Results by title

22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 1258 start with m

cover of Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring

Meanings of Maple

An Ethnography of Sugaring

Michael Lange

University of Arkansas Press, 2017

In Meanings of Maple, Michael A. Lange provides a cultural analysis of maple syrup making, known in Vermont as sugaring, to illustrate how maple syrup as both process and product is an aspect of cultural identity.

Readers will go deep into a Vermont sugar bush and its web of plastic tubes, mainline valves, and collection tanks. They will visit sugarhouses crammed with gas evaporators and reverse-osmosis machines. And they will witness encounters between sugar makers and the tourists eager to invest Vermont with mythological fantasies of rural simplicity.

So much more than a commodity study, Meanings of Maple frames a new approach for evaluating the broader implications of iconic foodways, and it will animate conversations in food studies for years to come.
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cover of Meanings of Mobility: Family, Education, and Immigration in the Lives of Latino Youth

Meanings of Mobility

Family, Education, and Immigration in the Lives of Latino Youth

Leah Schmalzbauer

Russell Sage Foundation, 2023

Over the past twenty years, elite colleges and universities enacted policies that reshaped the racial and class composition of their campuses, and over the past decade, Latinos’ college attendance notably increased. While discussions on educational mobility often focus on its perceived benefits – that it will ultimately lead to social and economic mobility – less attention is paid to the process of “making it” and the challenges low-income youth experience when navigating these elite spaces. In Meanings of Mobility, sociologist Leah C. Schmalzbauer explores the experiences of low-income Latino youth attending highly selective, elite colleges.
 
To better understand these experiences, Schmalzbauer draws on interviews with 60 low-income Latino youth who graduated or were set to graduate from Amherst College, one of the most selective private colleges in the United States. The vast majority of these students were the first in their immigrant families to go to college in the U.S. She finds that while most of the students believed attending Amherst provided them with previously unimaginable opportunities, adjusting to life on campus came with significant challenges. Many of the students Schmalzbauer spoke with had difficulties adapting to the cultural norms at Amherst as well as with relating to their non-Latino, non-low-income peers. The challenges these students faced were not limited to life on campus. As they attempted to adapt to Amherst, many felt distanced from the family and friends they left behind who could not understand the new challenges they faced.
 
The students credit their elite education for access to extraordinary educational and employment opportunities. However, their experiences while in college and afterward reveal that the relationship between educational and social mobility is much more complicated and less secure than popular conversations about the “American Dream” suggest. Many students found that their educational attainment was not enough to erase the core challenges of growing up in a marginalized immigrant family: many were still poor, faced racism, and those who were undocumented or had undocumented family members still feared deportation.
 
Schmalzbeauer suggests ways elite colleges can better support low-income Latino students and lower the emotional price of educational mobility, including the creation of immigration offices on campus to provide programming and support for undocumented students and their families. She recommends educating staff to better understand the centrality of family for these students and the challenges they face, as well as educating more privileged students about inequality and the life experiences of their marginalized peers.
 
Meanings of Mobility provides compelling insights into the difficulties faced by low-income Latinos pursuing educational and social mobility in America’s elite institutions.
 
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cover of Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century

Measuring America

How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century

Andrew L. Yarrow

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

The United States has always fancied itself a nation apart—"exceptional" in its values, traditions, and way of life. For most of the country's history, ideas about what made America distinctive generally were framed in terms of a liberal idealism rooted in the thought of John Locke and articulated by Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders. While some commentators also observed that the United States was a land of plenty, it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that material abundance emerged as the principal standard of American “greatness,” as measured by a host of new economic indicators.

Beginning in earnest in the wake of World War II, opinion-shapers in politics, business, academia, the media, the schools, and public diplomacy gloried in the nation's booming economy. Where “plenty” had once been a largely abstract concept, it was now quantifiable, thanks to new national income accounting and other economic data collection and analysis techniques. One could tally up production and consumption of an ever-expanding cornucopia of goods and services that made up the gross national product (GNP), the king of postwar statistics. American preeminence and American identity were increasingly linked with this measurable prosperity, presented in the language of a newly influential economics profession. 

In Measuring America, Andrew L. Yarrow explores this history, telling two parallel, interlocking stories—of how economic ideas came to have vastly greater influence on American culture after World War II, and how those ideas dovetailed with a growing belief that the meaning and value of the United States resided in its material output. How and why this new way of “measuring America” developed, how it was expressed, and what it has meant and means for Americans today are the subject of this well-researched and insightful book.

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cover of Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth

Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth

Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A collection of twenty-three studies that explore the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility.

