Damiana Gibbons

Damiana Gibbons is an Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University in the Reich College of Education where she teaches courses in Media Literacy and Instructional Technology. She earned her PH.D in Curriculum am nd Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a major in Literacy Syudies and a minor in Composition and Rhetoric. At UW-Madison, She worked as part of a research team headed by Dr Erica Halverson on a multi-year project exploring how digital literacy is fostered through youth video production in youth media arts organizations across the United States.

Her dissertation research from this study focuses on media production, identity, and media literacy practices in order to understand the intersections of the visual, the spoken, the written, and the performed in youth video production.

In order to understand this youth video production, She is currently attempting to create analytic tools, such as multimodal microanalysis, to analyze youth-produced videos as well as to find ways to analyze how youth media is fostered pedagogically. The heart of her research, however, is exploring questions of ethics in youth media production. In particular, She hopes to begin shifting questions about youth and media away from how youth produce media in ethical ways toward more questions about what makes up the ethics within which youth create media.