Catherine Burwell
University of Calgary, Education, Faculty Member
- Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, Sociology of Education, Digital Media & Learning, Youth Studies, Youth Culture, and 16 moreMedia Literacy, Adolescent Literacy, Fan Theory and Culture, Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Girlhood Studies, Digital Media, English Education, Public Pedagogy, Digital Copyright, Media Education, Critical Literacy, Occupy Wall Street, Critical Legal Studies, Authorship, and Video Gamesedit
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This article explores three ways critical literacy educators might use Let’s Play videos in the high school classroom: as texts for analyzing video games, as models for media production, and as starting places for conversations about... more
This article explores three ways critical literacy educators might use Let’s Play videos in the high school classroom: as texts for analyzing video games, as models for media production, and as starting places for conversations about power and profit in the gaming industry.
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This paper analyzes the use of captions in Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) news videos. In particular, it looks at those videos created in response to Facebook's autoplay feature. Analysing two recent AJ+ videos, I show how captions add new layers... more
This paper analyzes the use of captions in Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) news videos. In particular, it looks at those videos created in response to Facebook's autoplay feature. Analysing two recent AJ+ videos, I show how captions add new layers of meaning to the already multimodal form of the video, and how they change the way that news stories are communicated. I also take a political economic view of captions, considering the role they play in audience engagement, branding and profit-making within current " economies of attention. " I end with a brief inquiry into the implications of captions for our understanding of literacy in an age of constantly shifting media.
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This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let's Play videos (or LPs) on YouTube. A hybrid of digital gaming and video, LPs feature gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. Players... more
This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let's Play videos (or LPs) on YouTube. A hybrid of digital gaming and video, LPs feature gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. Players may set out to promote, review, critique or satirize a game. In recent years, LPs have become hugely popular with young audiences, and currently make up over half the top hundred channels on YouTube. The authors identify LPs as emerging videogame paratexts with pedagogical potential. In particular, they ask how LPs function as sites of new literacies. They answer that question by discussing two key characteristics of LP practices: their emphasis on processes of meaning-making within games and their mobilization of literacies associated with remix and appropriation. The final section of the article explores how LP practices might inform literacy instruction in schools.
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This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of “linguistic landscapes.” We collaborated with a group of Humanities teachers to design and implement the “Word on the Street” project, in which Grade 10 students took on the... more
This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of “linguistic landscapes.” We collaborated with a group of Humanities teachers to design and implement the “Word on the Street” project, in which Grade 10 students took on the role of researchers to explore the linguistic, visual and spatial texts of their neighbourhood. We show how the concept of linguistic landscapes fits especially well with a pedagogy of multiliteracies by encouraging the critical study of multimodality and linguistic diversity in context. We then describe the design and implementation of the project, which combined visual analysis with the production of place-based documentaries. Reading two of the documentaries, we illustrate ways that students used the project to identify and investigate the gap between how their community is represented, and how they experience it in their daily lives. In the end, we argue that linguistic landscape analysis provides a unique pedagogical tool for recognizing the complexity of meaning-making in urban landscapes, one with the potential to confront the inequities that shape the lives of many youth living in contemporary global cities.
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In this paper I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I ask how corporate media producers and young users interact and... more
In this paper I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I ask how corporate media producers and young users interact and negotiate their relationships with one another, and I analyze the circulation of power between the two. After outlining key concerns around commodification, agency, labour and copyright, I present two case studies of young people’s appropriation of the television programs Gossip Girl and The Colbert Report. I note the ways in which youth undertake activities such as renarrating, remixing and customizing popular culture content, and, correspondingly, the ways in which commercial media have enabled, controlled, prohibited or profited from these kinds of interactions. After addressing this emergent set of concerns, I finish with a brief reflection on ways that we might use these examples to help us frame our own curricular projects, particularly in teaching new media literacies.
