Results by title
1488 books match the query 'Media Studies' and 45 start with g
Gadget Consciousness
Collective Thought, Will and Action in the Age of Social MediaJoss Hands
Pluto Press, 2019
Galactic Herencia
Latinos in the Star Wars UniverseChristopher González
University of Arizona Press, 2027
In 1977, George Lucas created a galaxy far, far away that somehow contained no Latinos. Forty-seven years later, Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor speaks unapologetically accented English as he leads a rebel cell against the Empire, Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin anchors Disney’s flagship series, and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron commands X-wing squadrons with a confidence that refuses to apologize for difference. The transformation didn’t happen by accident—it was fought for character by character, film by film, against resistance both corporate and cultural.
In Galactic Herencia, Christopher González uses personal, historical, and critical reflection to trace this long arc from erasure to visibility, examining how Latinx actors bring cultural resonance to roles in a fictional universe that never explicitly acknowledges their heritage—and what it means when so few performers must carry the hopes of so many. The book moves from the painful absences of the original trilogy through the breakthrough moments of Rogue One and The Mandalorian, to the current struggles over authentic representation in an era of franchise expansion and toxic fandom. By centering Latinx perspectives on a globally dominant franchise, Galactic Herencia makes visible the cultural work that representation does—demonstrating that genuine inclusion isn’t about quotas but about empowering stories that affirm our full humanity.
Game
Animals, Video Games, and HumanityTom Tyler
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
A playful reflection on animals and video games, and what each can teach us about the other
Video games conjure new worlds for those who play them, human or otherwise: they’ve been played by cats, orangutans, pigs, and penguins, and they let gamers experience life from the perspective of a pet dog, a predator or a prey animal, or even a pathogen. In Game, author Tom Tyler provides the first sustained consideration of video games and animals and demonstrates how thinking about animals and games together can prompt fresh thinking about both.
Game comprises thirteen short essays, each of which examines a particular video game, franchise, aspect of gameplay, or production in which animals are featured, allowing us to reflect on conventional understandings of humans, animals, and the relationships between them. Tyler contemplates the significance of animals who insert themselves into video games, as protagonists, opponents, and brute resources, but also as ciphers, subjects, and subversive guides to new ways of thinking. These animals encourage us to reconsider how we understand games, contesting established ideas about winning and losing, difficulty settings, accessibility, playing badly, virtuality, vitality and vulnerability, and much more.
Written in a playful style, Game draws from a dizzying array of sources, from children’s television, sitcoms, and regional newspapers to medieval fables, Shakespearean tragedy, and Edwardian comedy; from primatology, entomology, and hunting and fishing manuals to theological tracts and philosophical treatises. By examining video games through the lens of animals and animality, Tyler leads us to a greater humility regarding the nature and status of the human creature, and a greater sensitivity in dealings with other animals.
Games of Empire
Global Capitalism and Video GamesNick Dyer-Witheford
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.
In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street.
Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development.
Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.
Gaming Exhaustion
Reclaiming Play from Late CapitalismRainforest Scully-Blaker
Duke University Press, 2027
Gaming Sports
Gambling and the Sports Media ComplexJason Kido Lopez
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Gaming Sports: Gambling and the Sports Media Complex examines games that are based on sports—like horse race and sports betting, fantasy sports, and March Madness brackets—and explores their relationship to sports and sports media. It seeks to improve common ways of understanding these games and to correct prevalent misconceptions. For example, gaming is often seen to be a supplementary add-on that is essentially corruptive to sports and sports fandom. Gaming Sports challenges this view and explores how gaming and gambling have always been part of commercialized sports leagues, sports media, and sports cultures. Indeed, gaming has an underexplored role in explaining why certain sports rose to popularity, how sports leagues are organized, the way sports media covers sports, and how fans engage with sports. Gaming Sports tracks the development of American sports-based games from colonization to the present to argue that gaming and sports have always influenced and been built upon each other.
Gaming at the Edge
Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer CultureAdrienne Shaw
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter.
In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates.
Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.
Gaming
Essays On Algorithmic CultureAlexander R. Galloway
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions.
Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form.
Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age.
Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.