Economic research is increasingly focused on inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes. One aspect of inequality is mobility: are individuals locked into their respective places in this distribution? To what extent do circumstances change, either over the lifecycle or across generations? Research not only measures inequality and mobility, but also analyzes the historical, economic, and social determinants of these outcomes and the effect of public policies. This volume explores the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The collection of twenty-three studies is divided into five sections. The first examines observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in the distribution of earnings and in other factors that contribute to it. The next examines wealth inequality, including a substantial discussion of the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that underlie it. The next section considers the impact of various policy interventions that are directed at reducing inequality. The final section addresses the challenges of combining household-level data, potentially from multiple sources such as surveys and administrative records, and aggregate data to study inequality, and explores ways to make survey data more comparable with national income accounts data.  
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cover of Measuring Mamma's Milk: Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy

Measuring Mamma's Milk

Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy

Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker

University of Michigan Press, 2000

In Italy as in other Western societies, the medicalization of basic biological functions contributes to the loss of personal confidence in the care of the body. Measuring Mamma's Milk analyzes the medicalization of maternity through a study of breastfeeding practices over a century of changes in socioeconomic organization, family life, and health beliefs. During the pivotal interwar period in Italy, fascism changed the relationship between the state and the public and greatly tightened the state's ties with medicine and science. "Rationalized" breastfeeding was at the heart of programs to reduce infant mortality rates in order to increase the size and "quality" of the population. Highly regimented feeding schedules, still practiced today, came to represent both an eternal, natural function and the conquest of fatal maternal ignorance by modern science. They also had important consequences for fertility and for maternal and child health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Elizabeth Whitaker shows how fascism went beneath the surface to have a lasting impact on cultural beliefs and behaviors. Measuring Mamma's Milk will appeal to readers interested in Italy, fascism, and the care of young children as well as to scholars in medical and cultural anthropology, European history, history of medicine, and women's studies. Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University. She is the recipient of two Fulbright grants, the second of which sent her to the University of Bologna as a Senior Scholar in 1998-99. She is currently an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C.
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cover of Measuring the Flow of Time: The Works of James A. Ford, 1935-1941

Measuring the Flow of Time

The Works of James A. Ford, 1935-1941

James A. Ford, edited by R. Lee Lyman and Michael J. O'Brien

University of Alabama Press, 1999

This collection of Ford's works focuses on the development of ceramic chronology—a key tool in Americanist archaeology.

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cover of Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era

Meat Makes People Powerful

A Global History of the Modern Era

Wilson J. Warren

University of Iowa Press, 2018

From large-scale cattle farming to water pollution, meat— more than any other food—has had an enormous impact on our environment. Historically, Americans have been among the most avid meat-eaters in the world, but long before that meat was not even considered a key ingredient in most civilizations’ diets. Labor historian Wilson Warren, who has studied the meat industry for more than a decade, provides this global history of meat to help us understand how it entered the daily diet, and at what costs and benefits to society.

Spanning from the nineteenth century to current and future trends, Warren walks us through the economic theory of food, the discovery of protein, the Japanese eugenics debate around meat, and the environmental impact of livestock, among other topics. Through his comprehensive, multifaceted research, he provides readers with the political, economic, social, and cultural factors behind meat consumption over the last two centuries. With a special focus on East Asia, Meat Makes People Powerful reveals how national governments regulated and oversaw meat production, helping transform virtually vegetarian cultures into major meat consumers at record speed.

As more and more Americans pay attention to the sources of the meat they consume, Warren’s compelling study will help them not only better understand the industry, but also make more informed personal choices. Providing an international perspective that will appeal to scholars and nutritionists alike, this timely examination will forever change the way you see the food on your plate.

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cover of Meat and the Birth of Rome: Zooarchaeology, Foodways, and Religious Rituals

Meat and the Birth of Rome

Zooarchaeology, Foodways, and Religious Rituals

Victoria C. Moses

University of Alabama Press, 2026

Meat and the Birth of Rome explores faunal remains from archaeological sites dating to the early Iron Age through early Republican period in Rome and its environs and challenges a prevailing view of Rome’s exceptionalism. Victoria C. Moses tempers the myth by illuminating the roles of meat production, distribution, and consumption and ritual sacrifice in the social hierarchy, economy, and religious practices as Rome grew. During the transformative period around the eighth century BCE, Romans conserved older foodways and their diverse ritual practices. These findings within the broader zooarchaeological data from peninsular Italy show that, despite Rome’s later success, it shared many early characteristics with its neighbors.

This compelling narrative adds to the current archaeological conversations and research on the history of the eternal city.

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cover of Meat!: A Transnational Analysis

Meat!

A Transnational Analysis

Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism.

Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson
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cover of Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse

Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse

Paula Young Lee

University of New Hampshire Press, 2008

Over the course of the nineteenth century, factory slaughterhouses replaced the hand-slaughter of livestock by individual butchers, who often performed this task in back rooms, letting blood run through streets. A wholly modern invention, the centralized municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to the public's increasing lack of tolerance for "dirty" butchering practices, corresponding to changing norms of social hygiene and fear of meat-borne disease. The slaughterhouse, in Europe and the Americas, rationalized animal slaughter according to capitalist imperatives. What is lost and what is gained when meat becomes a commodity? What do the sites of animal slaughter reveal about our relationship to animals and nature? Essays by the best international scholars come together in this cutting-edge interdisciplinary volume to examine the cultural significance of the slaughterhouse and its impact on modernity.

