Results by title

1488 books match the query 'Media Studies' and 107 start with c

cover of Complacency and Collusion: A Critical Introduction to Business and Financial Journalism

Complacency and Collusion

A Critical Introduction to Business and Financial Journalism

Keith J. Butterick

Pluto Press, 2015

In Complacency and Collusion, Keith J. Butterick draws on extensive experience as a journalist and scholar to show why financial and business journalism is so often toothless. He offers compelling explanations for why big business needs the press—and vice versa—and presents piercing analyses of the inadequacies of reporting in such major outlets as the Economist and the Financial Times, showing how those failures are rooted in the close relationship between businesses and those covering them. He concludes with a reflection on what the growth and spread of a complacent, complicit corporate journalism will mean for the future of a truly free media.
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cover of Computational Humanities

Computational Humanities

Jessica Marie Johnson

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities

Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, Computational Humanities redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders?

 

Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of data, from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content, have enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume highlights both opportunities and frictions, showing that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about p-values.

 

Contributors: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford U; David Bamman, U of California, Berkeley; Kaspar Beelen, U of London; Peter Bell, Philipps U of Marburg; Tobias Blanke, U of Amsterdam; Julia Damerow, Arizona State U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Crystal Nicole Eddins, U of Pittsburgh; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Tassie Gniady; Crystal Hall, Bowdoin College; Vanessa M. Holden, U of Kentucky; David Kloster, Indiana U; Manfred D. Laubichler, Arizona State U; Katherine McDonough, Lancaster U; Barbara McGillivray, King’s College London; Megan Meredith-Lobay, Simon Fraser U; Federico Nanni, Alan Turing Institute; Fabian Offert, U of California, Santa Barbara; Hannah Ringler, Illinois Institute of Technology; Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College; Joshua D. Rothman, U of Alabama; Benjamin M. Schmidt; Lisa Tagliaferri, Rutgers U; Jeffrey Tharsen, U of Chicago; Marieke van Erp, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Lee Zickel, Case Western Reserve U.

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cover of Computer Game Worlds

Computer Game Worlds

Claus Pias

Diaphanes, 2017

Computer games have become ubiquitous in today’s society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven’t considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations?

With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.

 
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cover of Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy

Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy

David Lyon and Elia Zureik, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

From computer networks to grocery store checkout scanners, it is easier and easier for governments, employers, advertisers, and individuals to gather detailed and sophisticated information about each of us. In this important new collection, the authors question the impact of these new technologies of surveillance on our privacy and our culture.

Although surveillance-literally some people "watching over" others-is as old as social relationships themselves, with the advent of the computer age this phenomenon has acquired new and distinctive meanings. Technological advances have made it possible for surveillance to become increasingly global and integrated-both commercial and government-related personal data flows more frequently across national boundaries, and the flow between private and public sectors has increased as well.

Addressing issues of the global integration of surveillance, social control, new information technologies, privacy violation and protection, and workplace surveillance, the contributors to Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy grapple with the ramifications of these concerns for society today. Timely and provocative, this collection will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with resistance to social control and incursions into privacy.

Contributors: Jonathan P. Allen, Colin J. Bennett, Simon G. Davies, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., Calvin C. Gotlieb, Rob Kling, Gary T. Marx, Abbe Mowshowitz, Judith A. Perrolle, Mark Poster, Priscilla M. Regan, James B. Rule.

David Lyon is professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada. His previous books include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 1994). Elia Zureik is also professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, and coedited (with Dianne Hartling) The Social Context of the New Information and Communication Technologies (1987).

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cover of Confidence Culture

Confidence Culture

Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill

Duke University Press, 2022

In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.
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cover of Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification

Conflict Graffiti

From Revolution to Gentrification

John Lennon

University of Chicago Press, 2021

This study examines the waves of graffiti that occur before, during, and after a conflict—important tools of political resistance that make protest visible and material.
 
Graffiti makes for messy politics. In film and television, it is often used to create a sense of danger or lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. But it is also a resistive tool of protest, making visible the disparate voices and interests that come together to make a movement.

In Conflict Graffiti, John Lennon dives into the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones—ranging from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, to the tourist-attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall and the street art that has rebranded Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but as the conflict subsides a new graffiti and street art scene emerges—often one that ushers in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anesthetized forgetting.

Graffiti has an unstable afterlife, fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. But as Lennon concludes, when protest movements change and adapt, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them.
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cover of Connect and Divide: The Practice Turn in Media Studies

Connect and Divide

The Practice Turn in Media Studies

Edited by Erhard Schüttpelz, Ulrike Bergermann, Monika Dommann, Jeremy Stolow, and Nadine Taha

Diaphanes, 2018

Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time. When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves—to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions—referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and soundwaves. But as the middle or between, the essence of media itself seems to be distributed across the mix of entities involved, and its location and agency are hard to pin down.

