This chapter provides a genealogy and critical perspective on media literacy across the world. Foregrounding a way of thinking about media literacy as dynamic, it emphasises media literacy for how it enables context-bound capability, as opposed to a set of neutral, universal competences and considers how transferable ‘third space media literacy’ design principles are effective for the more positively consequential media literacy work. By engaging with the inherent tensions and epistemological challenges across the field, the ‘thinking aloud’ approach taken here articulates an idea of media literacy being itself a process of change and being always-already ‘unsettled’. Three domains are unpacked here—Media Education, Media Literacy and Media Activism—so that the theory of change can be used to map the impact of media literacy from a starting point which bears witness to the field as mature, complex and always in flux. Understanding media literacy as deeply situated in cultural, geo-political and media ecosystem contexts seeks to avoid universal, ‘neutral’ solutionism and to understand tensions and nuances, such as the ways in which media literacy interventions in response to ‘information disorder’ relate to freedom of expression, civic agency and epistemological value systems. By situating media literacy in this way, we can move beyond solutionism, with productive humility, so we can ‘claim less to change more’.