Contributors include: Dorothee Brantz, Kyri Claflin, Jared Day, Roger Horowitz, Lindgren Johnson, Ian MacLachlan, Christopher Otter, Dominic Pacyga, Richard Perren, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Sydney Watts.
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cover of Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies

Mechademia 5

Fanthropologies

Frenchy Lunning

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Passionate fans of anime and manga, known in Japan as otaku and active around the world, play a significant role in the creation and interpretation of this pervasive popular culture. Routinely appropriating and remixing favorite characters, narratives, imagery, and settings, otaku take control of the anime characters they consume.
 
Fanthropologies-the fifth volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga-focuses on fans, fan activities, and the otaku phenomenon. The zones of activity discussed in these essays range from fan-subs (fan-subtitled versions of anime and manga) and copyright issues to gender and nationality in fandom, dolls, and other forms of consumption that fandom offers. Individual pieces include a remarkable photo essay on the emerging art of cosplay photography; an original manga about an obsessive doll-fan; and a tour of Akihabara, Tokyo's discount electronics shopping district, by a scholar disguised as a fuzzy animal.
 
Contributors: Madeline Ashby; Jodie Beck, McGill U; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Naitô Chizuko, Otsuma U; Ian Condry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Martha Cornog; Kathryn Dunlap, U of Central Florida; Ôtsuka Eiji, Kobe Design U; Gerald Figal, Vanderbilt U; Patrick W. Galbraith, U of Tokyo; Marc Hairston, U of Texas at Dallas; Marilyn Ivy, Columbia U; Koichi Iwabuchi, Waseda U; Paul Jackson; Amamiya Karin; Fan-Yi Lam; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Paul M. Malone, U of Waterloo; Anne McKnight, U of Southern California; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Kerin Ogg; Timothy Perper; Eron Rauch; Brian Ruh, Indiana U; Nathan Shockey, Columbia U; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U; Jin C. Tomshine, U of California, San Francisco; Carissa Wolf, North Dakota State U.
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cover of Medea’s Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills

Medea’s Daughters

Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills

Jennifer Jones

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

In Medea's Daughters, Jennifer Jones explores the legal, cultural, and dramatic representations of six accused murderesses to look at how English-speaking society responded to and controlled anxiety over female transgressions. The woman who kills—in particular, the woman who kills a member of her own family—has not only broken the law, she has also violated gender expectations. Jones argues that dramatic representations of criminal women, especially women who kill, proliferate during times of heightened feminist activity and that theatrical narratives, as evidenced in plays, television, and film, serve to contain women and deflect attention away from issues of women’s systematic repression.

Medea’s Daughters focuses on six women (of whom Lizzie Borden, Susan Smith, and Louise Woodward are the best known) whose murder trials caught the attention of their respective cultures. This broad spectrum allows an examination of how women’s legal status has evolved over five centuries.

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cover of Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis

Media Amnesia

Rewriting the Economic Crisis

Laura Basu

Pluto Press, 2018

One of the major questions confronting us in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the Brexit vote, and the rise of populism around the world, is what role the media has played in shaping our current political moment. This book offers an unprecedented dive into that question, reaching back more than a decade to show the stance of the media toward the 2008 financial crash, the recession that followed, austerity in the UK, the Eurozone crisis, and more. Throughout, we see—with damning clarity—that even as capitalism is in crisis, the media remains devoted to a narrative of a swollen public sector, welfare scams, and immigration threats. What does this mean for those who are committed to solving our manifest economic and social problems? How can we use what we know about the workings of the media to break through their filter and force progress? The insights in this book are the first step.
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cover of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Media Backends

Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Edited by Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander de Ridder

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems

Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India.

A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. 

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

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cover of Media Constrained by Context: International Assistance and Democratic Media Transition in the Western Balkans

Media Constrained by Context

International Assistance and Democratic Media Transition in the Western Balkans

Kristina Irion

Central European University Press, 2018

This books draws a comparative balance of twenty years' international media assistance in the five countries of the Western Balkans. The central question was what happens to imported models when they are transposed onto the newly evolving media systems of transitional societies. Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia undertook a range of media reforms to conform with accession requirements of the European Union and the standards of the Council of Europe, among others. The essays explore the nexus between the democratic transformation of the media and international media assistance. The cross-national analysis concludes that the effects of international assistance are highly constrained by the local context. From today's vantage point it becomes obvious, that scaling media assistance does not necessarily improve outcomes. The experiences in the region suggest that imported solutions have not been very cognitive in all aspects of local conditions but international strategies tent to be rather schematic and lacked strategic approaches to promote media policy stability, credible media reform and implementation. The book offers valuable insights into the nature and effects of media assistance and the strategies deployed by international aid agencies, local political forces, media professionals, civil society organizations and other actors.
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cover of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures

Media Crossroads

Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures

Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

The contributors to Media Crossroads examine space and place in media as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, class, and ability. Considering a wide range of film, television, video games, and other media, the authors show how spaces—from the large and fantastical to the intimate and virtual—are shaped by the social interactions and intersections staged within them. The highly teachable essays include analyses of media representations of urban life and gentrification, the ways video games allow users to adopt an experiential understanding of space, the intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces, and how style and aesthetics can influence intersectional thinking. Whether interrogating the construction of Portland as a white utopia in Portlandia or the link between queerness and the spatial design and gaming mechanics in the Legend of Zelda video game series, the contributors deepen understanding of screen cultures in ways that redefine conversations around space studies in film and media.

Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desirée J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik
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cover of Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences

Media Culture in Transnational Asia

Convergences and Divergences

Hyesu Park

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world’s population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book’s contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian sociopolitical and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.


 
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cover of Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere

Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s

Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere

Edited by Maya Vinokour

Amherst College Press, 2025

Examining Russian-language media from the “long 1990s”—the period beginning with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”) and ending with the election of President Vladimir Putin—Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s shows how post-Soviet civil society emerged simultaneously with the explosion of new media, especially a newly liberated television and internet. A brief and contested period of media independence ensued as explosive creativity collided with rank commercialism, journalistic integrity with burgeoning political ambitions, and fringe with mainstream. By the late 1990s, however, the media landscape had succumbed to economic and political exploitation. The causes and nature of this shift, which set the stage for Putin’s crackdown on independent media after 2000—as well as Russia’s slide into aggressive authoritarianism—are embedded in the era’s media artifacts.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, this edited collection addresses the mutual influence among disparate spheres of public life that enabled the media “Wild West” of the first post-Soviet decade. As a joint platform, the volume and the associated Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s present the decade’s media cultures in a manner that reflects their historical interconnectedness and relationship to the global present.

Edited by Maya Vinokour with contributions from Bradley Gorski, Courtney Doucette, Fabrizio Fenghi, Rita Safariants, Daniil Leiderman, Thomas Keenan, and Pavel Khazanov.

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cover of Media Freedom and Pluralism: Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe

Media Freedom and Pluralism

Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe

Beata Klimkiewicz

Central European University Press, 2010

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.
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cover of Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

Media Freedom

The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

Richard Barbrook

Pluto Press, 1995

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cover of Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production

Media Heterotopias

Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production

Jean Hye Chung

Duke University Press, 2018

In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.
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cover of Media Hot and Cold

Media Hot and Cold

Nicole Starosielski

Duke University Press, 2021

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Media Imaginaries: A Critical Playbook

Media Imaginaries

A Critical Playbook

Edited by Annette Hill, Joke Hermes, and Simon Dawes

Intellect Books, 2027

How does media shape ways of being in the world? This collection explores media imaginaries as a tool for reflection. 

Media imaginaries are shapeshifters. The term refers to the cultural and infrastructural work of texts and artifacts, audience engagement and experiences, and commercial and civic organizations. The authors in this volume empirically and conceptually examine media imaginaries in all their diversity, providing space for dialogue on themes of political-social imaginaries, cultural-technological imaginaries, and reflecting imaginaries.

The volume explores how media affects both real and imagined experiences, examining the interplay of media practice, culture, and imagination across past, present, and future contexts. It highlights the impact of AI-enabled content and media ecologies on everyday life globally, offering fresh insights for media and cultural studies. 

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cover of Media Localism: The Policies of Place

Media Localism

The Policies of Place

Christopher Ali

University of Illinois Press, 2017

We live in a boosterish era that exhorts us to play local and buy local. But what does it mean to support local media? How should we define local media in the first place? Christopher Ali delves into our ideas about localism and their far-reaching repercussions for the discourse of federal media policy and regulation. His critique focuses on the new interest in localism among regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As he shows, the many different and often contradictory meanings of localism complicate efforts to study local voices. At the same time, market factors and regulators' unwillingness to critically examine local media blunt challenges to the status quo. Ali argues that reconciling the places where we live with the spaces we inhabit will point regulators toward effective policies that strengthens local media. That new approach will again elevate local media to its rightful place as a vital part of the public good.
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cover of Media Making as Peacemaking: Israel/Palestine

