In the face of challenges posed by a shifting digital media landscape, an array of international bodies continue to endorse public service media (PSM) as an essential component of democratisation. Yet how can PSM achieve viability in settings where models of media independence and credibility are unfamiliar or rejected by political leaders?

The answer lies in a holistic approach that is neither media-centric nor defeatist about PSM’s place in a landscape marked by younger generations’ widespread preference for social media platforms. There are more ways of working towards PSM than are often recognized. Wide-ranging research from media NGOs and academics demonstrates the potential of diverse, incremental approaches to embedding the values and mechanisms of PSM. These are as likely to involve regulatory and licensing institutions, unions of media practitioners, audiences, advocacy groups or social media platforms as content producers themselves.

This Policy Brief considers the issues, research and policy options around achieving viability for PSM. It concludes with six recommendations that are relevant to policymakers, practitioners and media studies specialists.

We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is debate that asks and answers fundamental questions about power. This book brings together critical interrogations of what constitutes AI, its impact and its inequalities in order to offer an analysis of what it means for AI to deliver benefits for everyone. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1, AI: Humans vs. Machines, presents critical perspectives on human-machine dualism. Part 2, Discourses and Myths About AI, excavates metaphors and policies to ask normative questions about what is ‘desirable’ AI and what conditions make this possible. Part 3, AI Power and Inequalities, discusses how the implementation of AI creates important challenges that urgently need to be addressed. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and regional contexts, this book offers a vital intervention on one of the most hyped concepts of our times.

‘Ambitious, sophisticated, timely and downright inspirational.’ – Philip Hayward, University of Technology Sydney, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies

'A must read … a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.' – Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University

‘This is an essential book. [The] analytics they propose … offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.’ – Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’i, Manoa

‘All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary - if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.’ – Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg

‘ … a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling’. — Nigel Clark, Lancaster University

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

The portrayal of disfigurement in the UK media must change. This policy brief is based on recent research that found a general negative and sensationalised attitude towards disfigurement in the media.

Disfigurement is a condition that can affect anyone at any time in life regardless their social or demographic background due to accidents or health conditions or be congenital. In the UK, one in 111 people have facial disfigurements.

In order to improve the ways in which media portray disfigurement, this policy brief argues that media should move away from sensationalised coverage on disfigurement and focus instead on the lived experiences of individuals with this condition. It recommends strengthening diversity-oriented editorial practices and training as well as media literacy education. In addition, it addresses the lack of guidelines on the portrayal of disfigurement and urges regulatory bodies to be more efficient in handling complaints.

Through algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), objects and digital services now demonstrate new skills they did not have before, right up to replacing human activity through pre-programming or by making their own decisions. As part of the internet of things, AI applications are already widely used today, for example in language processing, image recognition and the tracking and processing of data.

This policy brief illustrates the potential negative and positive impacts of AI and reviews related policy strategies adopted by the UK, US, EU, as well as Canada and China. Based on an ethical approach that considers the role of AI from a democratic perspective and considering the public interest, the authors make policy recommendations that help to strengthen the positive impact of AI and to mitigate its negative consequences.

The Blitz Companion offers a unique overview of a century of aerial warfare, its impact on cities and the people who lived in them. It tells the story of aerial warfare from the earliest bombing raids and in World War 1 through to the London Blitz and Allied bombings of Europe and Japan. These are compared with more recent American air campaigns over Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the NATO bombings during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and subsequent bombings in the aftermath of 9/11. Beginning with the premonitions and predictions of air warfare and its terrible consequences, the book focuses on air raids precautions, evacuation and preparations for total war, and resilience, both of citizens and of cities. The legacies of air raids, from reconstruction to commemoration, are also discussed. While a key theme of the book is the futility of many air campaigns, care is taken to situate them in their historical context. The Blitz Companion also includes a guide to documentary and visual resources for students and general readers. Uniquely accessible, comparative and broad in scope this book draws key conclusions about civilian experience in the twentieth century and what these might mean for military engagement and civil reconstruction processes once conflicts have been resolved.

Are financial crises embedded in IT? Can gender studies offer insights into financial reporting? Feminist theories and Science and Technology Studies (STS) can enrich a critique of financial crises in capitalism as the author argues their critical, political economic approaches to communication can help in understanding because they historicize technology and economy and how these are materially embedded. Current literature has neglected finance and capital’s gendered aspect – even – the ideology of a ‘crisis’. This book develops four themes: women as resources in financial markets and as producers of values; gender ideology and unequal distribution; machine production and distribution of financial information and the varied actuality of markets. Working with case histories of tulipmania, microcredit, Wall Street reporting and the role of ‘screens’, Bubbles and Machines argues that rather than calling financial crises human-made or inevitable they should be recognized as technological.

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies.

Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse and how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support American paramountcy and conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and of the New American Way of War. At the same time it demonstrates how the American security state represses activists—such as Black Lives Matter—who resist this emerging security leviathan. The book also critiques the digital positivism behind the algorithmic regulation used to control labour and further diminish prospects for human flourishing for the ‘99%’.

Capital, State, Empire contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and political power in the early 21st century.

Challenges and Developments in Public Service Journalism, the 11th RIPE Reader, examines the role of public service journalism, as well as the opportunities and challenges of delivering it in today’s increasingly complex and competitive digital media environment. The volume is organised in three parts: ‘Normative frameworks’; ‘Platform Power, Artificial Intelligence and Public Service Journalism’; and ‘National and Regional Cases’ in Europe and beyond – especially Africa, Asia and India. The book addresses the formidable challenges facing public service journalism in the digital media ecology and provides rich and insightful analyses based on empirical research with findings that are relevant for policy interventions, developing organisational strategy, and for applied practice.

In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked.

This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media platforms such as Tumblr and Wattpad, this collection develops a critical understanding of the integral role collaboration plays in contemporary media and culture. It draws attention to diverse kinds of creative collaboration afforded via the intermediation of digital platforms and networked publics. It considers how these are incorporated into emergent market paradigms and investigates the complicated forms of subjectivity that develop as a consequence. But it also acknowledges historical continuities, not least in terms of the continued exploitation of ‘support personnel’ and of resulting artistic conflicts but also of alternative models that resist the precarious nature of contemporary cultural work.

Finally, this volume attempts to situate creative collaboration in broader social and economic contexts, where the experience and outcomes of such work have proved more problematic than the rich potential of their promise would lead us to expect.

The Editors: James Graham is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University, London. Alessandro Gandini is Lecturer in Digital Media Management and Innovation in the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College, London.