This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself. A unique discussion of the intersection of media theory and practice theory, Connect and Divide explores how distributions of knowledge, labor, and power may be hidden in what remains untraceable about media, shedding vital light on the social implications of media theory today.
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cover of Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Constructing the Little House

Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Ann Romines

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture?

Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written.

This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.
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cover of Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory

Constructing the Outbreak

Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory

Katherine A. Foss

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic.

Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years—from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century—Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.
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cover of Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture

Lury, Celia

Rutgers University Press, 1996

This book is written as a survey for students who are interested in the nature and role of consumer culture in modern societies. Drawing on a wide range of studies and disciplines, Celia Lury examines the rise of consumer culture and the changing relations between the production and consumption of cultural goods. Rejecting the Marxist principle of production as the lone economic determinant in capitalist society, Lury presents consumerism as an equally active player in the free market. Rather than existing as opposites, production and consumerism are seen as complements, feeding off each other in an endless cycle. As the author writes, “the use or appropriation of an object is more often than not both a moment of consumption and production, of undoing and doing, of destruction and construction.”         

Lury weaves unique arguments over the expansive nature of consumption, including explanations as to how poorer segments of society do in fact contribute to consumer culture and how a commodity moves beyond its function and assumes a cultural and symbolic meaning. Not only does the author explore the way an individual’s position in social groups structured by class, gender, race and age affects the nature of his or her participation in consumer culture, but also how this culture itself is instrumental in the defining of social and political groups and the forming of an individual’s self-identity.         

Clearly written and well illustrated, Consumer Culture is a lively and engaging introduction to a topic which is of growing importance in media and cultural studies and in the sociology of culture. It will enable readers to understand and ultimately to have better control over the means of consumption.

 

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cover of Consumer Identities: Agency, Media and Digital Culture

Consumer Identities

Agency, Media and Digital Culture

Edited by Candice Roberts and Myles Ethan Lascity

Intellect Books, 2019

This edited collection explores the notion of agency by tracing the role and activities of consumers from the pre-internet age into the possible future. Using an overview of the historical creation of consumer identity, Consumer Identities demonstrates that active consumption is not merely a product of the digital age; it has always been a means by which a person can develop identity. Grounded in the acknowledgment that identity is a constructed and contested space, the authors analyze emerging dynamics in contemporary consumerism, ongoing tensions of structure and agency in consumer identities, and the ways in which identity construction could be influenced in the future. By exploring consumer identity through examples in pop culture, the authors have created a scholarly work that will appeal to industry professionals as well as academics.
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cover of Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America's Decade of Disaster

Consuming Catastrophe

Mass Culture in America's Decade of Disaster

Timothy Recuber

Temple University Press, 2016

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies—from omnipresent media broadcasts to relief fund efforts and promises to “Never Forget.”  

Recuber explains how a specific and “real” kind of emotional connection to the victims becomes a crucial element in the creation, use, and consumption of mass mediation of disasters. He links this to the concept of “empathetic hedonism,” or the desire to understand or feel the suffering of others. 

The ineffability of disasters makes them a spectacular and emotional force in contemporary American culture. Consuming Catastrophe provides a lively analysis of the themes and meanings of tragedy and the emotions it engenders in the representation, mediation and consumption of disasters.

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cover of Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance

Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance

Christina N. Baker

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Christina N. Baker’s Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a “womanist artistic standpoint” theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees—and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers—Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.
 
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cover of Contemporary Opera in Flux

Contemporary Opera in Flux

Edited by Yayoi U. Everett

University of Michigan Press, 2024

In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. 

Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.
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cover of Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

Content Machines

Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

Sarah Brouillette

Duke University Press, 2026

While much has been said about the democratization of publishing through the rise of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, little attention has been paid to the broader effect these technologies have had on writers, readers, and the publishing industry. In Content Machines, Sarah Brouillette considers how short-form, platform-based, and social media writing on digital mediums like Wattpad and TikTok has reshaped modern publishing, reading, and writing. Brouillette identifies three mutually reinforcing processes that platform capitalism entangles in the publishing industry: the marked feminization of book work; the rise of a bibliotherapeutic vocabulary that grounds reading and writing as self-care work; and the growth of platform-based processes that cheapen content and intensify the pressure to engage in self-promotion and entrepreneurial strategizing. She breaks down the business models that have been key to this transformation and traces the social conditions that make online self-published fiction, especially young adult, romance, and fantasy stories, into spaces for community while, conversely, signaling how these publishing practices depend upon undervalued and feminized labor from marginalized groups. Content Machines is a much-needed survey of the contours of the modern reading and writing landscape.
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cover of Contested Ground: The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America

Contested Ground

The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America

Mike Conway

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, produced by NBC's Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions. While the television industry ultimately awarded the program three Emmys, the U.S. Department of State pressured NBC to cancel the program, and print journalists criticized the network for what they considered to be a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics.