Media Making as Peacemaking

Israel/Palestine

Yuval Katz

Rutgers University Press, 2026

The horrific events of October 7 and the devastating war in Gaza have brought Israel/Palestine to the headlines once again. We have seen this all play out before: another ambitious peace plan, which secured a ceasefire, is imagined as the dawn of a new era of peace in the Middle East. But is it? Critiquing traditional state-centered approaches to peace, which usually highlight the work of diplomats and politicians, and which historically failed miserably in Israel/Palestine, Media Making as Peacemaking shifts our attention to the experiences of ordinary people. Investigating the idea of media encounters, this book shows how the collaboration of Palestinian and Jewish media practitioners and the popular texts they create together in television dramas, digital activism and mainstream journalism offer a new and exciting way to think about peace—a peace which does not maintain a repressive status quo, but seeks to deliver equality and justice to all people, Palestinians and Jews, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

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cover of Media Marathon: A Twentieth-Century Memoir

Media Marathon

A Twentieth-Century Memoir

Erik Barnouw

Duke University Press, 1996

One of the most respected and honored historians of the media, Erik Barnouw has been called a major national resource by The Nation. Norman Corwin dubbed him America’s Gibbon. He is the writer, says critic John Leonard, “from whom the rest of us steal instead of doing our research.” Media history is his subject, and, as this memoir makes so delightfully clear, it has also been Erik Barnouw’s life. Barnouw’s story, told with wit and charm in Media Marathon, is the story of American culture adjusting to the twentieth century, of new media repeatedly displacing the old in a century-long competitive upheaval.
Born in Holland in 1908 and an immigrant to the United States at the age of eleven, Barnouw spent his early working years in an astounding array of occupations—actor and stage manager, lyricist, translator, director, producer, teacher, and union official. This varied background, described here in rich detail, informs his writings about the world in which he moved, specifically regarding the shifting channels of twentieth-century mass communication. Telling his story through a series of personal profiles of the famous, the infamous, and the little known but powerfully influential, Barnouw recounts the events that took him from the vaudeville stage to the Library of Congress, where he became the first chief of its newly formed Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recording Sound Division. Thornton Wilder, Pearl S. Buck, Joshua Logan, Dwight Eisenhower, Lynn Fontanne, Tallulah Bankhead, and Akira Iwasaki—these are among the featured characters in the drama of American media, rendered here in striking close-ups.
From The Hague to retirement in Vermont, with stops in India, Japan, and Russia, Barnouw’s remarkable story gives readers the chance to relive crucial chapters of modern media history—and to relive them with one of that history’s masters as an incomparable guide. A book for those interested in the “mass media,” its evolution, and role in society, Media Marathon will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers alike.
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cover of Media Materialities: Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning

Media Materialities

Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning

Edited by Iain A. Taylor and Oliver Carter

Intellect Books, 2025

An analysis of the interrelationship between media forms, format, and meaning.

Media Materialities brings together a team of scholars to analyze the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Deploying a number of different qualitative methodologies, the contributors address three overarching concepts: form, format, and ephemeral meaning. They investigate a range of media artifacts, such as 8mm film, board game maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios, and Twitter. Their goal is to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of media, culture, and society.
 
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cover of Media Pasts and Futures: Critical Reflections on 'Power Without Responsibility'

Media Pasts and Futures

Critical Reflections on 'Power Without Responsibility'

Edited by Des Freedman and Michael Klontzas

University of Westminster Press, 2025

This collection of short essays from leading media scholars reflects on critical issues of media history, power, ownership, influence and impact. The book uses the acclaimed media title Power Without Responsibility (PWR) as a calling card, a cue to reflect on the limitations of the media in different countries and to advocate solutions aimed at stimulating more democratic forms of communications.Organised in five sections, contributions in this book identify the relevance of PWR and then pick out and develop its core themes. The first section provides both a reminder of PWR’s significance to media history and analysis and then explores its conclusions in relation to media systems in places including Europe, South and East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The second section takes up the argument that ‘market censorship’ impoverishes the media while the third explores the book’s lessons for contemporary media reform. The fourth section explores the contribution of public service broadcasting and its relevance for future communications systems. The fifth section considers PWR’s analysis of radical journalism in relation to both historical and contemporary initiatives while the concluding section features two original essays by the authors of PWR, James Curran and Jean Seaton, reflecting on their book 43 years and nine editions after it was first published.
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cover of Media Pluralism and Online News: The Consequences of Automated Curation for Society

Media Pluralism and Online News

The Consequences of Automated Curation for Society

Tim Dwyer and Derek Wilding

Intellect Books, 2023

An exploration of the future of media pluralism policies for online news.

In the transition to a media landscape increasingly dominated by broadband internet distribution and the dominance of US-centric new media behemoths Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, Media Pluralism and Online News investigates measures that can be taken to reduce this ongoing march of concentration and the attenuation of media voices. The authors argue that there is an urgent need for revitalized thinking for a media policy agenda to deal with the trend of concentrated media power, which is an ongoing global risk to public interest journalism. Securing the public interest in a vibrant and sustainable news media sector will require that merger decisions assess whether there is a reduction in diversity, calling for a new public interest test and a more expansive policy focus than in the past.
 