Gandhi Meets Primetime
Globalization and Nationalism in Indian TelevisionShanti Kumar
University of Illinois Press, 2005
Kumar argues that India's hybrid national identity is manifested in the discourses found in this variety of empirical sources. He deconstructs representations of Mahatma Gandhi as the Father of the Nation on the state-sponsored network Doordarshan and those found on Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV network. The book closely analyzes print advertisements to trace the changing status of the television set as a cultural commodity in postcolonial India and examines publicity brochures, promotional materials and programming schedules of Indian-language networks to outline the role of vernacular media in the discourse of electronic capitalism. The empirical evidence is illuminated by theoretical analyses that combine diverse approaches such as cultural studies, poststructuralism and postcolonial criticism.
Gendered Defenders
Marvel's Heroines in Transmedia SpacesEdited by Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces delivers dynamic and original analyses of how women perform in super heroic spaces. Contributors from a range of disciplinary perspectives—communications, international relations, cultural and media studies, English, history, and public policy—take on Marvel’s representations of women and gender to examine how relations of power are (re)produced, understood, and challenged. Through vivid retellings of character-based scenarios, these essays examine Carol Danvers, Jessica Jones, Ms. Marvel, Shuri, Pepper Potts, Black Widow, and Squirrel Girl across media forms to characterize and critique contemporary understandings of identity, feminism, power, and gender. Collectively, Gendered Defenders challenges notions about female identity while illuminating the multidimensional portrayals that are enabled by the form of speculative fiction. Making explicit the connections between women’s lived experiences and the imagined exploits of superheroines, contributors explore how these pop culture narratives can help us understand real-world gender dynamics and prepare pedagogical, political, and social strategies for dealing with them. Contributors: Bryan J. Carr, Meta G. Carstarphen, Julie A. Davis, Rachel Grant, Annika Hagley, Amanda K. Kerhberg, Gregory P. Perreault, Mildred F. Perreault, CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Maryanne A. Rhett, Stephanie L. Sanders, J. Richard Stevens, Anna C. Turner, Kathleen M. Turner-Ledgerwood, Robert Westerfelhaus
Gendered Transformations
Theory and Practices on Gender and MediaEdited by Tonny Krijnen, Claudia Alvares, and Sofie Van Bauwel
Intellect Books, 2011
Comprising the most current scholarship from leading experts in the fields of gender and media studies, Gendered Transformations offers readers a new foundation from which to reexamine traditional perspectives on gender. Organized into sections concerning representational politics, embodied performance, and social constructions of reality, these essays explore a wide variety of concerns from a similarly wide variety of perspectives, from essentialist to anti-essentialist. A thought-provoking contribution to a number of disparate fields, Gendered Transformations offers a rare interdisciplinary approach to gender that reflects the most recent developments in media theory and methodology.
Gendering the Recession
Media and Culture in an Age of AusterityDiane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
Generations
Vilém Flusser
University of Minnesota Press, 2027
A vision of modern humanity trapped inside the system it has created
Written in the 1960s and unpublished until 2017, Generations is Vilém Flusser’s largest work and the foundation for many of his later theories on media and post-history. In this ambitious study of the Modern Age, Flusser traces a devastating shift in Western civilization that ultimately leads to the modern “apparatus”: the impersonal, cybernetic system of self-programmed objectification that has become our reality.
Flusser presents history as a recurring struggle between generations, with each new generation overturning the values of the former and eventually drifting into a state of existential avoidance. This cycle becomes the basis for a powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. Flusser identifies a critical shift toward self-worship and collective will in humanity’s understanding of progress and divinity during the Renaissance. This shift foregrounded our path toward an automated world driven by apathetic functionaries serving the apparatus and widespread fascist irrationalism, catastrophically realized during the Holocaust.
With surprising relevance to the digital present that gradually empties the world of its grounded reality, Generations offers a striking account of humanity’s relationship to technology, algorithms, and systems of control. Flusser’s concept of the “apparatus” anticipates the modern experience of being shaped by social media, bureaucratic systems, and oppressive technologies. Arguing that contemporary humanity exists in a state of slow existential stagnation rather than dramatic apocalypse, the book asks and answers a pressing question: how did we get here?
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Gentlemen of the Woods
Manhood, Myth, and the American LumberjackWilla Hammitt Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Lumberjacks: the men, the myth, and the making of an American legend
The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly, bearded, wielding his big ax, stands astride the story of the upper Midwest—a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This idea, celebrated in popular culture with songs and folktales, receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in Gentlemen of the Woods, a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history.