It was not just The Tunnel's subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country's top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
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cover of Contesting Copyright: A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans

Contesting Copyright

A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans

Augusta Dimou

Central European University Press, 2026

The creative sector, including the cultural industry, is key for today’s economy. Copyright has the capacity to x the roles and tasks of the actors involved and determine the direction of cash ows within this sector. The study of the evolution of copyright helps understand and adjust the regulation and commercialization of creative labor. Augusta Dimou provides a thoroughly researched, interdisciplinary and comparative study of the historical development of copyright regimes in three countries – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. She examines the function and signi cance of copyright in the institutionalization, development, and regulation of modern culture in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the diverse political regimes of the modern era, and at the interface between the various nationalization and globalization processes of the 20th century.
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cover of Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

Context Providers

Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna

Intellect Books, 2011

Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning. The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared, creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging the scientific community through collaboration, active dialogue, and creative work that challenges the scientific.

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cover of Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production

Cookery

Food Rhetorics and Social Production

Edited by Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein

University of Alabama Press, 2020

The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries

The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.

The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.

Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.

The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.
 

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cover of Cool Capitalism

Cool Capitalism

Jim McGuigan

Pluto Press, 2009

Thomas Frank coined the term ‘the conquest of cool’. This book shows how this conquest is at the heart of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

Jim McGuigan argues that 'cool capitalism' incorporates disaffection into capitalism itself, absorbing rebellion and thereby neutralising opposition to the present system of culture and society.

McGuigan explores a huge variety of cultural examples, from the sleek images of mainstream advertising, to the fringes of artistic production, offering a vigourous critique of our understanding of subversion, resistance and counter-culturalism.

Has capitalism really colonised our planet? McGuigan shows that there is still some space left for rebellion against the seductive power of the free market economy.

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cover of Copy/Rights and Early Cinema: Proceedings of the 17th International Domitor Conference

Copy/Rights and Early Cinema

Proceedings of the 17th International Domitor Conference

Edited by Clara Auclair, Ian Christie, Martin L. Johnson, Tami Williams, and Colin Williamson

Lever Press, 2026

Histories of early cinema often focus on technological, social, and aesthetic developments in the medium. But cinema also posed legal challenges throughout the world and continues to do so in the era of digital media and AI. The methods used to establish and defend copyright varied across national contexts and changed over time, shaping how films were circulated and preserved. This edited volume includes essays based on conference papers given at the 17th Domitor conference and includes case studies from a range of national, historical, and cultural contexts. 

The essays in this volume address an array of themes, including copyright and early intermediality, piracy and censorship, international distribution, infamy and defamation, and publicity, privacy, and rights to the image. Although these essays center the first decades of cinema, the rights they address continue to resonate today. Since intellectual property law is constantly struggling to stay abreast of technological innovation, this collection has special relevance in a new era of global production and digital technologies that is as momentous as the invention of cinema. Claiming, defining, and defending rights are returned to the spotlight as AI draws upon the past of cinema to shape its future.

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cover of Coralations

Coralations

Melody Jue

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

A captivating meditation on coral beyond iconic tropical corals

Coralations is a philosophical exploration of the media that come into focus when we shift our attention from the highly recognizable coral of the tropics. Focusing on soft corals and deep-water corals leads to different narratives about climate change and involves different analogies to media. Through thought-provoking analyses of photography, science fiction, visual art, and scientific images, Melody Jue renews our curiosity and broadens our understanding of corals beyond the dominant narratives about their endangerment. Coralations shows how paying attention to particular corals can change what we take for granted.

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cover of Corpse Crusaders: The Zombie in American Comics

Corpse Crusaders

The Zombie in American Comics

Chera Kee

University of Michigan Press, 2024

In the popular imagination, zombies are scary, decomposing corpses hunting down the living. But since the 1930s, there have also been other zombies shambling across the panels of comic books—zombies that aren’t quite what most people think zombies should be. There have been zombie slaves, zombie henchmen, talking zombies, beautiful zombies, and even zombie heroes.

