Goldfarb, Brian. Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 263 pp.

by Ann M. Ciasullo

I recently taught a media-based course entitled Imagining Difference: Race, Gender, and Class in U.S. Popular Culture. My goals for the course were to familiarize students with cultural stereotypes and provide them with critical tools for recognizing the ways that ideologies give shape to images. By the end of the term, students told me that they had indeed learned a great deal about the politics of representation, but many of them felt overwhelmed by this knowledge. They now knew how to read media images critically, but felt somewhat hopeless about the possibility of challenging these images, of carving out a space for agency and empowerment in a culture that looked much more homogeneous and hegemonic than when the term began.