How did I end up here? Advocating for situated media literacy

Media literacy is an important element in countering the harmful effects of dis- and misinformation. To date, the main perspective on media literacy can be described as a ‘liberalist’ view of media literacy, focused on the nature and source of individual messages (Phillips and Milner, 2021). In this approach, media literacy initiatives mainly focus on equipping ‘citizens with the necessary skills to make sense of the message they read, see and hear’ (Phillips and Milner, 2021: 151). In this paper, we report and reflect on the insights from the project “Putting Disinformation on the Map” in which we use creative, participative, visual and digital methods to understand how we can expand our understanding of media literacy. A central question to our inquiry is how to situate yourself in a media landscape which is inherently interconnected, networked and interdependent, also understanding yourself as a contributing actor.