Clare Ahn

Claire Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Multiliteracies in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Broadly speaking, Claire is interested in how information is shared across different platforms and how this affects people’s understanding of events, issues, and (historically marginalized) groups of people. Specifically, she is interested in the nuanced effects of visual images. She is also interested in the a/effects of genre, and the subtle yet powerful impact of genre patterns. As a former high school English teacher, Claire’s research is largely rooted in supporting educators and students in developing critical digital literacy and media literacy skills, and to consider how film analysis can help to develop these skills. She is also interested in the challenging but important ways in which educators engage youth in conversations about important social justice topics, and how social media plays a role in informing youth’s understanding, perceptions, and questions about these issues. Claire’s research can be found in journals such as Language and Literacy (genre), Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (environmental documentaries), and London Review of Education (youth, social justice, and social media).

Patterns of Reality

with Ernesto Peña

The current political environment of North America has reignited a skepticism towards different forms of media. This phenomenon has led to a general call to action aimed at researchers, educators, corporations and governments to address the problem of deceptive media (Bellemere, 2019; Gold, 2019). Some of these calls stress the fact that current mediatic developments have put the historicity of certain events and characters at risk by calling their authenticity into question. Until now, most of the solutions provided by those who have taken to themselves addressing this challenge, consist of fixing what they perceive is broken in the media infrastructure. Instead of focusing on the current media landscape, I will discuss how certain genres tend to have greater currency than others when it comes to the reception of visual and aural artifacts depending on how and when those genres stabilized (Schryer, 1994), and how the stabilization of such genres in our collective memory scaffolds the credibility of other events, past and future: I will discuss reality as a genre.