Popular Visual and Scholarly Representation of Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities

The purpose of this assignment is for students to collect information about the ways that their assigned historically underrepresented group is portrayed by the popular media, as well as explore scholarly research that analyzes covert and overt messages about the assigned group. First, the student will identify three to four popular cultural portrayals of your assigned group. They will include an image of the three portrayals in their paper. Second, in not more than 1,000 words, students will describe the portrayals and answer the following questions: What are the overt and covert messages being displayed about your selected group? How do these messages support a socially constructed view of the selected social group? What was the role of essentialism, bias, and power in the portrayals? Third, students will select at least two scholarly articles that analyze popular cultural portrayals of your assigned group. In not more than 1,000 words, students will answer the following questions: How did the popular culture images you selected match the analysis of popular cultural representations from the scholarly articles? Who or what benefits and who or what is damaged by the representations of your selected social group? In which ways do they benefit or suffer? Finally, students will provide an APA-formatted reference list.