Now recalled as heroes of wilderness and masculinity, lumberjacks in their own time were despised as amoral transients. Willa Hammitt Brown shows that nineteenth-century jacks defined their communities of itinerant workers by metrics of manhood that were abhorrent to the residents of the nearby Northwoods boomtowns, valuing risk-taking and skill rather than restraint and control. Reviewing songs, stories, and firsthand accounts from loggers, Brown brings to life the activities and experiences of the lumberjacks as they moved from camp to camp. She contrasts this view with the popular image cultivated by retreating lumber companies that had to sell off utterly barren land. This mythologized image glorified the lumberjack and evoked a kindly, flannel-wearing, naturalist hero.
Along with its portrait of lumberjack life and its analysis of the creation of lumberjack myth, Gentlemen of the Woods offers new insight into the intersections of race and social class in the logging enterprise, considering the actual and perceived roles of outsider lumberjacks and Native inhabitants of the northern forests. Anchored in the dual forces of capitalism and colonization, this lively and compulsively readable account offers a new way to understand a myth and history that has long captured our collective imagination.
Geographies of Digital Exclusion
Data and InequalityMark Graham
Pluto Press, 2021
Today's urban environments are layered with data and algorithms that fundamentally shape how we perceive and move through space. But are our digitally dense environments continuing to amplify inequalities rather than alleviate them? This book looks at the key contours of information inequality, and who, what and where gets left out.
Platforms like Google Maps and Wikipedia have become important gateways to understanding the world, and yet they are characterized by significant gaps and biases, often driven by processes of exclusion. As a result, their digital augmentations tend to be refractions rather than reflections: they highlight only some facets of the world at the expense of others.
This doesn't mean that more equitable futures aren't possible. By outlining the mechanisms through which our digital and material worlds intersect, the authors conclude with a roadmap for what alternative digital geographies might look like.
Geographies of Relation
Diasporas and Borderlands in the AmericasTheresa Delgadillo
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.
German Ways of War
The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War FilmsJaimey Fisher
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Gestures
Vilém Flusser
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it.
These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.
Gestures of Concern
Chris Ingraham
Duke University Press, 2020
Get Real
Crafting Race in the Reality Television IndustryEva Hageman
Duke University Press, 2027
Girlhood and the Plastic Image
Heather Warren-Crow
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
Girls Will Be Boys
Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934Horak, Laura
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association
Long-listed for the 2017 Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.
Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.
Global Cinema Networks
Gorfinkel, Elena
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Global Cities
Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital AgePetro, Patrice
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Global Communication Electric
Business, News and Politics in the World of TelegraphyEdited by M. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl
Campus Verlag, 2013
This book examines the emergence of this global media system between 1860 and 1930 in four sections—"Inter|Nationalisms," "Agents|Actors," "Use|News," and "Space|Time"—that aim to broaden and challenge popular conceptions of telegraphy. In exploring the varied uses of telegraphy, real or imagined, Global Communication Electric expands the notion of the telegraph as a globalizing medium: of connection as well as friction; of political, social, and economic entanglement as well as disentanglement; and of crossing as well as creating distance in space and time.
Global Debates in the Digital Humanities
Domenico Fiormonte
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
A necessary volume of essays working to decolonize the digital humanities
Often conceived of as an all-inclusive “big tent,” digital humanities has in fact been troubled by a lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts and assumptions. This latest collection in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series seeks to address this deficit in the field. Focused on thought and work that has been underappreciated for linguistic, cultural, or geopolitical reasons, contributors showcase alternative histories and perspectives that detail the rise of the digital humanities in the Global South and other “invisible” contexts and explore the implications of a globally diverse digital humanities.
Advancing a vision of the digital humanities as a space where we can reimagine basic questions about our cultural and historical development, this volume challenges the field to undertake innovation and reform.
