A local lens on global media literacy: Teaching media and the Arab world

The globalization and transnationalization of media use have facilitated access to voices from the Arab world. Students and teachers in Western higher education can make use of these voices within and outside the classroom to enhance students’ knowledge of the region and challenge Eurocentric imaginations of the ‘Other’. Yet to ensure students engage with these Arab sources in a meaningful way, media literacy is key. Drawing on and challenging a framework of global critical media literacy, this article argues that media literacy is grounded in time and space, meaning an effective teaching of global media literacy skills supposes an awareness of local media and power systems as well as communication cultures, and willingness to scrutinize one’s own Eurocentric positionalities. In this endeavor, this article proposes to teach global media literacy the local way, here, pertaining to the Arab world through three distinct media case studies: influencers; women’s activism; war and conflict.