This book explores the potential creation of a broader collaborative economy through commons-based peer production (P2P) and the emergent role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The book seeks to critically engage in the political discussion of commons-based peer production, which can be classified into three basic arguments: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist. This book categorises the liberal argument as being in favour of the coexistence of the commons with the market and the state. Reformists, on the other hand, advocate for the gradual adjustment of the state and of capitalism to the commons, while anti-capitalists situate the commons against capitalism and the state. By discussing these three viewpoints, the book contributes to contemporary debates concerning the future of commons-based peer production.

Further, the author argues that for the commons to become a fully operational mode of peer production, it needs to reach critical mass arguing that the liberal argument underestimates the reformist insight that technology has the potential to decentralise production, thereby forcing capitalism to transition to post-capitalism. Surveying the three main strands of commons-based peer production, this book makes the case for a post-capitalist commons-orientated transition that moves beyond neoliberalism.

‘An authoritative analysis of the role of communication in contemporary capitalism and an important contribution to debates about the forms of domination and potentials for liberation in today’s capitalist society.’ — Professor Michael Hardt, Duke University, co-author of the tetralogy Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly

‘A comprehensive approach to understanding and transcending the deepening crisis of communicative capitalism. It is a major work of synthesis and essential reading for anyone wanting to know what critical analysis is and why we need it now more than ever.’ — Professor Graham Murdock, Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough and co-editor of The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications

Communication and Capitalism outlines foundations of a critical theory of communication. Going beyond Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Christian Fuchs outlines a communicative materialism that is a critical, dialectical, humanist approach to theorising communication in society and in capitalism. The book renews Marxist Humanism as a critical theory perspective on communication and society.

The author theorises communication and society by engaging with the dialectic, materialism, society, work, labour, technology, the means of communication as means of production, capitalism, class, the public sphere, alienation, ideology, nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, fascism, patriarchy, globalisation, the new imperialism, the commons, love, death, metaphysics, religion, critique, social and class struggles, praxis, and socialism.

Fuchs renews the engagement with the questions of what it means to be a human and a humanist today and what dangers humanity faces today.

David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. 

However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey’s time-space compression takes on new features including those of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence. 

Lastly the author considers culture’s role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity’s radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

We live in a world dominated by states and statist knowledge; this is a world where, for multiple institutional and political reasons, it is rare to speak of more than one stateless nation, and there is a conspicuous neglect of non-Western colonial practices.

This volume brings together scholarship on two peoples associated with ‘conflict’ but who we argue are best described as ‘stateless nations’: Kurds and Kashmiris. Both these contexts raise important questions relating to coloniality, sovereignty, statehood, self-determination and human rights, and yet they have never been studied together. Our intervention challenges the ‘sovereignty privilege’ in International Relations and calls upon postcolonial and decolonial studies to take anti-colonialism seriously by focusing on contemporary stateless nations. The Kurdish and Kashmiri conflicts are more than power-laden contestations by states over territories; they are colonialities of power experienced by embodied individuals and involve mobilised communities of stateless nations with different gendered and political vulnerabilities.

“This book addresses the complex issue of colonialism and nationalism among the Kurds who live in Turkey and the Kashmiris who live in the valley of Kashmir. For those wishing to understand the respective political, religious and social challenges of both groups, this book is essential reading.”

Victoria Schofield, author of Kashmir in the Crossfire and Kashmir in Conflict

This memoir, completed just before Vincent Mosco’s sudden death in February 2024, chronicles the last half century of research, activism and teaching in critical communication, technology and society from the perspective of one of its pioneering figures. It concentrates on the making of a radical activist scholar, the creation of a critical communication research field, the growth of a critical political economy of media and the concomitant expansion of critical approaches to media and computer technology, to communication labour and to public policy and media activism.

This beautifully written and deeply personal book is an informative and fascinating read that will be of interest to anyone interested in Critical Media and Communication Studies and the Political Economy of Communication.

After President Trump’s election, BREXIT and the widespread rise of far-Right political parties, much public discussion has intensely focused on populism and authoritarianism. In the middle of the twentieth century, members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. In this volume, leading European and American scholars apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon and related developments across the globe. Chapters are arranged into three sections exploring different aspects of the topic: theories, historical foundations, and manifestations via social media. Contributions examine the vital political, psychological and anthropological theories of early Frankfurt School thinkers, and how their insights could be applied now amidst the insecurities and confusions of twenty-first century life. The many theorists considered include Adorno, Fromm, Löwenthal and Marcuse, alongside analysis of Austrian Facebook pages and Trump’s tweets and operatic media drama. This book is a major contribution towards deeper understanding of populism’s resurgence in the age of digital capitalism.

This book contributes to the foundations of a critical theory of communication as shaped by the forces of digital capitalism. One of the world's leading theorists of digital media Professor Christian Fuchs explores how the thought of some of the Frankfurt School’s key thinkers can be deployed for critically understanding media in the age of the Internet. Five essays that form the heart of this book review aspects of the works of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas and apply them as elements of a critical theory of communication's foundations. The approach taken starts from Georg Lukács Ontology of Social Being, draws on the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and sets them into dialogue with the Cultural Materialism of Raymond Williams.

Critical Theory of Communication offers a vital set of new insights on how communication operates in the age of information, digital media and social media, arguing that we need to transcend the communication theory of Habermas by establishing a dialectical and cultural-materialist critical theory of communication. It is the first title in a major new book series 'Critical Digital and Social Media Studies' published by the University of Westminster Press.

Critique of the Political Economy of the Media is an approach to the critical analysis of the media’s role in contemporary society. It is based on Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism, using a combination of critical social theory and empirical social research for studying what role the media has in capitalism.
 
It introduces a theoretical framework that engages with important themes including the crisis-ridden structural transformation of the media industry, media economics in the age of digital communications, media concentration, science communication and open access publishing, media technologies, the role of advertising in capitalism, and the contradictions of alternative media in capitalism.
 
 
“Over a quarter of a century Manfred Knoche has swum against the prevailing tides of German scholarship to develop a distinctive critical analysis of communications under capitalism grounded in new readings and applications of Marx’s essential insights.
 
Borrowing from the famous subtitle of Capital, the book combines theoretical depth with analytical rigour to throw new light on core issues of technological change, media concentration, private ownership, advertising finance and the commodification of media products, and to grapple with the problems of creating non-commercial alternatives.
 
This book is a treasure trove of insights and provocations that belongs on the bookshelf and reading list of anyone seriously interested in developing a critical political economy of communication. Almost unknown until now to English readers, Manfred Knoche can finally take his place among the founding figures.”
Professor Graham Murdock, Loughborough University.

Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed, and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the eight chapters.

The articles in this Review speak to the turbulent year that was 2020 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, to religion and spirituality, via language politics, heritage, and music. Pieces on representations of China in Britain and the Westminster Chinese Visual Arts Project reflect our particular location and home. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders.

The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.

Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on research and perspectives central to the Contemporary China Centre, based at the University of Westminster, and the Contemporary China Centre Blog.

The chapters in this Review speak to the challenging and eventful year that was 2021 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from health and medicine, environment, food, children and parenting via film, red culture and calls to action. Many of the contributions in this edited collection focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across and beyond national borders.

The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today offering academics, activists, practitioners and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.

This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by social media to finance cultural production (and carry out promotional tasks) is a significant shift, especially when supported by morphing public policies, supposedly enhancing cultural diversity and accessibility.

The aim of this book is to propose a critical analysis of these phenomena by questioning what follows from decisions to outsource modes of creation and funding to consumers. Drawing on research carried out within the ‘Collab’ programme backed by the French National Research Agency, the book considers how platforms are used to organize cultural labour and/or to control usages, following a logic of suggestion rather than overt injunction. Four key areas are considered: the history of crowdfunding as a system; whose interests crowdfunding may serve; the implications for digital labour and lastly crowdfunding’s interface with globalization and contemporary capitalism. The book concludes with an assessment of claims that crowdfunding can democratize culture.

Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics – but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes.

Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable.

This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts.

Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like.

London is one of the world’s most popular destinations and visitors contribute approximately £14.9 billion of expenditure to the city every year. Its tourism and events sectors are growing and over the last few years London has received more visitors than ever before. However, detailed accounts of the city’s visitor economy are conspicuously absent.

This book analyses how the capital is developing as a destination through the expansion of tourism and events into new urban spaces. The book outlines how parts of London not previously regarded as tourist territory are now subject to the visitor gaze with tourism spreading beyond established central zones into peripheral, suburban and residential areas – in part propelled by a big rise in peer to peer accommodation use. Simultaneously, London’s airports and sports stadiums and their surrounds are becoming destinations in their own right. New vantage points have been created, allowing tourists to explore the city: from above, at night-time or through tours given by the homeless; via the opening up of the River Thames; or through the transformation of local parks into eventscapes. 

The book explores these trends and shows how urban destinations expand. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of London and highlights the growing significance of tourism and events in global cities.

Evaluating skills and knowledge capture lies at the cutting edge of contemporary higher education where there is a drive towards increasing evaluation of classroom performance and use of digital technologies in pedagogy. Developing Educators for the Digital Age is a book that provides a narrative account of teacher development geared towards the further usage of technologies (including iPads, MOOCs and whiteboards) in the classroom presented via the histories and observation of a diverse group of teachers engaged in the multiple dimensions of their profession.

Drawing on the insights of a variety of educational theories and approaches (including TPACK) it presents a practical framework for capturing knowledge in action of these English language teachers – in their own voices – indicating how such methods, processes and experiences shed light more widely on related contexts within HE and may be transferable to other situations.

This book will be of interest to the growing body of scholars interested in TPACK theory, or communities of practice theory and more widely anyone concerned with how new pedagogical skills and knowledge with technology may be incorporated in better practice and concrete instances of teaching.

Edited by Angela Condello, Carlo Grassi and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
With an introduction by Carlo Grassi
Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations and Angela Condello

What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is right and what is wrong? Can laws be absent and is law always necessary?

This is the first English translation published of Jean- Luc Nancy’s acclaimed consideration of the law’s most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws. In a world where it is impossible to imagine the realisation of an ideal of justice that corresponds to every person’s ideal of justice, Nancy probes the limits of legal normativity. Moreover, the question is asked: how can legal normativity be legitimised? A legal order based on performativity and formal validity is questionable and other forces than juridical normativity are at the heart of Dies Irae. Such leads inevitably to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterise contemporary juridical systems and those issues of identity, hostility and self-representation central to contemporary political and legal debates

This book provides case studies on the strategies used by African governments in monitoring and controlling digital and social media, as well as the implications of such actions for claims about media freedom and freedom of expression. Further, the book examines the human rights challenges posed by state control and monitoring of digital and social media forms of communication. In the context of a digital surveillance state, it questions how digital and social media can possibly enhance the democratisation of both the communicative and political spaces. The book focuses on questions of censorship and control of digital and social media in ‘supposedly’ democratic societies. It discusses regulation and how governments have imposed their state power by ‘switching off’ the internet and blocking social media sites under the guise of national security and order maintenance.

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms.

The story of the Polytechnic and of the legacy of Quintin Hogg is the third publication exploring the University of Westminster's long and diverse history. A fitting tribute to the life and legacy of Hogg, his holistic approach to education and the institute he created. This book is richly illustrated with images from the University's Archive.

The story of sporting communities and individuals at the University of Westminster over 150 years is the second book to explore the institution's diverse history including its role as a pioneer of women's sports. Drawing upon the University's extensive archives this richly illustrated book celebrates its unique, ground-breaking sports heritage.

The Royal Polytechnic Institution's story is the first episode in the long, diverse history of the University of Westminster. Drawing on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources this book explores the Institution's reputation for visual spectacle and the popularisation of science. It is lavishly illustrated with contemporary images.

Former news reporter and founder of Africa’s first fact-checking organisation Peter Cunliffe-Jones argues that since concern about ‘information disorder’ soared in 2016, we have laboured under flawed assumptions about the nature and effects of ‘fake news’ and misinformation. Based on a four-year review of 250 case studies, Cunliffe-Jones sets out four ideas for fact-checkers, policymakers and platforms to curb harmful consequences and protect wider freedom of speech. First, information disorder is about more than misinformation. Second, misinformation in offline settings can cause as big a problem as misinformation online. Third, misinformation that affects policymakers can be as bad as misinformation that affects the public. Fourth, he proposes a model for fact-checkers, researchers and platforms to distinguish false claims that do and do not have substantive potential to cause substantive consequences.

Understandings of freedom are often discussed in moral, theological, legal and political terms, but they are not often set in a historical perspective, and they are even more rarely considered within their specific language context. From Homeric poems to contemporary works, the author traces the words that express the various notions of freedom in Classical Greek, Latin, and medieval and modern European idioms. Examining writers as varied as Plato, Aristotle, Luther, La Boétie, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Stirner, Nietzsche, and Foucault among others, this theoretical mapping shows old and new boundaries of the horizon of freedom. The book suggests the possibility of transcending these boundaries on the basis of a different theorization of human interactions, which constructs individual and collective subjects as processes rather than entities. This construction shifts and disseminates the very locus of freedom, whose vocabulary would be better recast as a relational middle path between autonomous and heteronomous alternatives.