Contributors: Maria José Afanador-Llach, U de los Andes, Bogotá; Maira E. Álvarez, U of Houston; Purbasha Auddy, Jadavpur U; Diana Barreto Ávila, U of British Columbia; Deepti Bharthur, IT for Change; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Carlton Clark, Kazimieras Simonavičius U, Vilnius; Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Erasmus U, Rotterdam; Gimena del Rio Riande, Institute of Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism; Leonardo Foletto, U of São Paulo; Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch U; Sofia Gavrilova, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography; Andre Goodrich, North-West U; Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change; Aliz Horvath, Eötvös Loránd U; Igor Kim, Russian Academy of Sciences; Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal U; Cédric Leterme, Tricontinental Center; Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Pontificia, U Javeriana, Bogotá; Lev Manovich, City U of New York; Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Ben-Gurion U of the Negev; Maciej Maryl, Polish Academy of Sciences; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore; Boris Orekhov, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Ernesto Priego, U of London; Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, U of Kansas; Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, U of Málaga; Steffen Roth, U of Turku; Dibyadyuti Roy, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur; Maxim Rumyantsev, Siberian Federal U; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources; Melissa Terras, U of Edinburgh; Ernesto Miranda Trigueros, U of the Cloister of Sor Juana; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Tim Unwin, U of London; Lei Zhang, U of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
Global Film Color
The Monopack Revolution at MidcenturySarah Street
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Global Icons
Apertures to the PopularBishnupriya Ghosh
Duke University Press, 2011
Global Masculinities and Manhood
Edited by Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Global Storytelling, vol. 1, no. 1
Journal of Digital and Moving ImagesYing Zhu
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
In this issue
Letter from the Editor Ying Zhu Hong Kong and Social MovementsHong Kong Unraveled: Social Media and the 2019 Protest Movement
Anonymous
Unleashing the Sounds of Silence: Hong Kong’s Story in Troubled Times
Andrea Riemenschnitter
Tragedy of Errors at Warp Speed
Sam Ho
Imagining a City-Based Democracy: Review of The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement by Laikwan Pang, University of Michigan Press, 2020
Enoch Tam
China and the Film Festival
Richard Peña
Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin Jonathan Haynes Collective Memory and the Rhetorical Power of the Historical Fiction Film
Carl Plantinga
From Nations to Worlds: Chris Marker’s Si j’avais quatre dromadaires
Michael Walsh
American Factory and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism
Peter Hitchcock
R.I.P. Soft Power: China’s Story Meets the Reset Button: Review of Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds edited by Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu, Routledge, 2019
Robert A. Kapp
Review: On Epidemics, Epidemiology, and Global Storytelling
Carlos Rojas
Global Storytelling, vol. 1, no. 2
Journal of Digital and Moving ImagesYing Zhu
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
Letter from the Editor - YING ZHU
Research Articles
Consuming the Pastoral Desire: Li Ziqi, Food Vlogging, and the Structure of Feeling in the Era of Microcelebrity - LIANG LIMIN
This Is Not Reality (Ceci n’est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling - PAOLA VOCI
The Networked Storyteller and Her Digital Tale: Film Festivals and Ann Hui’s My Way - GINA MARCHETTI
“Retweet for More”: The Serialization of Porn on the Twitter Alter Community - RUEPERT CAO
Book Reviews
Dazzling Revelations - Review of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand, Duke University Press, 2020 - HARRIET EVANS
Speaking Nations, Edge Ways - Reviews of Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound and Stability by Gerald Sim, Amsterdam University Press, 2020; and Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945–1998) edited by Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, Mary Ainslie, Amsterdam University Press, 2020 - MIN HUI YEO
Film Reviews
Nomadland: An American or Chinese Story? Review of Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao, 2020 - YING ZHU
New from Netflix: Mank, Fincher, and A Hollywood Creation Tale - Review of Mank, directed by David Fincher, 2020 - THOMAS SCHATZ
Superheroes: The Endgame - Review of Superhero Movies - PETER BISKIND
Short Essay
Love and Duty: Translating Films and Teaching Online through a Pandemic - CHRISTOPHER REA
Report
Narrating New Normal: Graduate Student Symposium Report - RUEPERT JIEL DIONISIO CAO, MINOS-ATHANASIOS KARYOTAKIS, MISTURA ADEBUSOLA SALAUDEEN, DONGLI CHEN, & YANJING WINNIE WU
Global Storytelling, vol. 2, no. 1
Journal of Digital and Moving ImagesGuest Editors: Ellen Seiter & Suzanne Scott
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022
Guest Editors
Suzanne Scott and Ellen Seiter
Ellen Seiter. Letter from the Editor.
