Abstract
This article introduces Productive Disruptions as a framework for civic media literacy that centers equity and social justice. Past scholarship has emphasized understanding media content and gaining competence in media production. To center equity as a structural concern beyond individual behaviors, we argue for media literacy interventions that support disrupting racism in content, production, and digital media distribution systems themselves. Drawing on an ethnographic case study with young people experiencing marginalization, we examine how youth productively disrupted instances of systemic racism via TikTok and Instagram. We identify three distinct modes of intervention: creating counter-narratives that disrupt racist discourses, subverting adult-led pedagogical norms to foster youth agency, and sabotaging the individualizing logics of social media platforms through collective account management. We argue that this framework offers educators a way to design and assess civic media literacy interventions that foreground collectivity and structural critique, consistent with decolonial and abolitionist goals for a more equitable society.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Jimenez, C., Schofield Clark, L., & Ramirez, J. (2026). Productive Disruptions: An equityoriented framework for civic media literacy in the digital era. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 18(1), 68-82. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2026-18-1-4
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