Using archival research into Golden Age comics and extended analyses of comics from the 1940s to today, Corpse Crusaders explores the profound influence early action/adventure and superheroic generic conventions had on shaping comic book zombies. It takes the reader from the 1940s superhero, the Purple Zombie, through 1950s revenge-from-the-grave zombies, to the 1970s anti-hero, Simon Garth (“The Zombie”) and the gruesome heroes-turned-zombies of Marvel Zombies. In becoming immersed in superheroic logics early on, the zombie in comics became a figure that, unlike the traditional narrative uses of other monsters, actually served to defend the status quo. This continuing trend not only provides insight into the overwhelming influence superheroes have had on the comic book medium, but it also provides a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which zombiism and superheroism parallel each other. Corpse Crusaders explores the ways that truth, justice, and the American way have influenced the undead in comics and turned what is often a rebellious figure into one that works to save the day.
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cover of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Corridor

Media Architectures in American Fiction

Kate Marshall

University of Minnesota Press, 2013


Corridor offers a series of conceptually provocative readings that illuminate a hidden and surprising relationship between architectural space and modern American fiction. By paying close attention to fictional descriptions of some of modernity’s least remarkable structures, such as plumbing, ductwork, and airshafts, Kate Marshall discovers a rich network of connections between corridors and novels, one that also sheds new light on the nature of modern media.


The corridor is the dominant organizational structure in modern architecture, yet its various functions are taken for granted, and it tends to disappear from view. But, as Marshall shows, even the most banal structures become strangely visible in the noisy communication systems of American fiction. By examining the link between modernist novels and corridors, Marshall demonstrates the ways architectural elements act as media. In a fresh look at the late naturalist fiction of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she leads the reader through the fetus-clogged sewers of Manhattan Transfer to the corpse-choked furnaces of Native Son and reveals how these invisible spaces have a fascinating history in organizing the structure of modern persons.


Portraying media as not only objects but processes, Marshall develops a new idiom for Americanist literary criticism, one that explains how media studies can inform our understanding of modernist literature.


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cover of Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence

Cosplay

The Fictional Mode of Existence

Frenchy Lunning

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An exploration of cosplay and its relationship with the realms of its global fandom, performance, and the modes of fictional existence 

 

Flourishing far beyond its Japanese roots, cosplay has become an international phenomenon with fervid fans who gather at enormous, worldwide conventions annually. Here, author Frenchy Lunning offers an intimate, sensational tour through cosplay’s past and present, as well as its global lure.

Through a culmination of years of personal research on cosplay, and growing out of Lunning’s wealth of scholarship, conference presentations, and cosplayer interviews, Cosplay is a unique and necessary examination of identity, performance, play, and otaku fandom and culture in relation to contemporary theories. With discussions covering construction, masquerades, and community through performance, Lunning presents cosplay as a dynamic and ever-evolving global practice. She combines the fascinating viewpoints of cosplayers with observational, in-depth research on cosplay history and practice, and a deep dive into critical theory involving the modes of fictional existence, in order to understand its global expansion. 

Augmented with beautiful photographs, this is an engrossing, lively read that explores a complicated and often misunderstood history and meditates on how cosplay allows its participants to create and construct meaning and identity.

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cover of Country Comes to Town: The Music Industry and the Transformation of Nashville

Country Comes to Town

The Music Industry and the Transformation of Nashville

Jeremy Hill

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of “country,” beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to “come to town,” to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country “character.”

To understand how the genre has become the far-reaching commercial phenomenon that it is today, Hill explores how various players within the country music fold have grappled with the notion of place. He shows both how the industry has transformed the city of Nashville and how country music—through song lyrics, imagery associated with the music, and branding—has reshaped ideas about the American landscape and character. As the genre underwent significant change in the last decades of the twentieth century, those who sought to explain its new styles and new locations relied on a traditional theme: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.” Hill demonstrates how this idea—that you can still be “country” while no longer living in a rural place—has been used to expand country's commercial appeal and establish a permanent home in the urban space of Nashville.

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cover of Covering Bin Laden: Global Media and the World's Most Wanted Man

Covering Bin Laden

Global Media and the World's Most Wanted Man

Edited by Susan Jeffords and Fahed Yahya Al-Sumait

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Starting in 2001, much of the world media used the image of Osama bin Laden as a shorthand for terrorism. Bin Laden himself considered media manipulation on a par with military, political, and ideological tools, and intentionally used interviews, taped speeches, and distributed statements to further al-Qaida's ends.
 
In Covering Bin Laden, editors Susan Jeffords and Fahed Yahya Al-Sumait collect perspectives from global scholars exploring a startling premise: that media depictions of Bin Laden not only diverge but often contradict each other, depending on the media provider and format, the place in which the depiction is presented, and the viewer's political and cultural background. The contributors analyze the representations of the many Bin Ladens, ranging from Al Jazeera broadcasts to video games. They examine the media's dominant role in shaping our understanding of terrorists and why/how they should be feared, and they engage with the ways the mosaic of Bin Laden images and narratives have influenced policies and actions around the world.
 