Fashion is among the biggest polluters, yet the media still promote throwaway fast fashion. The growing fashion public relations industry encourages and enables this media coverage. This policy brief identifies patterns in the way journalists and influencers cover fashion which contribute to unsustainable buying behaviours.

Recent research recommends practical steps to improve media coverage to make consumption sustainable, by changing consumers’ understanding and reducing the pressure on them to buy ‘fast’ satisfaction. Policy recommendations here suggested are based on original analysis of 1,000+ media artefacts in the UK – from magazines to newspapers, gossip weeklies to Instagram influencers.

Researcher Anastasia Denisova proposes regulation of vocabulary and of affiliated links in journalism and social media, greater discussion of the psychology of buying and a ‘paid advertisement label’. Also recommended is a more proactive approach to be taken by magazines and other media with the aim of promoting restyling advice and more sustainable coverage for readers of differing financial means.

This book explores how festivals and events affect urban places and public spaces, with a particular focus on their role in fostering inclusion. The ‘festivalisation’ of culture, politics and space in cities is often regarded as problematic, but this book examines the positive and negative ways that festivals affect cities by examining festive spaces as contested spaces. The book focuses on Western European cities, a particularly interesting context given the social and cultural pressures associated with high levels of in-migration and concerns over the commercialisation and privatisation of public spaces.

The key themes of this book are the quest for more inclusive urban spaces and the contested geographies of festival spaces and places. Festivals are often used by municipal authorities to break down symbolic barriers that restrict who uses public spaces and what those spaces are used for. However, the rise of commercial festivals and ticketed events means that they are also responsible for imposing physical and financial obstacles that reduce the accessibility of city parks, streets and squares.

Alongside addressing the contested effects of urban festivals on the character and inclusivity of public spaces, the book addresses more general themes including the role of festivals in culture-led regeneration. Several chapters analyse festivals and events as economic development tools, and the book also covers contested representations of festival cities and the ways related images and stories are used in place marketing.

A range of cases from Western Europe are used to explore these issues, including chapters on some of the world’s most significant and contested festival cities: Venice, Edinburgh, London and Barcelona. The book covers a wide range of festivals, including those dedicated to music and the arts, but also events celebrating particular histories, identities and pastimes. A series of fascinating cases are discussed - from the Venice Biennale and Dublin Festival of History, to Rotterdam’s music festivals and craft beer festivals in Manchester. The diverse and innovative qualities of the book are also evident in the range of urban spaces covered: obvious examples of public spaces – such as parks, streets, squares and piazzas – are addressed, but the book includes chapters on enclosed public spaces (e.g., libraries) and urban blue spaces (waterways) too. This reflects the interpretation of public spaces as socio-material entities: they are produced informally through their use (including for festivals and events), as well as through their formal design and management.

So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations.

This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait returning to a focus on workers’ experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity.

Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism.

Hearing is an intricate but delicate modality of sensory perception, continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, it is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. Always attuned to the present and immersed in the murmur of its background, hearing remains a situated perception but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. It is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. It is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of law and justice.

This collection gathers multidisciplinary contributions on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Contributors explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law, and recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In exploring the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches it as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law.

How to Create a Universe helps you create and understand the universes that you love from books, films, TV series and games. Through ideas, reflections, drawings, conversations, theories and first-hand examples, the book takes the mystery out of universe building and provides new knowledge and methods for understanding and creating content for fictional universes. 

You can use the methods in the book to develop, conceptualize and devise universes whether you are a game creator, film producer, writer, TV series showrunner, designer, theatre director, artist, researcher, student or educator – or simply enjoy being a curious explorer wishing to understand the creative process of building a fictional universe. 

The book follows a similar approach to design research by focusing on methods and tools and, not least, interdisciplinary collaboration. Combining approaches from art research and the humanities with media studies and development processes, the book draws on extensive studies of works across different media, including film, TV series, games, computer games, theatre, literature and oral lore. We are inspired by explanations from narrative theory and biological evolution of the human urge to create and delve into fiction and fictive universes. Furthermore, we share the interest in methods, tools and collaboration models that characterizes design thinking.

The book’s nine chapters contain insights into the process of universe building from idea to publication; interviews with some of the world’s leading universe thinkers and builders; practical exercises for developing universes across traditional, new and future media formats; and more than 200 drawings and illustrations of models and examples to provide support and inspiration. 

The authors draw on knowledge and information collected around the world over several years. In the book, you will meet people who have been involved in creating and developing the universes for Squid Game, Fight Club, The Terminal, Minority Report, Your Name, Suzume, Black Mirror, Mr. Turner, Wallace and Gromit, PandemicLegacy, Dead of Winter, Dark, Lego, El Tigre, Avatar, Spiderman, Halo, Quirky Circuits, End of Night, The Guilty and Enforcement.

The concept of ‘the commons’ has been used as a framework to understand resources shared by a community rather than a private entity, and it has also inspired social movements working against the enclosure of public goods and resources. One such resource is free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS emerged as an alternative to proprietary software in the 1980s. However, both the products and production processes of FLOSS have become incorporated into capitalist production. For example, Red Hat, Inc. is a large publicly traded company whose business model relies entirely on free software, and IBM, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, Google are some of the largest contributors to Linux, the open-source operating system. This book explores the ways in which FLOSS has been incorporated into digital capitalism. Just as the commons have been used as a motivational frame for radical social movements, it has also served the interests of free-marketeers, corporate libertarians, and states to expand their reach by dragging the shared resources of social life onto digital platforms so they can be integrated into the global capitalist system. 

The book concludes by asserting the need for a critical political economic understanding of the commons that foregrounds (digital) labour, class struggle, and uneven power distribution within the digital commons as well as between FLOSS communities and their corporate sponsors.

‘With clarity and sophistication, Antonios Broumas presents a bold new theory of intellectual commons and powerful arguments for a new body of supportive law. This book not only reveals the misleading logic of intellectual property law in our time; it reveals the rich possibilities for constructive change that legally protected commoning can bring. Highly recommended!’ — David Bollier, Director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

‘Liberating the Intellectual Commons from the fetters of capital accumulation and appropriation, would give us a renaissance of creative energies and empowered communities: exactly what the world needs to move away from the social and ecological devastations of our times. This book is a thoughtful and compelling argument for making this possible through the works of the law and the redesign of public domain as a common space.’ — Massimo De Angelis, Professor of Political Economy and Social Change, Co-director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change, University of East London.

