Media education and equality: a bibliometric analysis

Resumo

Media education has always encouraged critical thinking to promote more just societies, but how much has it focused on equality? The main objective of this research is to map the scientific production that has united education, communication and equality in the last 20 years. Two decades marked by an accelerated technological emergency that brings enormous opportunities and challenges for media education. To achieve this, an analysis of bibliometric indicators has been carried out and visualization maps have been extracted from the Scopus database with the VOSviewer software. The study has been completed with an analysis with keywords in Spanish in the Redalyc scientific journal network, carried out with ATLAS.ti, extracting a semantic network map that contains some of the main codes and links of the object of study. As a result, it is observed that, neither equality in general nor gender equality in particular are the most researched topics in the field of media literacy, compared to those related to technology. The growing importance of different digital media in the field of study in question is also detected, as is the need to critically and ethically address gender equality, inclusion and human rights in a technologically complex media education. Specifically analyzing gender equality in media literacy, in line with the idea of freirean pedagogy, the existence of not only diagnostic research (which analyses the issue) but also antidote research (which makes proposals to improve reality) is evident. Among the former, gender equality deficiencies are detected in the field of educommunication. And among the latter, practical cases are provided and analysed to overcome them. All of them have in common the need and potential of media education to build more egalitarian societies.