Literacy is the ability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy ; and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading and writing and functional literacy.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar, in which she argues that Russia very likely helped Donald J. Trump become the U.S. President in 2016.
Children's culture includes children's cultural artifacts, children's media and literature, and the myths and discourses spun around the notion of childhood. Children's culture has been studied within academia in cultural studies, media studies, and literature departments. The interdisciplinary focus of childhood studies could also be considered in the paradigm of social theory concerning the study of children's culture.
France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.
Amy B. Jordan is a Professor and Chair of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focuses on the role of media in the lives of children and their families, and the potential for communication messages to address health risk behaviors.
Kari-Lynn Winters, née Moore is a Canadian children's author, playwright, drama educator, and literacy professor. She taught children's literacy, literature, dance and drama education at the University of British Columbia from 2004 to 2009. In 2010, Winters became an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University (Ontario) and co-editor of Teaching and Learning. She advanced to associate professor in 2014, and to full professor in 2021.
John Hartley, , FAHA,, FLSW, ICA Fellow, is an Australian academic and a John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor. He was formerly Professor of Cultural Science and the Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University in Western Australia, and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He has published over twenty books about communication, journalism, media and cultural studies, many of which have been translated into other languages. Hartley is an adjunct professor with CCAT.
Ellen A. Wartella is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. She is the chair and professor of communication, director of Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, and an adviser for the review at Northwestern University. She studies social policy, media studies, psychology, and child development at the University. She believes that smartphones are disruptive in a way that's different from earlier technology.
The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) is a professional school within the New Brunswick Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The school was created in 1982 as a result of a merger between the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, the School of Communication Studies, and the Livingston Department of Urban Journalism. The school has about 2,500 students at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, and about 60 full-time faculty.
Donna Alvermann is an American educator and researcher in the field of Language and Literacy Education whose work focuses on adolescent literacy in and out of school, inclusive of new media and digital literacies. Her most recent research interest involves developing historical-autobiographical methods for uncovering silences in scholarly writing that mask more than they disclose. She is the Omer Clyde and Elizabeth Parr Aderhold Professor in Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She is also a UGA-appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education.
Amit Schejter is Professor of Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Visiting Professor of Communications and co-director of the Institute for Information Policy at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the former President of Oranim College.
Lynn Schofield Clark is an American media critic and scholar whose research focuses on media studies and film studies. She is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. She is author of several books and articles on the role social and visual media play in the lives of diverse U.S. adolescents. In her 2017 book co-authored with Regina Marchi, Young People and the Future of News, Clark and Marchi utilize an ethnographic approach to tell the stories of how young people engage with social media and legacy media both as producers and consumers of news. The book received the 2018 Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the 2018 James Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research Clark's book regarding parenting in the digital age is titled The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age. Clark’s main contributions are in the areas of family media studies, media rich youth participatory action research and the mediatization (media) of world religions.
Sonia Livingstone is a leading British scholar on the subjects of children, media and the Internet. She is Professor of Social Psychology and former head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. While Livingstone’s research has evolved since the start of her career in the 1980s, her recent work explores media and communication in relation to society, children and technology. Livingstone has authored or edited twenty-four books and hundreds of academic articles and chapters. She is known for her continued public engagement about her research areas and has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF, among others, on children’s internet safety and rights in the digital environment. In 2014, Livingstone was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to children and child Internet safety".
Keith N. Hampton is professor of media and information at Michigan State University. His research interests focus on the relationship between information and communication technology, such as the Internet, social networks, and community democratic engagement, social isolation, and participation in the urban environment.
Anne Marie Balsamo is a scholar whose career encompasses contributions as a theorist, designer, educator, and entrepreneur in the fields of feminist technology studies, media studies, design research, public interactives, cultural heritage, and media archeology.
Cynthia Carter is a Reader in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, and co-founding editor of the journal Feminist Media Studies.
Radhika Parmeswaran holds an endowed Herman B. Wells chair at Indiana University, Bloomington. A professor and former chair of journalism there, Parameswaran has published in leading journals, contributing to analysis of the ways in which colonialism, nationalism and globalization shape the social construction of modernity and gender.
Mary Chayko is an American sociologist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She is the director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information and she was a six-year Faculty Fellow in Residence at the Rutgers-New Brunswick Honors College (2017-2023). She is an affiliated faculty member of the Sociology Department and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers.
Mary Angela Bock is a journalist and professor of journalism. She is an associate professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin in the School of Media and Journalism with an expertise in visual communication, citizen journalism and representation.
Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Digital Literacy and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. She is a multimodal ethnographer who conducts arts-based, digital, media and maker-driven research with children, young people, and adults. She has conducted research in primary and secondary schools across Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
