Professor Toni Pepe Begins Multimodal Literacy Workshop
On Monday, October 3rd, Assistant Professor of Art & Photography Toni Pepe led the first of a two-session workshop on visual and multimodal literacy—a critical capacity for success in today’s interconnected world. Another objective of this workshop is to support the Fellows’ preparing of a slide presentation for the Program’s Global Leadership Forum (GLF), which will be held on October 23–27 in Washington, DC. This year, the State Department has designated “gender equity” as the central theme of the GLF, and all of Humphrey Program’s fifteen campus cohorts will present on that theme.
Professor Pepe is a specialist in the “performativity of gender”—how gender is socially constructed and expressed through images. She began with a digest version of her Introduction to Photography course, in which she described how factors such as perspective, lines, and lighting influence the messages communicated by photographs. She incorporated a variety of images, including centuries-old paintings and photographs from all over the world that have embedded within them a variety of messages about gender roles.
Professor Pepe then introduced Image Atlas, a website that shows how web searches are mediated depending on the country where the search is taking place. Fellows searched terms such as “gender”, “leadership”, and “manager” and saw how different the results were across nineteen different countries on six continents.
On October 17th, Professor Pepe and Assistant Professor of Art and Graphic Design Laura Grey will together continue the workshop and assist the Fellows in completing their presentation for the GLF.