Research Articles
Paige MacIntosh. Transgressive TV: Euphoria, HBO, and a New Trans Aesthetic
Kelsey J. Cummings. Queer Seriality, Streaming Television, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Jia Tan. Platformized Seriality: Chinese Time-Travel Fantasy from Prime-Time Television to Online Streaming
Jake Pitre. Platform Strategy in a Technopolitical War: The Failure (and Success) of Facebook Watch
Anne Gilbert. Algorithmic Audiences, Serialized Streamers, and the Discontents of Datafication
Oliver Kröener. Then, Now, Forever: Television Wrestling, Seriality, and the Rise of the Cinematic Match during COVID-19
Book Reviews
Briand Gentry. The Serial Will Be Televised: Serial Television’s Revolutionary Potential for Multidisciplinary Analysis of Social Identity. Reviews of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure by Dennis Broe, Wayne State University Press, 2019, and Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television by Maria Sulimma, Edinburgh University Press, 2021
Grace Elizabeth Wilsey. The Patchwork That Makes a Global Streaming Giant. Review of Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution by Ramon Lobato, New York University Press, 2019
Asher Guthertz. The History of the American Comic Book, Revised: Review of Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood by Shawna Kidman, University of California Press, 2019
Film Reviews
Anne Metcalf. Review of Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2020)
Global Technological Change
From Hard Technology to Soft Technology - Second EditionZhouying Jin
Intellect Books, 2011
This updated second edition of Global Technological Change reconsiders how we make and use technology in the twenty-first century. With human-centered "soft technology" driving machine-based "hard technology" in ever more complex ways, Zhouying Jin provides an understanding of the human dimension of technological advancement. Through a theoretical framework that incorporates elements of both Eastern and Western philosophy, she offers insight into the dynamic between the two as it relates to a variety of technological innovation. More relevant than ever, Global Technological Change continues to challenge assumptions about technology and the gap between the developed and developing countries in the twenty-first century.
God in the Machine
Video Games as Spiritual PursuitLiel Leibovitz
Templeton Press, 2014
Yet video games remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond outmoded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this rumor now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philosophical inquiry.
In God in the Machine, author Liel Leibovitz leads a fascinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection all come into play in the video games that some critics so quickly write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, their inherent logic, and their cognitive effects on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, the gameplay is a far more dynamic process that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensations that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engaging game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not to think, but rather to be, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers.
As more and more of us look “screenward,” it is crucial to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with God in the Machine. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years.
Going Viral
Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the WorldSchweitzer, Dahlia
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions.
Looking at everything from I Am Legend to The X Files to World War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others. Going Viral thus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it.
Supplemental Study Materials for "Going Viral": https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzer
Dahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow
Going to War in Iraq
When Citizens and the Press MatterStanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a very different story. Polling data from that critical period shows that the Bush administration’s carefully orchestrated campaign not only failed to raise Republican support for the war but, surprisingly, led Democrats and political independents to increasingly oppose the war at odds with most prominent Democratic leaders. More importantly, the research shows that what constitutes the news matters. People who read the newspaper were more likely to reject the claims coming out of Washington because they were exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers. That was not the case for those who got their news from television. Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy—especially in times of crisis—as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.
Good Vibes Only
Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic LegitimationRobin James
Duke University Press, 2026
Goodbye iSlave
A Manifesto for Digital AbolitionJack Linchuan Qiu
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Focusing on the alliance between Apple and the notorious Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, Jack Linchuan Qiu examines how corporations and governments everywhere collude to build systems of domination, exploitation, and alienation. His interviews, news analysis, and first-hand observation show the circumstances faced by Foxconn workers--circumstances with vivid parallels in the Atlantic slave trade. Ironically, the fanatic consumption of digital media also creates compulsive free labor that constitutes a form of bondage for the user. Arguing as a digital abolitionist, Qiu draws inspiration from transborder activist groups and incidents of grassroots resistance to make a passionate plea aimed at uniting--and liberating--the forgotten workers who make our twenty-first-century lives possible.
Governing Genealogies of International Film Education
Hadi Gharabaghi and Terri Ginsberg
Temple University Press, 2026
The editors of and contributors to Governing Genealogies of International Film Education offer a critical historiographic understanding of governmentalized film education during the Cold War. Chapters examine the production of hygiene and cultural films in Travancore, India during the postcolonial period, and Michigan State University’s documentary collaboration with Iran during the 1970s, among other topics, elucidating cinema’s deployment as a state apparatus and its implications for global cultures, subject positions, and social relations.