Contributors include Fahed Al-Sumait, Saranaz Barforoush, Aditi Bhatia, Purnima Bose, Ryan Croken, Simon Ferrari, Andrew Hill, Richard Jackson, Susan Jeffords, Joanna Margueritte-Giecewicz, Noha Mellor, Susan Moeller, Brigitte Nacos, Courtney C. Radsch, and Alexander Spencer.
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cover of Cowboys As Cold Warriors: The Western And U S History

Cowboys As Cold Warriors

The Western And U S History

Stanley Corkin

Temple University Press, 2004

Though the United States emerged from World War II with superpower status and quickly entered a period of economic prosperity, the stresses and contradictions of the Cold War nevertheless cast a shadow over American life. The same period marked the heyday of the western film. Cowboys as Cold Warriors shows that this was no coincidence. It examines many of the significant westerns released between 1946 and 1962, analyzing how they responded to and influenced the cultural climate of the country. Author Stanley Corkin discusses a dozen films in detail, connecting them to each other and to numerous others. He considers how these cultural productions both embellished the myth of the American frontier and reflected the era in which they were made.

Films discussed include: My Darling Clementine, Red River, Duel in the Sun, Pursued, Fort Apache, Broken Arrow, The Gunfighter, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Alamo, Lonely Are the Brave, Ride the High Country, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
[more]
cover of Cozy Time: Resistance Through Comfort in Youth(ful) Media and Popular Culture

Cozy Time

Resistance Through Comfort in Youth(ful) Media and Popular Culture

Emily Midkiff

University of Iowa Press, 2027

[more]
cover of Crafting Identity: Transnational Indian Arts and the Politics of Race in Central Mexico

Crafting Identity

Transnational Indian Arts and the Politics of Race in Central Mexico

Pavel Shlossberg

University of Arizona Press, 2015

Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican “arte popular,” which makes Mexican indigeneity “digestible” from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore.

The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft. Using data from his interviews with mask makers, collectors, museum curators, editors, and others, Pavel Shlossberg places the artisans within the larger context of their relationships with the nation-state and Mexican elites, as well as with the production cultures that inform international arts and crafts markets. In exploring the connection of mask making to capitalism, the book examines the symbolic and material pressures brought to bear on Mexican artisans to embody and enact self-racializing stereotypes and the performance of stigmatized indigenous identities.

Shlossberg’s weaving of ethnographic data and cultural theory demystifies the way mask makers ascribe meaning to their practices and illuminates how these practices are influenced by state and cultural institutions. Demonstrating how the practice of mask making negotiates ethnoracial identity with regard to the Mexican state and the United States, Shlossberg shows how it derives meaning, value, and economic worth in the eyes of the state and cultural institutions that mediate between the mask maker and the market.
[more]
cover of Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema

Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema

Ian Christie, Priska Morrissey, Louis Pelletier, Valentine Robert, Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, and Tami Williams

Michigan Publishing Services, 2024

These proceedings of the 16th conference of the international society for the study of early cinema Domitor includes 26 studies and numerous rarely seen figures dealing with the often overlooked history of the crafts, trades and techniques of early cinema. By examining material culture and the institutionalization of practices into trades during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this new investigation into the skills and the techniques that defined the cinema in its early decades aims to foster a better understanding of the medium in its varied industrial and professional aspects. The art and gestures of craftspersons—including performers, camera operators, editors, directors, designers, engineers, projectionists, programmers, and critics—, like those of the factory or laboratory workers, are considered for their emerging specificity, as well as in relation to existing cultural, material and technological forms. This book shows how the industrialization of cinema, the professionalization of workers, and the standardization of techniques led to the creation (or at times, subversion) of norms, and consequently legitimized certain skills, crafts and techniques at the expense of others.
 
The intermedial approaches deployed in this collection bring into focus the influence of multiple professional worlds and cultural practices on the nascent film medium, as well as the necessary adaptations and transformations required by the latter. This circulatory dynamic concerns people and practices, studied in a non-diffusionist approach taking into account transcultural interactions. Chapters examine the mechanisms of professionalization and identity-building as they relate to professions such as filmmaker or colorist, as well as to more unexpected occupations such as accountant, censor, or chemical engineer.
 
The notion of technique is broadly defined. Several of the volume’s chapters deal with cameras or special effects, as well as with new historical investigation into mysterious technical devices such as shutters, cue systems or working samples. Going beyond this preoccupation with materiality, the collected studies also approach technique as a human and cultural activity, and thus as a set of gestures, crafts, and expertise. The book more specifically opens up a reflection on the skills of screen performers and on the training that brought the institutionalization of body techniques and film acting. The book further illustrates to an unprecedented extent that the first film workers were frequently women.
 
