James Elrod was awarded the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. The fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on dissertation research and writing. Elrod's dissertation explores how media literacy pedagogies in US secondary schools, throughout their history, have sought to shape temporally-specific 'teen' identities in response to adult-centric social panics surrounding each generation. He claims that schools have had a long partnership with various media industries and, in fact, have functioned as intentional or coincidental extensions with them to craft standardized (and therefore commodifiable) forms of tutored, taste-driven media consumption. Ultimately, Elrod argues that in stressing the 'effects' media have on youth, media literacy education sidelines the 'affective' relationship that teens have with the media they view and create, thus foreclosing possible avenues of identity formation, particularly for already-marginalized students.