Governing Genealogies of International Film Education investigates this distinct modality of cultural production and policy to shed necessary light on the ideological overdetermination of institutionalized film education as well as on audiovisual education as an international academic discipline. The contributors show how governmentalized film education has taught American exceptionalism, hegemony, and colonialism. They also theorize about and provide methodological examples of how film archives and film studies have framed prevailing understandings of cinema’s role in American and world history.
Contributors: Kaveh Askari, Zoë Druick, Bindu Menon Mannil, Wissam Mouawad, and the editors
Governing With the News, Second Edition
The News Media as a Political InstitutionTimothy E. Cook
University of Chicago Press, 2005
"Provocative and often wise. . . . Cook, who has a complex understanding of the relationship between governing and the news, provides a fascinating account of the origins of this complicity."—James Bennet, Washington Monthly
"[Governing with the News] addresses central issues of media impact and power in fresh, illuminating ways. . . . Cook mines a wealth of historical and organizational literature to assert that the news media are a distinct political institution in our democratic system."—Robert Schmuhl, Commonweal
Growing Up With Television
Everyday Learning Among Young AdolescentsJoellen Fisherkeller
Temple University Press, 2002
Guardians of Power
The Myth of the Liberal MediaDavid Edwards and David Cromwell, Foreword by John Pilger
Pluto Press, 2005
"Guardians of Power ought to be required reading in every media college. It is the most important book about journalism I can remember."
- John Pilger
"Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care."
- Noam Chomsky
"Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. [This is] fun as well as enlightening."
- Edward S. Herman
Can a corporate media system be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations?
Can newspapers, including the 'liberal' Guardian and the Independent, tell the truth about catastrophic climate change -- about its roots in mass consumerism and corporate obstructionism -- when they are themselves profit-oriented businesses dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues?
Can the BBC tell the truth about UK government crimes in Iraq when its senior managers are appointed by the government? Has anything fundamentally changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote of the establishment: "They know they can trust us not to be really impartial"?
Why did the British and American mass media fail to challenge even the most obvious government lies on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the invasion in March 2003? Why did the media ignore the claims of UN weapons inspectors that Iraq had been 90-95% "fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1998?
This book answers these questions, and more.
Since July 2001, Media Lens has encouraged thousands of readers to email senior editors and journalists, challenging them to account for their distorted reporting on Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti, East Timor, climate change, Western crimes in Central America, and much more. The responses -- often surprising, sometimes outrageous -- reveal the arrogance, unaccountability and servility to power of even our most respected media.
Guerrilla Marketing
Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in ColombiaAlexander L. Fattal
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Full of rich, unforgettable ethnographic stories, Guerrilla Marketing is a stunning and troubling analysis of the mediation of global conflict.
Gurus and Media
Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the DigitalEdited by Jacob Copeman, Arkotong Longkumer, and Koonal Duggal
University College London, 2023
Illuminating the mediatization of guruship and the guruization of media, this book bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs, and more.
The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of “absent-present” guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste, and Hindutva.
Gurus and Media foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, this book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly.
Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers
How Influencers Reshaped Social MediaAngèle Christin
University of Chicago Press, 2026
An illuminating investigation of the complex work of social media content creators—their lives, conflicts, and controversies.
In this eye-opening book, digital studies scholar Angèle Christin demystifies the content creator economy, explaining its long history and the pitfalls of its professionalization. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with digital creators as varied as vegan YouTubers, dads of Instagram, and self-described drama commentators, Christin shows how individuals enter social media creation, how they make money, and how their online environments shape their content.
Aspiring creators often dream of a better life in social media careers. Yet these dreams soon turn into exhaustion as influencers try to meet the contradictory demands of platforms, brands, and audiences. Over time, Christin shows, creators cluster into three types: hucksters, who work on behalf of brands; entertainers, who chase virality and platform payments; and gurus, who monetize the loyalty of their fans. Platform dynamics push entertainers and gurus to create extreme and incendiary content to maintain audience engagement, while brands and marketers nudge hucksters toward repetitive, staid commercial performances. Concerns about algorithmic manipulation and conflicts between creators further lead to reputation-damaging, harassment-laden scandals. Christin reveals how platform labor repeatedly—and structurally—fosters precarity and inequality, destructive drama, and inflammatory content online.