Critical Media Literacies in the Twenty-First Century: Writing Autoethnographies, Making Connections, and Creating Virtual Identities.

Critical media literacies can help nurture students' creative agencies and engender positive, sustained change in local communities. Although students do need to develop faculties with digital technologies, they must also participate in critical readings of cultural artifacts and discriminate between various multimedia sources. It is important for youth to conceptualize language as perpetuating different kinds of ideologies. The proliferation of digital and mobile applications expand academic and political boundaries, for within a critical media literacies framework, reading is a collective transaction, learning is a generative act, and political engagement is an accessible achievement. This paper provides an overview of several significant studies that have interrogated the possibilities of critical media pedagogies in youth spaces. In this paper, I chart ways in which students can engage with critical media literacies, namely by (1) affording the production of meaningful and authentic autoethnographies, (2) facilitating hospitable connections with near and distant others, and 3) encouraging imaginative self-constructions of identities within virtual communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]