Critical Media Ecology

Critical Media Ecology examines communication technologies not merely as tools transmitting content but as environments that actively shape perception, power, and culture. By integrating critical theory into media-ecological analysis, we uncover how communication infrastructures produce — and can contest systems of domination, surveillance, and inequality.

Relational Technologies and Power

Communication media extend human faculties while encoding power relations. bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze” urges Black women to transform film spectatorship into a political act of refusal and re-vision, showing how marginalized viewers can repurpose media codes to assert agency. Our audits build on this critique by identifying how platform interfaces both invite and foreclose oppositional practices.

Media Ecologies as Borderlands

Following Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of Borderlands as spaces of in-between-ness, media environments are hybrid terrains where cultural norms collide. Like the mestiza consciousness that inhabits multiple worlds, media users navigate layered interfaces—social feeds, apps, and analog archives—that generate emergent identities along technological fault lines. Our workshops apply this lens to co-create “mestiza media” interventions that honor multiplicity.

Algorithmic Oppression and Data Justice

Search and recommendation algorithms operate as covert mediators, shaping what we see and think. Safiya U. Noble’s Black feminist critique in Algorithms of Oppression reveals how racialized biases are built into “neutral” platforms, necessitating proactive data justice measures to reclaim algorithmic transparency and accountability. My consulting engagements co-design consent-based data governance grounded in Noble’s insights.

Queering Media Archaeology

Queer media historian Mira Stolpe Törneman queers media archaeology by treating media artifacts as performative bodies, showing how digital repetition and reproducibility create queer counter-histories that disrupt normative archival narratives. We incorporate “queering” protocols into heritage-site audits and digital preservation strategies.

Working Together: Next Steps

Ready to co-design critical media ecologies that uplift marginalized voices? Book a complimentary discovery call to map your media environment, integrate feminist and queer methodologies, and pilot transformative interventions.
Reach out through the Contact page to begin.

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