‘In this pioneering book, Antonios Broumas argues that philosophically, morally, politically and economically we are in urgent need of a new legal regime that recognizes the intellectual commons, peer production and sharing as the primary practices of intellectual production, distribution and consumption. I cannot imagine a more urgent task today. A legally protected intellectual commons will lead to greater scientific and cultural innovation and creativity and will lead to an urgently needed second Enlightenment. This book should be read by lawyers, critical theorists, economists and the many professionals of science, culture and the academy.’ — Costas Douzinas, Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.

‘Antonios Broumas’ book is an excellent critical analysis of the cultural commons and a must-read for everyone interested in understanding what the commons, the cultural commons, and the digital commons are all about. This work brilliantly outlines the foundations of an empirically grounded critical theory of the commons and the cultural commons in the context of the interactions of law and society.’ — Christian Fuchs, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, author of Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory (2020).

‘Broumas takes us on a spellbinding tour of how and why the law could and should change to accommodate the creative multitude, which engages into an emerging mode of production. He tells a vibrant story that makes us shout: “Lawmakers of the world, unite!”’ — Vasilis Kostakis, Professor of P2P Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School.

At the cutting edge of contemporary wealth creation people form self-governed communities of collaborative innovation in conditions of relative equipotency and produce resources with free access to all. The emergent intellectual commons have the potential to commonify intellectual production and distribution, unleash human creativity through collaboration and democratise innovation with wider positive effects for our societies. Contemporary intellectual property laws fail to address this potential. We are, therefore, in pressing need of an institutional alternative beyond the inherent limitations of intellectual property law. This book offers an overall analysis of the moral significance of the intellectual commons and outlines appropriate modes for their regulation. Its principal thesis is that our legal systems are in need of an independent body of law for the protection and promotion of the intellectual commons, in parallel to intellectual property law. In this context, the author of the book proposes the reconstruction of the doctrine of the public domain and the exceptions and limitations of exclusive intellectual property rights into an intellectual commons law, which will underpin a vibrant non-commercial zone of creativity and innovation in intellectual production, distribution and consumption alongside commodity markets enabled by intellectual property law.

‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World

The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the Internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s.

Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens.

The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time.

This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland.

Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism proposes a new critical theory concerning the functioning of capitalism and how we consider knowledge and information. This ambitious book systematically and lucidly introduces contemporary phenomena into the framework of cognitive materialism to address some of the great themes of the social sciences: knowledge, exploitation and social class in an account of capitalism’s totality in the present day. Author Mariano Zukerfeld reinvigorates materialist study of communications, presenting a typology of knowledge to explain the underlying material forms of information, intellectual property and cognitive work in contemporary societies. Using current examples the book also examines concerns such as free labour and the pivotal role of intellectual property. The book offers nothing less than an introduction to the theory of cognitive materialism and an account of the entirety of the digital (or knowledge) capitalism of our time.

Digital platforms are more than devices, algorithms and websites. They organise societies through the leadership of platform capitalists and their allies in political institutions. We know that this leadership, or hegemony, fosters exploitation and inequalities. We also know that a politics of resistance is emerging among platform workers and communities around the digital commons.

Less known is how the left has been changing to have a say in digital politics. And what do left-wing parties think and do about platform societies? The Left and Digital Politics answers these questions by developing an updated Gramscian critical theory of (counter-)hegemony in platform societies and a comparative analysis of the ideologies and practices of key European left-wing parties.

The book provides a map of left-wing ideas and practices on digital politics, a compass to point out how some left-wing parties perform as barriers or allies of radical change, and an analytical toolkit to open new routes towards platform socialism.

“Transforming Gramsci’s project of the Modern Prince into a Digital Princess*+ may not happen overnight, but Guglielmo’s book provides great inspiration. It advances concepts in networked revolution and informs strategies for wars of position and movement for a socialist future. The author holds the left to account in its search for a better digital politics, by challenging us to unearth patterns of agency of the digital platform ‘subaltern’. I recommend The Left and Digital Politics whole-heartedly to all those fighting for digital justice, and beyond.”
– Professor Phoebe Moore, University of Essex

“This book sets a new standard for understanding the thorny relationship between the left and digital politics today. Combining innovative theory with detailed empirical studies, Guglielmo sets out to understand how left-wing political projects have made use of digital technologies, both practically and ideologically. In so doing, he sets out new pathways towards platform socialism in an era of neoliberal rule, exhaustively mapping out the contemporary terrain and lines of potential alliance and conflict.”
– Dr Alex Williams, University of East Anglia

In 1965 the UK enacted the Race Relations Act while the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) opened for signature and ratification. In the US, the changes that brought down the walls of segregation, conveying some equality to black people essentially began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These ground-breaking instruments marked a commitment—domestically and internationally by the state parties to the ICERD—to address racial injustice and inequality through legal means.

Yet, the intervening years reveal the challenges of pursuing racial justice and equality through the medium of law. In recent years, allegations of institutional racism have been levelled against numerous public institutions in the UK, while the rise of populism globally has challenged the ability of law to effect change.

This edited collection draws attention to the need to reflect on the persistence of racial inequalities and injustices despite law’s intervention and arguably because of its ‘unconscious’ role in their promotion. It does so from a multiplicity of perspectives ranging from the doctrinal, socio-legal, critical and theoretical, thereby generating different kinds of knowledge about race and law. By exploring contemporary issues in racial justice and equality, contributors examine the role of law—whether domestic or international, hard or soft—in advancing racial equality and justice and consider whether it can effect substantive change.

The story of the (now restored) Regent Street Cinema is the fourth volume exploring the University of Westminster's long and diverse history. This multi-authored volume tells its history from architectural, educational, legal and cinematic perspectives and is richly illustrated throughout with images from the University of Westminster archive.

This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. 

Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. 

The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.

All the tips, ideas and advice given to, and requested by, MA students in Media and Communications, are brought together in an easy-to-use accessible guide to help students study most effectively.

Based upon many years of teaching study skills and hundreds of lecture slides and handouts this introduction covers a range of general and generic skills that the author relates specifically towards media and communications studies. As well as the mechanics of writing and presentations, the book also shows how students can work on and engage with the critical and contemplative elements of their degrees whilst retaining motivation and refining timekeeping skills.

Of course the nuts and bolts of reading, writing, listening, seminars and the dreaded dissertation and essays are covered too. In addition advice on referencing, citation and academic style is offered for those with concerns over English grammar and expression.

Aimed primarily at postgraduate students, there is significant crossover with undergraduate work, so this book will also prove of use to upper level undergraduate readers whether using English as a first or second language.