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Media Primitivism

Technological Art in Africa

Delinda Collier

Duke University Press, 2020

In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.
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cover of Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future

Media Reform and the Climate Emergency

Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future

David J. Park

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Award-winning author David J. Park argues that the battle against global warming is also a fight for media reform. With his new book Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future, he critically examines how advertising, the digital infrastructure, and journalism advance the climate emergency and lays out a path of reform to help create a more sustainable world. The production and consumption of goods and services within consumer societies lead to unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, and Park finds that much of mass communication is either dependent upon or closely tied to the success of this social organization. As a result, he suggests successful environmental movements creatively dismantle or reform institutional infrastructures that extend the planetary global warming crisis and the unsustainable consumption of nature.

Communication policies and industries are part of these infrastructures. Advertising evolved to propel a new consumer society that would encourage the over-consumption of goods and services with harmful and unsustainable production processes. Our digital infrastructure is largely premised upon the surveillance of online consumer habits and preferences, with the goal to create individualized messages to more effectively persuade people to increase their consumption habits. Much of commercial journalism resists the drastic and immediate regulatory changes necessary to address the worst aspects of this crisis. This is because so many of the needed changes challenge the media’s source of income, their libertarian philosophy, and the general status quo, which is preferred by elites. Bound to foster conversations among scholars, activists, politicians, and those who work in the communication industries, this book rethinks mass communication and highlights how immediate reform is needed in the struggle for a sustainable planet.

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Media Rurality

Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney, editors

Duke University Press, 2026

Media Rurality investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. From the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural territories are highly mediated, technologized spaces profoundly enmeshed with global capitalism and colonialism. Approaching the study of rurality through a materialist lens that foregrounds infrastructure, this collection shows how rural spaces often bear the environmental brunt of capitalist development while being relegated to the economic and cultural periphery.

Contributors. Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B. Kinder, Burç Köstem, Cindy Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh
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Media Theory in Japan

Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

Providing an overview of Japanese media theory from the 1910s to the present, this volume introduces English-language readers to Japan's rich body of theoretical and conceptual work on media for the first time. The essays address a wide range of topics, including the work of foundational Japanese thinkers; Japanese theories of mediation and the philosophy of media; the connections between early Japanese television and consumer culture; and architecture's intersection with communications theory. Tracing the theoretical frameworks and paradigms that stem from Japan's media ecology, the contributors decenter Eurocentric media theory and demonstrate the value of the Japanese context to reassessing the parameters and definition of media theory itself. Taken together, these interdisciplinary essays expand media theory to encompass philosophy, feminist critique, literary theory, marketing discourse, and art; provide a counterbalance to the persisting universalist impulse of media studies; and emphasize the need to consider media theory situationally.
 
Contributors. Yuriko Furuhata, Aaron Gerow, Mark Hansen, Marilyn Ivy, Takeshi Kadobayashi, Keisuke Kitano, Akihiro Kitada, Thomas Looser, Anne McKnight, Ryoko Misono, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Miryam Sas, Fabian Schäfer, Marc Steinberg, Tomiko Yoda, Alexander Zahlten
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Media Travels

Toward an Atlas of Global Media

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

Amherst College Press, 2025

Media Travels: Toward An Atlas of Global Media fills a significant gap in global media scholarship by offering short, readable articles covering different types of media from around the world. Through careful and informed analysis, these eleven accessibly written chapters illustrate the particularities of different media practices and situate them within social, historical, and geographical contexts. Examples range from South African video games to Korean TV series popular in Latin America to Indigenous film and media from the US and Canada.

Media studies courses, particularly introductory courses, are often narrowly focused on US and Western European canons. Instructors for introductory media studies courses wishing to expand the offerings in their curricula will find in these essays new ways of approaching foundational concepts and issues in the field, including globalization, social difference, and diverse media cultures. Scholars wishing to expand their research into specific media forms or representational issues can also turn to these case studies for approaches from beyond the US. By including a variety of media and several geographical areas, the collection introduces readers to the formal, technological, and cultural diversity of global media studies.

Edited by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez with contributions from Anthony Adah and Añulika Agina, Maria Corrigan, Benjamin Han, Anna Shah Hoque, Meryem Kamil, Angelica Marie Lawson, Lilia Adriana Perez Limon, Sonia Robles, Kuhu Tanvir, David Tenorio, and Rachel van der Merwe.