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In this paper, I analyze young women’s video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emphasis on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers within neoliberal regimes, Gossip... more
In this paper, I analyze young women’s video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emphasis on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers within neoliberal regimes, Gossip Girl bears many of the marks of postfeminist media. Drawing on an archive of videos posted to YouTube during the program’s first two seasons, I show how young video makers reimagine the program’s postfeminist aesthetics. Gossip Girl fan videos frequently seek to create emotional intensity through repetition of close-ups on the female face. They also use innovative digital editing techniques to alter television’s realist aesthetic and portray split, fragmented or contradictory subjects. This focus on the face and amplification of affect cuts out the source text’s emphasis on the teenage body as a vehicle for product placement, and challenges the neoliberal privileging of economic success and independence. At the same time, the videos also contain their own limitations, reproducing the young female body as a site of spectacle.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Communication, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, and 24 moreYouth Studies, Television Studies, Popular Culture, Digital Media, User-Generated Content, Digital Culture, Fan Studies, Youth Culture, Media Literacy, Social Media, Media, Digital Media And New Literacies, Fan Cultures, Fandom, Youth Subcultures, Fan Theory and Culture, Postfeminism, Girlhood Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), Television, Youtube, Remix, and Visual Culture and Media Studies
Appropriation, transformation and remix are increasingly recognized as significant aspects of digital literacy. This article considers how one form of digital remix – the video remix – might be used in classrooms to introduce critical... more
Appropriation, transformation and remix are increasingly recognized as significant aspects of digital literacy. This article considers how one form of digital remix – the video remix – might be used in classrooms to introduce critical conversations about representation, appropriation, creativity and copyright. The first half of the article explores the opportunities that remix presents to reflect on mainstream media ideologies, emerging modes of collaborative creativity, and the complexities of intellectual property. The second half illustrates this potential by examining the use of one popular video remix, Buffy vs. Edward, in a secondary school English class and an undergraduate popular culture course. Throughout, the article argues that critical discussion of digital texts and practices opens up the possibilities for students to analyze their everyday lived media experience. This is an important undertaking in a context in which young people's identities and world views are increasingly shaped through digital texts and interactions.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Literacy, Communication, Education, New Media, and 27 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Educational Technology, Television Studies, Digital media Production, Teacher Education, Popular Culture, Digital Media, Critical Pedagogy, Adolescent Literacy, Video Art, Media Education, Participatory Culture, Digital Culture, Copyright, Media Literacy, Digital Media & Learning, English Language Arts, Digital Media And New Literacies, Video remix, Digital Copyright, Secondary Education, Secondary English Language Arts, Adult literacy, Copyright and intellectual property, Remix, Remix Culture, and Digital creativity
Remix is the practice of re-assembling, recontextualizing, and creating new meanings out of music, sound, images, and words. Increasingly, youth are using remix as a powerful tool for bringing their concerns into the public domain. In an... more
Remix is the practice of re-assembling, recontextualizing, and creating new meanings out of music, sound, images, and words. Increasingly, youth are using remix as a powerful tool for bringing their concerns into the public domain. In an educational context, producing remix gives students the chance to act simultaneously as readers and writers, consumers and producers, a stance many media scholars say is indicative of today's new media environments. In an age in which the ability to participate in creating, critiquing, and manipulating digital texts is a means of belonging and social power, schools committed to equity need to educate students in the practical aspects of symbolic meaning-making.
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Abstract: In this article we consider the relationship between fandom, politics and parody through an examination of fan practices related to The Colbert Report. We begin by recounting the way in which a project intended to analyze online... more
Abstract: In this article we consider the relationship between fandom, politics and parody through an examination of fan practices related to The Colbert Report. We begin by recounting the way in which a project intended to analyze online political activism took an unexpected turn into fan culture. We then undertake two case studies. In the first, we focus on one example of Colbert Report fan participation to demonstrate the ways in which audiences’ online activities complicate theories of irony as simple acts of encoding and decoding. In the second, we revisit two interviews with prominent bloggers writing about The Colbert Report and The Daily Show to suggest that fan practices not only overlap with political practices, but demonstrate a convergence of imaginative performance, cultural consumption and collective engagement that blurs the boundaries between affect and activism. We conclude by suggesting that fan cultures hold significant insights into meaning production and civic engagement in mediated worlds, and that they cannot be separated from questions about contemporary modes of online political expression.
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Communication, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, and 25 moreTelevision Studies, Blogs, Comedy, Digital Literacy, Popular Culture, Digital Media, Politics, Cultural Politics, Digital Culture, Fan Studies, Media Literacy, Social Media, Television And Social Change, Media, Fan Cultures, Fandom, Fan Theory and Culture, Parody, Media Convergence, Blogging, Bloggers, Media Research, DIY culture, Digital Politics, and Political Satire
""This article traces tensions between participants and producers on the official Colbert Report discussion boards. Employing critical discourse analysis, it examines the flow of power between the program’s producers and fans as they... more
""This article traces tensions between participants and producers on the official Colbert Report discussion boards. Employing critical discourse analysis, it examines the flow of power between the program’s producers and fans as they struggle over how the parody’s meanings will be interpreted, and how fans’ digital labor and content will be used. I begin by recounting the conflicted history of the message boards, and then analyze a sample of discussion threads in order to illustrate the vibrant and boisterous community created there. Finally, I explore strategies of migration, refusal and offline communication used by participants to express agency and power in relation to the boards’ producers. Throughout, I argue that theoretical approaches to participatory culture must take into account the corporate drive to centralize, manage and profit from users’ communicative desires, as well as audiences’ corresponding efforts to resist such control.
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