Several chapters are dedicated to the unconventional careers of specific film workers, with particular attention being given to the diversity and complexity of professional trajectories. Indeed, this book demonstrates that the invention of cinema was deeply enmeshed with the rise of international networks, which resulted in the standardization of technical practices within corporate and national contexts being ultimately shaped by globalization.
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Crime and the Media

The Post-Modern Spectacle

Edited by David Kidd-Hewitt and Richard Osborne

Pluto Press, 1996

This book brings together key debates within cultural studies, media studies, criminology and sociology on the relationship between the media and crime in a postmodern society – highlighted by recent controversies on the effects of media portrayals of violence and crime on the community at large.

Real-life crime, crime reconstruction and crime as entertainment are categories that are now so interdependent that the media itself is in danger of confusing the genres as it seeks to profit from their undoubted appeal. This intertextuality is a key theme in this collection. The contributors highlight and theorise the symbiosis that exists between real crime and its representations, from media moral panics, policing the crisis and representing order to the postmodern confusion of crime and spectacle, trial by media and trials on media. As recent debates have shown all too starkly, the media's neutrality in this critical area is ever more problematic.

This is an invaluable introduction to new thinking in a pressing contemporary debate.
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cover of Crip Love Onscreen: Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability

Crip Love Onscreen

Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability

Sarah Rainey-Smithback

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

Crip Love Onscreen: Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability examines how disabled people’s sexual lives—including pleasure/sex, love, pregnancy, and sexual violence—are represented in popular film and television. Analyzing a variety of films and TV shows from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Sarah Rainey-Smithback traces patterns in disability representation that ignore or distort many of the realities of crip sexuality. These patterns of sexual representation tend to uphold compulsory able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and privacy norms—what Rainey-Smithback terms “neoliberal love values,” or standards that celebrate normative forms of sexual desire, bodies, and intimacy practices.

As disability representation increases, though, new possibilities are emerging. Crip Love Onscreen also draws attention to the exceptional through a close reading of screen narratives (such as 50 First Dates,Love and Other Drugs,American Horror Story: Freak Show, and more) that push against neoliberal, heteronormative, and ableist values. Drawing on the work of queer/crip scholars and activists, Rainey-Smithback uncovers glimpses of what Tobin Siebers calls a “sexual culture for disabled people”—a space and way of being that expands sexual access and sexual experience.
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Crip Screens

Countering Psychiatric Media Technologies

Olivia Banner

Duke University Press, 2025

In Crip Screens, Olivia Banner provides a wide-ranging and ongoing history of Black, feminist-of-color, and crip resistance to psychiatry’s incorporation of hegemonic media technologies into treatment and research. Banner shows how institutions use documentary films, data visualization, network graphs, therapy chatbots, virtual patient training programs, and pharmaceutical advertising to pathologize certain people as “deviant” and “mentally ill.” Those people so categorized have used media technologies toward alternative visions of care. Examining insurgent media and technology efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, Banner shows how women and communities of color worked to wrest away from psychiatry its hold over representing mental distress and pathological categorization. These efforts and innovations, she argues, were distinct from what is now accepted as the antipsychiatry movement. In so doing, Banner recovers a lost history of disability politics—what she calls crip screens—that refused psychiatry’s use of cultural productions toward its carceral and subjugating designs.
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cover of Cripping Girlhood

Cripping Girlhood

Anastasia Todd

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. In paying critical attention to disabled girlhood, the book uses feminist disability studies to rupture the unwitting assumption in girls’ studies that girlhood is necessarily non-disabled. 

By closely examining the ways that disabled girls represent themselves, Anastasia Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the privileged, disabled girl subject in the national imagination to explore how disabled girls circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. In analyzing a range of cultural sites, including YouTube, TikTok, documentaries, and GoFundMe campaigns, Todd shows how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms.  By analyzing disabled girls’ self-representational practices and cultural productions, Todd shows how disabled girls deftly theorize their experiences of ableism, sexism, racism, and ageism, and cultivate communities online, creating archives of disability knowledge and politicizing other disabled people in the process. 
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Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Tom Monahan

Duke University Press, 2022

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.
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cover of Critical Communication: A Memoir

Critical Communication

A Memoir

Vincent Mosco

University of Westminster Press, 2025

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.
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cover of Critical Fandom: Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction

Critical Fandom

Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction

Cara Marta Messina

University of Iowa Press, 2026

Critical Fandom positions fan authors as rhetoricians and fan fiction as an action. Every fan author navigates—implicitly or explicitly—the politics of their fandom, the media they love, their lived experiences, digital technologies, reader expectations, and a larger culture. To better understand critical fans, Cara Marta Messina analyzes Archive of Our Own tagging practices, fan fictions, and interviews from four different fandoms.