This collection of short essays from leading media scholars reflects on critical issues of media history, power, ownership, influence and impact. The book uses the acclaimed media title Power Without Responsibility (PWR) as a calling card, a cue to reflect on the limitations of the media in different countries and to advocate solutions aimed at stimulating more democratic forms of communications.

Organised in five sections, contributions in this book identify the relevance of PWR and then pick out and develop its core themes. The first section provides both a reminder of PWR’s significance to media history and analysis and then explores its conclusions in relation to media systems in places including Europe, South and East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The second section takes up the argument that ‘market censorship’ impoverishes the media while the third explores the book’s lessons for contemporary media reform. The fourth section explores the contribution of public service broadcasting and its relevance for future communications systems. The fifth section considers PWR’s analysis of radical journalism in relation to both historical and contemporary initiatives while the concluding section features two original essays by the authors of PWR, James Curran and Jean Seaton, reflecting on their book 43 years and nine editions after it was first published.

Misinformation Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa is a single volume containing two research reports by eight authors examining policy towards misinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The volume first examines the teaching of ‘media literacy’ in state-run schools in seven Sub-Saharan African countries as of mid-2020, as relates to misinformation. It explains the limited elements of media and information literacy (MIL) that are included in the curricula in the seven countries studied and the elements of media literacy related to misinformation taught in schools in one province of South Africa since January 2020. The authors propose six fields of knowledge and skills specific to misinformation that are required in order to reduce students’ susceptibility to false and misleading claims. Identifying obstacles to the introduction and effective teaching of misinformation literacy, the authors make five recommendations for the promotion of misinformation literacy in schools, to reduce the harm misinformation causes.

The second report in the volume examines changes made to laws and regulations related to ‘false information’ in eleven countries across Sub-Saharan Africa 2016-2020 from Ethiopia to South Africa. By examining the terms of such laws against what is known of misinformation types, drivers and effects, it assesses the likely effects of punitive policies and those of more positive approaches that provide accountability in political debate by promoting access to accurate information and corrective speech. In contrast to the effects described for most recent regulations relating to misinformation, the report identifies ways in which legal and regulatory frameworks can be used to promote a healthier information environment.

Google and Facebook currently control close to two-thirds of global advertising revenue. While dominating the online advertising market, these two companies have thus far avoided paying adequate taxes.

This CAMRI policy brief presents a new policy innovation, the online advertising tax. Considering the key role of user activity and user data for the value of Google and Facebook’s services, it explains how digital advertising companies’ revenues could be taxed based on the respective country in which targeted users are located.

The author reviews existing policy arguments and policy options and sets out practical steps to ensure that tax avoidance by online advertising companies is mitigated. Furthermore, he illustrates how tax revenues could be used to support public service internet platforms.

Online advertising will soon form the largest share of global advertisement revenues. Google and Facebook netted profits of US $29 billion in 2016. While these two giants control more than 66% of all online advertising revenues complex legal company structures have minimised their tax liabilities. This extended policy report considers where they should be taxed and where the value of their activities is actually created. It argues that tax paid by those platforms should be levied in the country where platform users are located when they click on or view an advertisement. Furthermore, the report examines the practical steps needed to ensure transparent accounting of taxed transactions in order to avoid long term negative effects for media and democracy.

Considering counter-arguments the author makes the case for an online advertising tax alongside a public service Internet strategy that could support other viable platforms and counter the dangers of duopoly or oligopoly and the high risks of financial bubbles in a world where advertising is the Internet's dominant business model.

“The digital now thoroughly saturates our everyday lives to the point where it seems we are drowning. But is it possible to swim on our terms? This book thoughtfully examines this question, critically teasing apart the structures of power that permeate digital relations and charting pathways to a more just digital world. Essential reading for those who want to move beyond personal digital detoxes to challenge and transform our digital society and economy.” - Professor Rob Kitchin, author of The Data Revolution and Data Lives

“The seductions of tech have ushered in the encroachment of technological solutions into policing, law enforcement and ever-widening systems of social regulation across the UK and Europe. This book marks a critical intervention – by conceptualising our understanding of the ways in which data and digital harms are systemically expended against the powerless. It is a must read for those of us who are concerned to resist the (digital) exclusion of the marginalised, and the (digital) banishment of the vulnerable.” - Dr Patrick Williams, author of Data-Driven Policing: The Hardwiring of Discriminatory Policing Practices Across Europe

“While imaginaries of techno futures constructed by the Digital Lords of contemporary societies become self-fulfilling prophecies, we struggle to imagine a present and future free from digital coercion and exclusion. In their powerful interdisciplinary analysis, Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake delve into the personal, social, political and environmental costs of compulsory digitality. Rejecting a self-defeating naturalisation of digitality and digital inevitability Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement compellingly shows how collective digital justice is imperative in this future/present where the machine rules and people can become marginalized and excluded. A much-needed scholarly intervention that can inspire our collective thinking, research and praxis.” - Dr Benedetta Brevini, author of Is AI Good for the Planet?

Life is increasingly governed and mediated through digital and smart technologies, platforms, big data and algorithms. However, the reasons, practices and impact of how the digital is used by different institutions are often deeply linked to social oppression and injustice. Similarly, the ability to resist these digital impositions is based on inequality and privilege. Challenging the ways in which we are increasingly dependent on the digital, this book raises a set of provocative and urgent questions: in a world of compulsory digitality is there an opt out button? Where, when, how, why and to whom is it available? Answering these questions has become even more relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, the book puts forward the concept of ‘digital disengagement’ which is explored across six key areas of digitisation: health; citizenship; education; consumer culture; labour; and the environment.

Part I examines the difficulty of opting out of compulsory digitality in a world where most things are digital by default. From health apps, algorithmic decision-making to learning analytics, opting out comes with a set of troubling consequences. Part II turns to several examples of disconnection and disengagement. The chapters reveal how phenomena like digital detoxes, time-management apps and online ‘green’ spaces are co-opted by the very digital systems one is trying to resist.

The book critiques issues relating to digital surveillance, algorithmic discrimination and biased tech, corporatisation and monetisation of data, exploitative digital labour, digitalised self-discipline and destruction of the environment. As an interdisciplinary piece of work, the book will be useful to any scholar and activist in Digital, Internet and Social Media Studies; Digital Sociology and Social Policy; Digital Health; Media, Popular and Communication Studies; Consumer culture; and Environment Studies.

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging: peer to peer.

