apologies for any cross postings... SIMILE Volume 2 Issue 2 May 2002 is now available at www.utpjournals.com/simile ------------------- Announcing the sixth issue (see table of contents and abstracts below) of Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education (SIMILE), a new e-journal published by the University of Toronto Press. The journal, which is currently available for free, is intended to be an electronic meeting place for anyone and everyone interested in the broad subject of media literacy. The journal will be published four times per year, in February, May, August, and November. Each issue will contain three or four full-length refereed articles from scholars approaching media literacy from a wide variety of perspectives. SIMILE hopes to bring together scholars and educators at all levels from the research university to the grade school to the community college and everything in between. The submission of theoretically-based work that has been tested and applied in the field-the kind of work that demands collaboration between university-based researchers and, for example, high school teachers-is strongly encouraged. SIMILE Volume 2 Issue 2 May 2002 Scott Robert Olson Contaminations and hybrids: Indigenous identity and resistance to global media ABSTRACT Postcolonial theory has noted how the dissemination of transnational media has accelerated the hybridization of culture (Bhabha, 1997; Paspatergiadis, 1995; Spivak, 1995), a process that is often likened to infection or contamination (Fisher, 1995). In such a metaphor, the media are the viral agent. Identity cannot help but be affected, creating numerous cultural problems for the subaltern and indigenous peoples. In order to counter the strategies of transnational media, identified by Sholle (1988) as sedimentation, reification, adaptation, mollification, and depolitization, the subaltern are resorting to counter tactics identified here as eruption, deconstruction, mutation, intensification, and politicization. At the same time, the subaltern use the media available to them to enact their own alternative communication strategies of dialogue, mutual interest, rule changing, revolution, secession, and solipsism Kate Manuel How first-year college students read Popular Science: An experiment in teaching media literacy skills ABSTRACT Over the course of three consecutive quarters during the 2000-2001 academic year, 63 students enrolled in an information literacy course at a western American public university were required to conduct a close reading of an article from Popular Science after preliminary instruction in key information and media literacy concepts. Students' responses to questions about (1) the nature of the information and documentation presented by the text, (2) the purpose and intended audience of the text, and (3) the authorship and point of view of the text were examined to see to what degree students were able to think critically about these articles. Findings suggest that, even after basic instruction in information and media literacy skills, many students have difficulties identifying problems (biases, authors' lack of credentials, lack of sources, etc.) with information resources largely because of the ways in which they typically misread texts and make mistaken inferences from them. This article provides quantitative and qualitative descriptions of students' misreadings and mistaken inferences; discusses possible explanations for students' difficulties in interpreting texts; and examines the implications of these difficulties for information literacy and media literacy education. Shehla Burney Manufacturing nationalism: Post-September 11 discourse in United States media ABSTRACT Using Chomsky's notion of the manufacture of consent as well as Said's critiques of Orientalism and culture and imperialism, this article presents a theory and way of looking at post September 11 discourse in United States media as a hegemonic, state-oriented manufacturing of nationalism. Story and memory, images, words and icons, ritual, spectacle, advertising, and commercialism are deployed subliminally to construct self-serving nationalist mythologies. These grand narratives of nationalism evoke meanings and ideologies, which produce an us/them nationalist discourse that demonizes and dehumanizes the other. The US[A]/ THEM discourse deflects attention elsewhere from key critical and moral issues raised by the United States war against terrorism. Cornel Pewewardy From subhuman to superhuman: Images of First Nations peoples in comic books ABSTRACT This article chronicles the ways in which First Nations peoples are portrayed in comic books in the United States. Rendered first as subhuman and then as superhuman, First Nations peoples were consistently presented as different in comics. The superhuman characteristics that are occasionally attributed to First Nations representatives in 20th century media are, ideologically, not much different from the subhuman characteristics attributed to First Nations representatives in the 19th century. Both superhuman and subhuman portrayals serve to exclude, isolate, and deframe First Nations peoples from a common humanity. A critical analysis of this phenomenon can provide students with powerful insights into the challenges that educators face as critical multicultural educators and points the way to creating oppositional pedagogies. > ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite