remix Video a website that showcases some of the best, most innovative and inspiring examples of political remix video on the net.
Sociological Images: website designed to encourage all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief sociological discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry.
Media Literacy & Education Resources
Center for Media Literacy
Center for Media and Information Literacy: a hub for research, outreach, education, and professional development on issues involving media literacy and information literacy. The CMIL is dedicated to improving the quality of media and information literacy practice locally, nationally, and internationally.
Common Sense Media
Educational Equity Compliance: This site details student rights regarding equal access to educational programs and activities at schools within LAUSD, offering downloadable PDFs on bullying, sexual harassment and other discrimination that may come up in school context.
FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is a watchdog group offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.
National Association of Media Literacy Education
Media Education Lab: University of Rhode Island lab (founded by Renee Hobbs) that provides public programs, educational services, community outreach, and multimedia curriculum resources targeted to the needs of educators and learners in school and after-school settings
Media Smarts: a Canadian not-for-profit charitable organization for digital and media literacy.
Mind Over Media/Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda: a site developed by the Media Education Lab to promote dialogue and discussion about what constitutes contemporary propaganda and how it may have positive, benign or negative impact on individuals and society.
Students for Education Reform: a vibrant, fast-growing movement of students fighting to close the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in public schools across the United States. This “social sharing” portal showcases the work that they do, and allows any SFER member to submit a post.
News Literacy & Education Resources
Blue Feed/Red Feed: A Wall Street Journal news application that allows readers to see Facebook posts from conservatives and liberals on political and newsworthy topics side by side.
BS Detector Plugin: a browser extension for Chrome and Mozilla-based browsers, B.S. Detector searches all links on a given webpage for references to unreliable sources, checking against a manually compiled list of domains, providing visual warnings about the presence of questionable links or the browsing of questionable sites and materials.
Digital Resource Center: part of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook, this site shares the accumulating wisdom and materials of the News Literacy teaching community, working to strengthen democracy by teaching students to pluck reliable information from the daily media tsunami.
Crap Detection Resources: an online document and list of resources for assessing the accuracy and veracity of online information, organized under a number of headings. Starting as a chapter in the book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (2012), Howard Rheingold’s aim is to increase the number of people who know how to separate good from bad information.
The Echo Chamber Club: a weekly newsletter, podcast and website to help ‘liberals’, ‘metropolitans’ and ‘progressives’ access and understand different viewpoints and stories that don’t appear on their news feed.
Fair.org: a U.S.-based media watch group offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.
First Draft News: a nonprofit coalition founded in 2015 to raise awareness and address challenges relating to trust and truth in the digital age by providing practical and ethical guidance in how to find, verify and publish content sourced from the social web.
How to Lie with Statistics (PDF of entire text): a now classic book written by journalist Darrell Huff in 1954 presenting an introduction to statistics for general readers.
Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information: PDF of report from Data & Society Research Institute by Caroline Jack and Monica Bulger
News Co Lab: center housed at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication that works to advance media literacy through journalism, education, and technology, designing open-access educational resources, advising newsrooms, developing tools to improve journalistic transparency.
News Decoder: is an effort to promote global understanding and to empower the millennial generation to find solutions to the world’s most intractable problems.
NewsTrust: sponsored by the Reuters Foundation, this nonprofit news site covers the world’s under-reported stories at the heart of aid, development, women’s rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change.
PolitiFact: a project of the Tampa Bay Times and its partners to help ascertain the truth in politics.
ProCon.org: a nonprofit nonpartisan public charity that provides professionally-researched pro, con, and related information on more than 50 controversial issues.
Project Implicit: a non-profit organization and international collaboration of researchers investigating implicit bias (thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control) with the goal of educating the public and to providing a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet.
Snopes: a website founded by David Mikkelson in 1994 that initially focused on researching urban legends and has since grown into a well-known and widely used fact-checking site.
Stat: media company focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery–producing daily news, investigative articles, and narrative projects in addition to multimedia features.
Verification Junkie: a growing directory of apps, tools, sites and strategies for verifying, fact checking and assessing the validity of social media and user generated content.
Visual Literacy Resources
Know Your Meme: a site (founded in 2008) that researches and documents Internet memes and viral phenomena through an independent professional editorial and research staff and community members.
Reading the Pictures: a web-based, not-for-profit educational and publishing organization dedicated to visual culture, visual literacy and media literacy through the analysis of news, documentary and social media images.
No Caption Needed: a blog (tied to the book of the same name) dedicated to public discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.
What’s Going On In This Picture: part of the New York Times’ Learning Network, this site offers Times images stripped of their captions — and an invitation to students to discuss them live.
Data Literacy Resources
Data & Society: an independent nonprofit research organization that produces original research on topics including AI and information, the impact of technology on labor and health, and online disinformation.
My Data and Privacy Online–A Toolkit for Young People: A resource developed by Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics) focusing on concerns over children’s online privacy and the commercial uses of their data, listening to children’s voices and developing tools to better empower them.
Social Justice Organizations
Anti-Defamation League: founded in 1913 this organization works to fight threats to democracy, including cyberhate, bullying, bias in schools and in the criminal justice system, terrorism, hate crimes, coercion of religious minorities, and contempt for anyone who is different. Their educational programs can be found here
Global Action Project: develops the capacities and skills of youth most affected by injustice, to create powerful media, cultural expression, and social change. GAP provides effective media-arts programming to youth from low-income, new immigrant, and TLGBQ (Transgender, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Queer) communities.
National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ): a human relations organization that promotes inclusion and acceptance by providing education and advocacy while building communities that are respectful and just for all.
Online Bibliographies
Edited Print Collections
Media/Current Event/Hashtag Syllabi
