Prof. dr. Annette Markham, Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement (Utrecht University), will give an online guest lecture at the Centre for Digital Humanities on critical digital literacies.

From Reflection to Reflexivity: The new challenge of Critical Digital Literacies

Every time a new media technology emerges, the label for ‘literacy’ changes – including media, digital, computational, data, algorithmic, and now: AI literacy. While there is continued attention on understanding literacy as a form of competency, discussions have become much more critically, ethically, and future-oriented in recent years. There is an urgent need to comprehend and respond to the power of big tech companies as well as the persuasiveness of automated decision making systems, not least generative AI.

In this talk, Professor Markham begins by discussing how the crucial aspect of building critical literacies among communities of practice is not to focus on the tech itself, but on the processes of learning criticality and reflexivity. Markham builds on a twelve-year critical pedagogy project where she has trained young adults to conduct deep-dive autoethnographic studies of their own lived experience with social media interactions. She reflects on the value – and challenges – of finding the right exercises and prompts to shift participants from surface level reflections to more reflexive levels. This is what Paulo Freire called ‘critical consciousness’, where they build more nuanced perspectives on hegemony, power, and the possibilities for better ethical futures of socio-technical relations.

Practical information

This online lecture will take place on Thursday, 8 May 2025, from 15.30 to 16.30 hours via Teams webinar. You will receive a Teams link before the lecture if you sign up via the registration form at the bottom of this page. Participation is free of charge.

About

Annette Markham is Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in organizational theory (Purdue University, 1997), with special emphasis on interpretive qualitative methods. She has been researching the impact of digitalization on identity and organizing practices since 1995 and now holds specializations in the lived experience of human/machine interactions, impact of datafication and algorithmic logics on social practices, and critical approaches to digital and algorithmic identity. She also studies research methodologies to devise ethical models for speculative, mixed-method, ethnographic, and multi-entity research design. Methods specializations include guided digital autoethnography, critical pedagogy, arts-based interventions, citizen social science, digital and data literacy through critical pedagogy, and digital ethnography.

Annette co-founded and directed the international Masters degree program in Digital Living at Aarhus University from 2013-2020 and was co-director of Aarhus University’s Digital Living Research Centre. Annette holds honorary adjunct professor posts at Aarhus University (in Information Studies) and RMIT University (in Media & Communication).

Level

No prior knowledge of or experience with digital humanities will be required. The lecture will be in English.

For whom?

This online lecture is open to all who are interested in the topic of this lecture and the work of Prof. dr. Annette Markham.

Registration

Please complete the registration form below if you wish to sign up for this lecture. Register early to secure your place, as spots are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you find yourself unable to attend after completing registration, we kindly request that you cancel your registration by sending an email to cdh@uu.nl, allowing us to offer the spot to another participant. Thank you for your cooperation.