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Media and Dependency in South Africa

A Case Study of the Press and the Ciskei “Homeland”

Les Switzer

Ohio University Press, 1985

Switzer looks at how South Africa’s communications industry, the largest and most powerful on the continent, promotes dependency among the subject African populations. This study of the Ciskei “Homeland”, which has long been a fountainhead of African nationalism and a zone of conflict between blacks and whites, focuses on the privately owned, commercial press and its role in helping to frame a consensus in support of the political, economic and ideological values of the ruling alliance. The conceptual framework employed differs from that normally used in communications research. Further, Switzer offers an alternative methodology which attempts to show how researchers can conceptualize the purposes behind news, entertainment and advertising and to measure the extent to which mediated reality does and does not conform to the lives of the people. This work, then, is of interest to workers in communications as well as to those who are concerned with development in South Africa and, indeed, in the entire non-Western world.
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Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Consequences of global convergence

Richard Collins

Intellect Books, 1995

Chapters focus on technological change and its impact on cultural and political identities, the role of the cultural industries in the 'New Economy' and the impact of European integration on national institutions - public service broadcasting in particular.

Because technological change in broadcasting has enabled us to open up media markets, the shape of media and of society has become more internationally-oriented. Indeed, modern international media has bought into question the very legitimacy of national communities and ideologies. And this is a phenomenon whose greatest impact has been in Europe.

These studies address the future of public service broadcasting and the power of national regulators to shape trans-national media relationships. The author takes an empirical approach to analysis of these issues, exploring media and communication studies very much as a social science.
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Media and Management

Rutvica Andrijasevic

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

An essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor

This book argues that management is enabled by media forms, just as media gives life to management. Media technologies central to management have included the stopwatch, the punch card, the calculator, and the camera, while management theories are taught in printed and virtual textbooks and online through TED talks. In each stage of the evolving relationship between workers and employers, management innovations are learned through media, with media formats producing fresh opportunities for management.

Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic case studies, this book approaches key instances of the industrial and service economy—the legacy of Toyotism in today’s software industry, labor mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food-delivery platforms in China—to push media and management studies in new directions. Media and Management offers a provocative insight on the future of labor and media that inevitably cross geographical boundaries.

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cover of Media and Values: Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape

Media and Values

Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape

David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig and Sarah Ventress

Intellect Books, 2007

Media and Values investigates the moral performance of the media. Based on an exhaustive number of focus groups, surveys, and interviews with senior media staffers in the United Kingdom and Europe, this book charts the changing status of the media as a moral voice. The authors argue that television has lost the authority to espouse a single vision of the proper way to live, and instead reflects the norms of a variety of social groups.  This groundbreaking volume addresses the lack of moral certainty reflected both in television programs and their audiences.
 
“There are great riches here: from the interviews with senior media executives . . . to the discussion of popular television culture's celebration of celebrity.”—John Lloyd, Prospect
 
“This profoundly original and learned book creatively illuminates citizens’ moral reasoning about the media, culture, and government. A tour de force of nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, Media & Values offers wide-ranging insights into the responsibilities of the communication industry, the justifications and consequences of telecoms regulation—and the nature of the good society itself.”—Robert M. Entman, J. B. and M. C. Shapiro Professor of Media & Public Affairs, George Washington University
 
“This is a very important book—a ‘must read.’ The intellectual scope is astonishing: the problem it addresses is quite crucial—namely the moral incoherence of the contemporary world and the way that this shows up in empirical research into individual attitudes/opinions/tastes/judgements. It is clearly a cumulative critical reassessment of the implications of research going back to the sixties. It’s original, powerful, thoughtful and spot-on as a diagnosis of the times and the very real issues we confront today. A major piece of work.”—Paddy Scannell, Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan
 
 
 
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Media and the Affective Life of Slavery

Allison Page

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

How media shapes our actions and feelings about race
 

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism.

From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. 

Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists. 

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Media in Europe Today

Edited by Josef Trappel, Werner A. Meier, Leen d’Haenens, Jeanette Steemers, and Barbara Thomass for the Euromedia Research Group

Intellect Books, 2011

Media in Europe Today provides a comprehensive overview of European media in its current state of transformation. Through a focus on specific European media sectors, it assesses the impact of new technologies across industries and addresses a wide range of practices, strategies, and challenges facing European media today. The Euromedia Research Group has more than twenty years of experience in the observation of trends affecting media today, and this book marks the strong continuation of that long tradition.

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cover of Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State

Media in New Turkey

The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State

Bilge Yesil

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In Media in New Turkey, Bilge Yesil unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. Yesil focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. Her analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and she uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships.
 
Yesil confronts essential questions regarding: the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech.
 
Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, Yesil provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.
 
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cover of Media in the Enlarged Europe: Politics, Policy and Industry

Media in the Enlarged Europe

Politics, Policy and Industry

Edited by Alec Charles

Intellect Books, 2009

Looking beyond national and cultural boundaries, Media in the Enlarged Europe focuses on the complexity and instability of the European Union and its relationship with the mass media. Contributors to this volume address the continuing growth and expansion of the European Union, relationships between old and new Europe, and social and political developments in the former communist countries. Media in the Enlarged Europe presents snapshots of media politics, policies, industries, and cultures in the European Union as a whole, while incorporating case studies of the history and current state of mass media in specific nations. This will be an essential volume for students and experts in media studies, international relations, and international studies.