What is peer to peer? Why is it essential for building a commons-centric future? How could this happen? These are the questions this book tries to answer. Peer to peer is a type of social relations in human networks, as well as a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible. Thus, peer to peer enables a new mode of production and creates the potential for a transition to a commons-oriented economy.

The objective of this book is to outline how a radically democratic politics can be reinvigorated in theory and practice through the use of the internet. The author argues that politics in its proper sense can be distinguished from anti-politics by analyzing the configuration of public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. Each of these terrains can be configured in a more or less political manner, though the contemporary status quo heavily skews them towards anti-political configuration.

Using this understanding of what exactly politics entails, this book considers how the internet can both help and hinder efforts to move each area in a more political direction. By explicitly interpreting contemporary theories of the political in terms of the internet, this analysis avoids the twin traps of both technological determinism and technological cynicism.

Raising awareness of what the word ‘politics’ means, the author develops theoretical work by Arendt, Rancière, Žižek and Mouffe to present a clear and coherent view of how in theory, politics can be digitized and alternatively how the internet can be deployed in the service of trulydemocratic politics.

While the individual elements of the propaganda system (or filters) identified by the Propaganda Model (PM) – ownership, advertising, sources, flak and anti-communism – have previously been the focus of much scholarly attention, their systematisation in a model, empirical corroboration and historicisation have made the PM a useful tool for media analysis across cultural and geographical boundaries.

Despite the wealth of scholarly research Herman and Chomsky’s work has set into motion over the past decades, the PM has been subjected to marginalisation, poorly informed critiques and misrepresentations. Interestingly, while the PM enables researchers to form discerning predictions as regards corporate media performance, Herman and Chomsky had further predicted that the PM itself would meet with such marginalisation and contempt.

In current theoretical and empirical studies of mass media performance, uses of the PM continue, nonetheless, to yield important insights into the workings of political and economic power in society, due in large measure to the model’s considerable explanatory power.

Books about Oxford have generally focused on the University rather than the city. This original book on the local politics of Oxford City from 1830 to 1980 is based on a comprehensive analysis of primary sources and tells the story of the city’s progressive politics. The book traces this history from Chartism and electoral reform in the mid-nineteenth century, through the early years of socialism to the impact of communism in the interwar period, the struggle between nuclear disarmers and Gaitskellites in the 1960s and the impact of the new revolutionary left in the late 1970s. Throughout the narrative, the book contrasts the two approaches of those engaged in progressive politics, those who focused on the politics of reform and improved government and those who preferred the politics of revolt, protest and revolutionary rhetoric. The author argues that a central feature of this history has been the co-existence and interaction of working- and middle- class elements. It rediscovers a rich heritage, a fascinating story and offers a rare wide-ranging chronological narrative of local UK city politics. Through its extensive quotes from primary sources, the book presents a vivid picture of local politics over 150 years.

Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world.

This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

Although somewhat marginal in relation to the other senses, smell is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. We subconsciously find our place in it by sniffing our body, the body of the one next to us, the room in which we are, the culture with which we are familiar. There is an incessant olfactory flow consisting of bodies, human and nonhuman, that are agents of generation, consumption, diffusion, reproduction and dissolution of odours. As they move or pause, as they cluster with others or try to move away, these bodies constantly partake in this olfactory flow, this dense planetary swirl that leaves nothing outside.

The law aims at presenting itself as rational and objective. Smell, on the other hand, is one of the least integrated senses in the legal edifice, in comparison to, say, seeing and hearing. This can be attributed mainly to the fact that sense-making of smell and law are different, even antithetical. Smell operates undercurrent, tickling the olfactory antennas of individual and collective bodies while habitually hiding behind other sensory volumes. Law, on the other hand, has an interest in appearing present, universal, constant. Olfactory sense-making relies on its elusiveness; legal sense-making invests in its obviousness. Yet, the two can interact in most unexpected ways, as this volume amply shows. If anything, smell airs the way in which law conceptualises and contextualises its own actuality. Smell brings law forth by allowing it to show its underbelly, its elusive sense-making that is invariably sacrificed in preference to the necessity of legal impressions of constancy. However, smell’s fragmentary, discontinuous and unstable nature, despite all the ordering that goes to it, poses a peculiar challenge to the law. This volume sets out to investigate this juncture.

What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping.

A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

This book explores how the Internet is connected to the global crisis of liberal democracy. Today, self-promotion is at the heart of many human relationships. The selfie is not just a social media gesture people love to hate. It is also a symbol of social reality in the age of the Internet. Through social media people have new ways of rating and judging themselves and one another, via metrics such as likes, shares, followers and friends. There are new thirsts for authenticity, outlets for verbal aggression, and social problems. Social media culture and neoliberalism dovetail and amplify one another, feeding social estrangement. With neoliberalism, psychosocial wounds are agitated and authoritarianism is provoked. Yet this new sociality also inspires resistance and political mobilisation. Illustrating ideas and trends with examples from news and popular culture, the book outlines and applies theories from Debord, Foucault, Fromm, Goffman, and Giddens, among others. Topics covered include the global history of communication technologies, personal branding, echo chamber effects, alienation and fear of abnormality. Information technologies provide channels for public engagement where extreme ideas reach farther and faster than ever before, and political differences are widened and inflamed. They also provide new opportunities for protest and resistance.

Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debord's theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism and more specifically of digital and media labour. It is argued that the Spectacle 2.0 form operates as the interactive network that links through one singular (but contradictory) language and various imaginaries, uniting diverse productive contexts such as logistics, finance, new media and urbanism. Spectacle 2.0 thus colonizes most spheres of social life by processes of commodification, exploitation and reification. Diverse contributors consider the topic within the book’s two main sections: Part I conceptualizes and historicizes the Spectacle in the context of informational capitalism; contributions in Part II offer empirical cases that historicise the Spectacle in relation to the present (and recent past) showing how a Spectacle 2.0 approach can illuminate and deconstruct specific aspects of contemporary social reality. All contributions included in this book rework the category of the Spectacle to present a stimulating compendium of theoretical critical literature in the fields of media and labour studies. In the era of the gig-economy, highly mediated content and President Trump, Debord’s concept is arguably more relevant than ever.

This book looks at what it means to work in a creative studio. The volume takes a broad view of the concept of studio, defining it as any creative space that exists in the real or digital world – so this could be your studio at the university, a space or table you have at home, or a digital environment such as Miro where you work alone or with others. This book guides you in setting up a studio space and thinking about how to get the most out of solo and collaborative work within that space. It examines some of the practical elements, such as hardware and tools you might need, along with some of the soft skills, such as time management that will help you in your working.

