Crip Access, Media Literacy, and The Work of Ideology

Abstract

This article connects my experience as a filmmaker and teacher working with disability media access forms like captioning and audio description with filmmaking and teaching practices that seek to cultivate and question media literacy. Putting Georgina Kleege and Scott Wallin’s “Audio Description as a Pedagogical Tool” (2015), my 2021 film Shared Resources, and Christine Sun Kim’s Close Readings (2015) and Closer Captions (2020) in conversation with Peter Watkins’ film The Journey (1987) and Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s film The Viewing Booth (2019), I consider how the act of describing images and sounds actively reflects conditions of audienceship, where makers, students, and audiences are confronted with the interpretive and ideological dimensions of description. In particular, I consider how the work of description equally reflects how ideology puts audiences/describers to work to defend their world views. I then apply this intersection of ideology and description to consider models of media literacy posed in recent films by Tiffany Sia (Do Not Circulate, 2021) and Miranda Pennell (Man number 4, 2024) that are largely concerned with how to read images, sounds, and the networks of circulation around them. Ultimately, the article seeks to understand the use of these media literacy practices for disentangling the circulation of media, juridical logics, and state violence and how these practices act in tandem with crip access forms.