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cover of Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Media, Culture, and Decolonization

Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.

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Media, Democracy and European Culture

Edited by Ib Bondebjerg and Peter Madsen

Intellect Books, 2008

Media, Democracy and European Culture presents up-to-date and cutting-edge research on the political and cultural dimension of democracy in Europe and its representation in the media.  This interdisciplinary volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent European scholars in media, political science, sociology, cultural studies and law. The contributors explore issues of globalization, the role of the media and communication policy to order to provide a comparative country-to-country look at how the media constructs European identity. This timely and forward-looking collection will be of interest to scholars of media, international and cultural studies.

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Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia

Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, eds.

Duke University Press, 2012

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media.

Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived.

Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

 

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Media, Geopolitics, and Power

A View from the Global South

Herman Wasserman

University of Illinois Press, 2018

The end of apartheid brought South Africa into the global media environment. Outside companies invested in the nation's newspapers while South African conglomerates pursued lucrative tech ventures and communication markets around the world. Many observers viewed the rapid development of South African media as a roadmap from authoritarianism to global modernity.

Herman Wasserman analyzes the debates surrounding South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics. His exploration reveals how South African disputes regarding access to, and representation in, the media reflect the domination and inequality in the global communication sphere. Optimists see post-apartheid media as providing a vital space that encourages exchanges of opinion in a young democracy. Critics argue the public sphere mirrors South Africa's past divisions and privileges the viewpoints of the elite. Wasserman delves into the ways these simplistic narratives obscure the country's internal tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes even as he charts the diverse nature of South African entry into the global arena.

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cover of Media, Markets and Public Spheres: European Media at the Crossroads

Media, Markets and Public Spheres

European Media at the Crossroads

Edited by Jostein Gripsrud and Lennart Weibull

Intellect Books, 2010

Using a sample of European newspapers and their TV listings as a stepping stone, Media, Markets and Public Spheres presents an overview of changes in European public spheres over the last fifty years. With in-depth analyses of structural changes in press and broadcasting, changing relations between media, and changes in media policies, this book explores how and why the media decisively influence most aspects of society. Media, Markets and Public Spheres will be useful to students in media and communication studies and European studies, as well as for those studying sociology and political science.

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Media, Monarchy and Power

Neil Blain and Hugh O'Donnell

Intellect Books, 2013

Is obsession with the Royal Family in Britain a fact of culture or an illusion of media culture? What interest do the European media display in their royal families? Does twenty-first century monarchy remain a political and ideological force - or is it just an economic commodity? Media, Monarchy and Power provides a radical insight into the cultural and political functioning of royalty in five countries. Blain and O'Donnell examine the bonds between monarchies and their 'subjects' or 'citizens', and the relationships between royal families, the media, and nation-states. Numerous case-studies from press and television in Europe and the UK support a theoretical account of the operation of monarchy and royalty in the media. Central to the concerns of Media, Monarchy and Power are the complex relationship between Britain and Europe and the limits of British political modernization.
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cover of Media, Nationalism and European Identities

Media, Nationalism and European Identities

Karol Jakubowicz

Central European University Press, 2011

Explores patterns of interaction between the mass media and identity formation in the context of Europeanization. On the one hand, the major contribution of the volume is a comprehensive framework that considers media impacts on four levels of identity: European, regional, national, and ethnic minority identities. On the other hand, authors offer cutting edge analysis of the structural transformation of European media institutions, and policies that shape the future of European media.
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cover of Media, Technology, and Society: Theories of Media Evolution

Media, Technology, and Society

Theories of Media Evolution

W. Russell Neuman

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"This book is the perfect primer for understanding media in the digital age. We are in an era when newspaper, radio, and television are fast becoming archeological concepts. Herein are the reasons why."
---Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child and cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory

"Congratulations to Neuman and colleagues for a fascinating exploration of how previous new media were constructed, whether things could have been otherwise, and what can be learned for future media."
---Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, the London School of Economics and Political Science

In Media, Technology, and Society, some of the most prominent figures in media studies explore the issue of media evolution. Focusing on a variety of compelling examples in media history, ranging from the telephone to the television, the radio to the Internet, these essays collectively address a series of notoriously vexing questions about the nature of technological change. Is it possible to make general claims about the conditions that enable or inhibit innovation? Does government regulation tend to protect or thwart incumbent interests? What kinds of concepts are needed to address the relationship between technology and society in a nonreductive and nondeterministic manner? To what extent can media history help us to understand and to influence the future of media in constructive ways? The contributors' historically grounded responses to these questions will be relevant to numerous fields, including history, media and communication studies, management, sociology, and information studies.

W. Russell Neuman is John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology and Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan.

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

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