CLIP - Critical visual media literacy and empowerment aimed at strengthening critical visual media literacy and fluency in higher education, thus increasing resilience to manipulation and polarisation. The main objectives were to: - raise awareness of the role played by higher education in Europe to enable the fair and resilient digital transformation, tracking disinformation and bias in visual communication through education and training; - increase the digital fluency and critical consciousness about visual media of European students and faculties, both within communication study communities and transversely across subjects, nourishing misinformation-resilient behaviours and providing them with the practical skills to detect image bias as well as stereotypes in visual artefacts; - enable academic staff, senior management and communication staff at the universities to develop sustainable strategies for integrating visual media literacy at all levels of course offering.
Through the project, the consortium intended to respond to the need, on one side, to boost the Higher Education resilience to information overload, manipulation and polarisation and, on the other, to mitigate the risks of bias in visual representations, by providing young people (within and outside universities) with the capacity to critically understand media and images, and the way those are used in education, news and online narratives. When it comes to visual media literacy, the concept has been rarely addressed as a whole: media literacy programs mainly focus on textual elements and related skills, while traditional visual methodologies often do not include an analysis of visual media. Considering the power images have nowadays in shaping people’s perceptions and in delivering specific - direct or hidden - messages, and the advancements in the use of AI and innovative technologies to manipulate them, the risks related to bias in visual representation and spreading of fake news, disinformation and misinformation are largely recognised and require urgent action to provide the society at large with dedicated tools and skills to face these challenges.