Having helped you to establish your working space, the authors provide guidance on specific creative skills that cross multiple disciplines and ways of working. Providing help with creating portfolios, including those that are needed to get into university, those you might produce while at university, and also ones that might be used after you complete your studies. The book also takes a deep five into how to present your work, both in person and online, synchronously, and asynchronously. Relatedly the volume examines crits, and how you might use and respond to feedback provided by your lecturers and peers. 

The authors are also joined by more than 20 contributors who help this volume to dive deeply into different subject areas. Ranging from sculpture, textiles, art and graphic design, readers will find tailored expert tips to help them in their own discipline to get the most from the digital creative environment.

This book challenges the reader to think about what it means to be creative and how digital can play a role in this. Furthermore, it asks the reader to ask what is next. To think about the career they would like that will engage in creative practices. Think about how the creative studio might differ in the world of work and how you can ensure you keep your creative energies going. Throughout this, though, the authors, with the help of expert contributors, guide and support the reader in exploiting the digital creative environment to its maximum.

 

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.

Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses.

This volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.

The growing role and relevance of tourism in cities – and of cities in tourism – has in recent decades emerged as a topic of great interest to scholars across many social sciences disciplines. Yet, while urban tourism research has flourished, various issues relating to tourism in metropolitan contexts are in need of greater scholarly engagement.

What forms does tourism take in today’s metropolises and metropolitan regions? How do these forms differ from tourism in other urban contexts? Are these differences significant enough to warrant the classification of ‘metropolitan tourism’ as a distinct type of urban tourism? What are their implications for policy and planning processes? How do policy and planning processes in different metropolises and metropolitan regions differ from each other, and what can they learn from each other? And finally, how could tourism in metropolises and metropolitan regions be made more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive?

Given the importance widely attributed to major metropolises and metropolitan regions as contemporary engines of economic development, innovation, and change, the widespread portrayal of tourism as a leading economic and social force of the 21st century, and the fact that the world's large metropolitan areas are key recipients of tourism flows, it is surprising how little systematic attention is paid to tourism in metropolitan contexts. This book aims to fill these gaps.

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

This book charts the development of climate assemblies across Europe and beyond. It explores what ordinary people want, highlighting the ways in which assembly recommendations take us beyond current government policies and offer new visions and directions for change. It shows that not all assemblies are the same and that the context and design of climate assemblies have differed quite profoundly – as have their impacts on policy and public discourse. The book also lays out the key elements needed for climate assemblies to have sustained impact, providing essential insights for anyone wanting to run or advocate for them, and concludes with reflections on what we can expect from assemblies as they evolve.

The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ choices and behaviours. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly and this book shows how climate assemblies can achieve this, allowing us to address the issues we all face together.

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

This book charts the development of climate assemblies across Europe and beyond. It explores what ordinary people want, highlighting the ways in which assembly recommendations take us beyond current government policies and offer new visions and directions for change. It shows that not all assemblies are the same and that the context and design of climate assemblies have differed quite profoundly – as have their impacts on policy and public discourse. The book also lays out the key elements needed for climate assemblies to have sustained impact, providing essential insights for anyone wanting to run or advocate for them, and concludes with reflections on what we can expect from assemblies as they evolve.

The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ choices and behaviours. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly and this book shows how climate assemblies can achieve this, allowing us to address the issues we all face together.

A response is needed to the numerous issues spurred by the expansion of the gig economy, where flexible patterns of employment prevail in contrast to permanent jobs. In this context of the exponential growth of the digital economy and underlying business models the largest nationwide study of its kind into the impact of the working conditions in the UK music industry ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ has been conducted by MusicTank/University of Westminster.

This research suggests the need to consider the future of work not only from an economic or employment law perspective but from a mental health one too. What are the psychological implications of precarious work and how are factors such as financial instability, the feedback economy and personal relationships reflected in mental health outcomes or connected to the business relationships most musicians and other gig economy participants work under?

Authors Sally-Anne Gross, George Musgrave and Laima Janciute consider which policy measures may help or harm gig economy workers including the taxation of self-employed workers, a universal basic income, education around mental health issues and access to mental health support.

"How is it that ontology has come to be seen as the antidote for modernity? While Foucault denigrated ontology as a mistaken and parochial exercise, contemporary social theory holds out the promise that new modes of planetary knowledge will save us from our own excesses. Drawing together long traditions in Caribbean scholarship with Afro-pessimist thought, Pugh and Chandler illustrate how the search for more emancipatory ontologies - relational ontologies, indigenous ontologies, non-human ontologies, etc. – not only misunderstands the problem of modernity but (more importantly) works to veil the negative force that marks both the limit and cause of all such knowledge practices: what they term the abyss. To engage in abyssal thought – as they lay out – is to inhabit a site of refusal: a determination not to be drawn into the lure of ontological ‘correction’ and to recognise that the practice of world making cannot not bear the imprint of colonial violence. Articulated in passionate declarative prose, these authors powerfully illuminate the trap of the emancipatory instinct and the promise of a deconstructive ethic." — Mitch Rose, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK

“A much-needed intellectual effort in the non-reductionist and non-essentialising style of Pugh and Chandler's previous book. The World as Abyss gives Caribbean thought and culture the place they deserve within critical theory and materialist studies.” — Mónica Fernández Jiménez, Valladolid University, Spain

“For some time now scholars have questioned the overly general assumptions about the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene, but much work needs to be done to flesh out what a decolonized Anthropocene might be. Pugh and Chandler’s The World as Abyss provides an original, intriguing and compelling counterpoint to bland Anthropocene humanism (and posthumanism). This timely work explores the poetics of the Caribbean and provides a way to think about the Anthropocene and the future beyond the managerialism of the present. This book is essential reading for those working in the environmental humanities or Anthropocene studies.” — Claire Colebrook, Professor, Penn State University, USA

“This book names an apocalypse that began long ago. Pugh and Chandler patiently follow the journey of thought as it travels from the Middle Passage to the Caribbean. This brings them face-to-face with the horror of anti-Black violence, not as just another resource to strip-mine, but as an unavoidable abyss that confines all thought. Its reminder: that we have still not yet begun to think a truly Black world.” — Andrew Culp, Professor, California Institute of the Arts, USA 

This book is about a distinctive ‘abyssal’ approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded – a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the ‘human’ by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the ‘world’ in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and brings indeterminacy into the heart of ontological assumptions of a world of entities, essences, and universal determination. This is an approach that does not focus upon tropes of rescue and salvation but upon the generative power of negation. In doing so, it highlights how Caribbean experiences and writings have been drawn upon to provide an important and distinct perspective for critical thought.