Fans of The Legend of Korra celebrate queer relationships while understanding representation is just the first step in the face of systemic homophobia. Game of Thrones fan authors challenge racism and heteronormativity in both the community and the show. In online forums for Black Panther, fans make space for sapphic romances and explore the humanity of Erik Killmonger, ultimately contending with harmful stereotypes of radical Black men. And the Our Flag Means Death fandom demonstrates how a show can flourish when it centers queerness, especially for trans fans. Even in these moments of joy, there’s conflict. Critical Fandom seeks to answer what comes next.

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Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities

Alan Liu

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection.

Contributors: Anne Beaulieu, U of Groningen; Kyle Booten, U of Connecticut; Ann Borda, U of Melbourne; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Toby Burrows, U of Western Australia; Ashley Caranto Morford, Weber State U; Javier Cha, U of Hong Kong; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Arianna Ciula, King’s College London; Maya Dodd, FLAME U, Pune, India; Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, U of London; Allan Gomez, Philly Community Wireless; Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue U; Matthew Hockenberry, Fordham U; Arun Jacob, U of Toronto; Mike Jones, U of Tasmania; Lucie Kolb, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW; Ian M. Miller, St. John’s U, New York; Sylvia K. Miller, Duke U; Sarah Montoya, Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow; Saumyaa Naidu, independent researcher; Sharika Parmar, FLAME U, Pune, India; Kush Patel, Srishti Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru; Miriam Posner, UCLA; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad; Paul Spence, King’s College London; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Deb Verhoeven, U of Alberta; Miguel Vieira, King’s College London; Devren Washington, Philly Community Wireless; Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple U and Philly Community Wireless; Darren Wershler, Concordia U; Grant Wythoff, Princeton U and Philly Community Wireless.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Critique of the Political Economy of the Media: Foundations and Applications

Critique of the Political Economy of the Media

Foundations and Applications

Manfred Knoche

University of Westminster Press, 2025

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.

[more]
cover of Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age

Cultural Citizenship

Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age

Toby Miller

Temple University Press, 2006

What does it mean to be a "citizen" today, in an age of unbridled consumerism, terrorism, militarism, and multinationalism? In this passionate and dazzling book, Toby Miller dares to answer this question with the depth of thought it deserves. Fast-moving and far-ranging, Cultural Citizenship blends fact, theory, observation, and speculation in a way that continually startles and engages the reader. Although he is unabashedly liberal in his politics, Miller is anything but narrow minded. He looks at media coverage of September 11th and the Iraq invasion as well as "infotainment"—such as Food and Weather channels—to see how U.S. TV is serving its citizens as part of "the global commodity chain." Repeatedly revealing the crushing grip of the invisible hand of television, Miller shows us what we have given up in our drive to acquire and to "belong." For far too long, "cultural citizenship" has been a concept invoked without content. With the publication of this book, it has at last been given flesh and substance.
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cover of Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization

Cultural Crowdfunding

Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization

Vincent Rouzé

University of Westminster Press, 2019

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.

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cover of Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City

Cultural Industries in Shanghai

Policy and Planning inside a Global City

Edited by Rong Yueming and Justin O’Connor

Intellect Books, 2018

This volume gathers articles by Chinese scholars dealing with developments in Shanghai’s cultural industries over the past thirty years. Like many cities in China and elsewhere, Shanghai has explicitly stated that fostering the creative economy is its top economic and political priority over the next decade. This book examines, among other aspects of Shanghai’s approach to culture, the effects of this policy focus on the city’s creative growth in economic terms.
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cover of Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era: Industry Perspectives

Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era

Industry Perspectives

Dal Yong Jin

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era explores how histories, industry structures, and politics interact in the platformization of the Korean Wave. Dal Yong Jin argues that while much research centers on the Korean culture takeover and the dominance of Korean products on premier global media platforms, Korean cultural industries also experience reshaping and changing depending on the platforms, often on the global stage. 

Addressing the increasing significance of digital platforms, this work examines the transformative roles of over-the-top streaming services—Netflix, Viki, and V Live—video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, and social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, and the power relations between content producers, information technology sectors, the government, creative laborers, and audiences in the globalization of Korean culture and media. By developing critical cultural industries studies as a new theoretical framework, Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era explores the ever-growing Korean Wave phenomenon with the advent of global digital platforms. 
 
[more]
cover of Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

Cultural Studies 1983

A Theoretical History

Stuart Hall

Duke University Press, 2016

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall's unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall's original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies. Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies' intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.
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cover of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Lawrence Grossberg

Duke University Press, 2010

Lawrence Grossberg is one of the leading figures in cultural studies internationally. In Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, he offers a powerful critique of the present state of cultural studies and, more broadly, of the intellectual left, especially in the Anglo-American academy. He develops a vision for the future of cultural studies as conjunctural analysis, a radically contingent and contextual study of the articulations of lived, discursive, and material contexts. Proposing a compelling analysis of the contemporary political problem space as a struggle over modernity, he suggests the possibility of multiple ways of being modern as an analytic and imaginative frame. He elaborates an ontology of the modern as the potentialities of multiple configurations of temporalities and spatialities, differences, territorialities, and powers, and argues that euro-modernity is a specific geohistorical realization of this complex diagram. Challenging the euro-modern fragmentation of the social formation, he discusses the rigorous conceptual and empirical work that cultural studies must do—including rethinking fundamental concepts such as economy, culture, and politics as well as modernity—to reinvent itself as an effective political intellectual project. This book offers a vision of a contemporary cultural studies that embraces complexity, rigorous interdisciplinary practice and experimental collaborations in an effort to better explain the present in the service of the imagination of other futures and the struggles for social transformation.
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cover of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum

Cultural Studies in the Interregnum

Edited by Robert F. Carley, Anne Donlon, Beenash Jafri, Laura J. Kwak, Eero Laine, SAJ, and Chris Alen Sula

Temple University Press, 2025

The editors and contributors to Cultural Studies in the Interregnum mobilize transnational cultural studies as a tool for politically engaged intellectual critique. Alongside the work of emerging and established scholars and activists, they think through massive cultural shifts and explore the possibilities of the in-between.
Covering queer and feminist studies, critical disability studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, the essays in Cultural Studies in the Interregnum reflect on our shared political pasts and futures. Using examples ranging from media and literature to sex work, policing, and university systems, this exciting volume probes what cultural studies means in moments of social transformation.

Contributors include: Sean Johnson Andrews, C.M. Kaliko Baker, Mary Tuti Baker, James Bliss, Jorge E. Cuéllar, John R. Decker, Brian Dolber, Candace Fujikane, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Chris Hall, Rachel Lim, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anna Karthika, Manu Karuka, Najwa Mayer, Kyle Mays, Andrew Ó Baoill, Yumi Pak, Therí A. Pickens, Sami Schalk, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tia Trafford, and the editors
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cover of Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media

Cultural Sutures

Medicine and Media

Lester D. Friedman, ed.

Duke University Press, 2004

Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources—from news reports to Web sites to tv shows—for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology.

In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.

Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl

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cover of Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture

Culturally Speaking

The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture

Amanda Nell Edgar

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, Critical/Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Association

Recent pieces by NPR, the BBC, and Forbes have called attention to the power of voice—positing that “your voice is the secret to getting hired” and that “voice can accelerate or hold back a career.” While it has become clearer that such things as pitch and intonation can be tied to assumptions about one’s gender, race/ethnicity, and class, studying voice as a socially constructed artifact carries with it unique challenges. In response, Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture presents an innovative approach to studying the spoken voice in media, showing how racial and gendered oppression bubble beneath the surface of American culture’s most recognized speaking voices, spreading invisible messages about which kinds of vocal identities are privileged and which kinds should be silenced.
 
Through her analysis of prominent voices in American culture—including Morgan Freeman, Tina Fey, Barack Obama, Adele, Dave Chappelle, Richard Pryor, and George Lopez—Amanda Nell Edgar argues that voices carry a residue of the particular cultural environments in which they are formed, and that these environments can be traced and analyzed to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of race and gender as rhetorically situated identities—pushing back against the often-unnoticed systems of sound-based discrimination.
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cover of Culture War: Affective Cultural Politics, Tepid Nationalism, and Art Activism

Culture War

Affective Cultural Politics, Tepid Nationalism, and Art Activism

Camilla Møhring Reestorff

Intellect Books, 2017

The culture wars—intertwining art, culture, and politics—have sparked prominent political debates across the globe for many years, but particularly in Europe and America since 2001. Focusing specifically on the experience of Denmark during this period, Culture War aims to analyze and understand the rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe as part of the globalization and mediatization of the modern nation state and the culture war and affective politics arising from it. This culture war provides an example of an affective cultural politics in which institutional structures become entwined with media representations, events, and patterns of belonging.
            Employing a detailed and critically reflective argument covering social media, television, political campaigns, advertising, and “artivism,” Camilla Møhring Reestorff refuses the traditional distinction between the world of visual culture and the political domain, and she provides multiple tools for understanding the dynamics of contemporary affective cultural politics in a highly mediatized environment.
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