Marita Sturken Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero | ||
 | In Tourists of History, cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America’s innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh. | |
Eugene Secunda and Terence P. MoranSelling War to America: From the Spanish American War to the Global War on Terror | ||
 | Selling War to America begins its examination with the U.S. Government's campaign to instigate a war with Spain and ends with a review of the methods the government is using now to encourage support for the War Against Terrorism. The book analyzes each of these wars within the context of the techniques that the government used to generate public support, also examining the results of propaganda efforts, both before and after each conflict. From these historical analyses, noting both the blunders and the triumphs of the past century, Selling War to America pinpoints the pitfalls and offers the keys to successfully persuading the American public to support wars that must be fought. This book analyzes each of these wars within the context of the techniques that the government used to generate public support. It also examines the results of these propaganda efforts both before and after each conflict. Selling War to America begins its examination with the U.S. Government's campaign to instigate a war with Spain and ends with a review of the methods it is using now to encourage support for the War Against Terrorism. From these historical analyses, noting both the blunders and the triumphs of the past century, Selling War to America pinpoints the pitfalls and offers the keys to successfully persuade the American public to support wars that must be fought. | |
Alexander R. Galloway | ||
 | Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast--and in some cases, almost unlimited array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. | |
Rodney Benson | ||
 | Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field is an exciting new text which builds on and extends Pierre Bourdieu's impassioned critique of our media-saturated culture. Presenting for the first time in English the work of influential scholars who worked with or were influenced by Bourdieu, this volume is the one and only book for Anglophone scholars seeking a more detailed elaboration of field theory in relation to the mass media. | |
Charlton McIlwainWhen Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking of Community | ||
 | Scholars, educators, health professionals, and activists from a variety of fields have struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the experience of death and dying from the mire of fear, denial, and secrecy that it has been associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. McIlwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television--a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. | |
Mark Crispin Miller | ||
 | For Republicans, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College tally in the days leading up to the election, behind even on the very afternoon of the vote, the Bush ticket staged a stunning comeback. The exit polls, usually so reliable, turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in the swing states. Conservatives argued-and the media agreed-that "moral values" had made the difference. In his new book renowned critic and political commentator Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values that swung the election-it was theft. | |
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright | ||
 | This comprehensive and engaging introduction to visual culture provides an overview of a range of theories about how we understand visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to experience pleasure, and to learn. Using over 175 illustrations, Professors Sturken and Cartwright examine how images - paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and science images - gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and the law, how they travel globally and in distinct cultures, and how they are an integral and important aspect of our lives. These images are analyzed in relation to a range of cultural and representational issues (desire, power, the gaze, bodies, sexuality, ethnicity) and methodologies (semiotics, marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial theory). | |
Susan MurrayHitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Televison and Broadcast Stardom | ||
 | Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars! is the first cultural and industrial history of early television stardom. Susan Murray argues that television stars were central to the growth and development of American broadcasting. They were used not only to promote programs and the sale of television sets and advertised consumer goods, but also to established network identities. Through profiles of well-known performers including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball, she shows how the television industry gave birth to the idea of TV stars and established a system of star production and management notably different from the Hollywood star system of the studio era. | |
Aurora Wallace | ||
 | By investigating specific cases of newspapers in their communities, Newspapers and the Making of Modern America shows the newspaper as an agent of change in the construction and maintenance of community. It develops the theme of a newspaper as a prime mover in enacting policy, supporting development, building neighborhoods, and generally modifying the physical and built environment. | |
Marita SturkenTechnological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technology | ||
 | For as long as people have developed new technologies, there has been debate over the purposes, shape, and potential for their use. In this exciting collection, a range of contributors, including Sherry Turkle, Lynn Spigel, John Perry Barlow, Langdon Winner, David Nye, and Lord Asa Briggs, discuss the visions that have shaped "new" technologies and the cultural implications of technological adaptation. Focusing on issues such as the nature of prediction, community, citizenship, consumption, and the nation, as well as the metaphors that have shaped public debates about technology, the authors examine innovations past and present, from the telegraph and the portable television to the Internet, to better understand how our visions and imagination have shaped the meaning and use of technology. | |
Helen Nissenbaum | ||
 | This book explores the impact of the Internet on scholarly research across and beyond the social sciences. The contributors - leading figures in a broad spectrum of disciplines - explain how their fields of inquiry are being redefined, and what issues of social change are salient as new information technologies increasingly become the subject of scholarly analysis. They have rendered a conceptual photograph of how their disciplines are coping with the impact of information technology by covering policy approaches, empirical research, and theoretical questions. Academy & the Internet highlights significant zones of inquiry and provides a critical perspective on the direction each discipline is traveling. | |
JoEllen Fisherkeller | ||
 | Fisherkeller studies the experiences of adolescents watching TV and talking about TV at home, at school, and with their peers. They discuss their hopes for the future as well as the challenges they currently face, and reveal how television plays a role in their everyday life. These young individuals, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, literally grow up with television, as the author follows them from middle school to high school and then on to college. As the most significant cultural symbol in the US, television is a powerful educational and socializing force. Fisherkeller examines how youth are attracted to TV programs and persona that help them work through personal and social dilemmas. TV stories teach them about conflicts of gender, race and class that parallel the lessons they learn from real life and the system of television show them how image creation is a real means of "making it" in an image-conscious society. | |
Arvind Rajagopal | ||
 | In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indian politics was irrevocably changed thereafter. In this book, Arvind Rajagopal analyses this extraordinary series of events. While audiences may have thought they were harking back to an epic golden age, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalisation. Television was the device that hinged these movements together, symbolising the new possibilities of politics, at once more inclusive and authoritarian. Simultaneously, this study examines how the larger historical context was woven into and changed the character of Hindu nationalism. | |
Deborah J. Borisoff | ||
 | Understanding and effectively addressing the impact that differences have on our lives is important in promoting fairness and equitability. Arliss and Borisoff have enlisted the expertise of the best scholars to explore the effects of gender differences with regard to individuals, interpersonal relationships, and professional environments. Contributors have updated their original chapters and added questions for further discussion for this new edition. New chapters on gay men, race and gender, and employment interviewing have been added to strengthen an already highly regarded study of gender communication. The broad scope of topics covered in this volume reflects the challenges faced by both men and women communicating on a variety of fronts. While some readers may discover new perspectives, all readers will relate to and learn from the experts exploration of gender and communication, gaining insights that are most important in the twenty-first century. | |
Brett GaryThe Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War | ||
 | The Nervous Liberals explores how following World War I the social sciences (especially political science and the new field of mass communications) identified propaganda as the object of urgent "scientific" study. From there his narrative moves to the eve of WWII as mainstream journalists, clerics, and activists demanded greater government action against fascist propaganda, in response to which Congress and the Justice Department sought to create a prophylaxis against foreign or antidemocratic communications. Finally, Gary explores how free speech liberalism was further challenged by the national security culture, whose mobilization before World War II to fight the propaganda threat lead to much of the Cold War anxiety about propaganda. Gary's account sheds considerable light not only on the history of propaganda, but also on the central dilemmas of liberalism in the first half of the century: the delicate balance between protecting national security and protecting civil liberties, including freedom of speech; the tension between public centered versus expert centered theories of democracy; and the conflict between social reform and public opinion control as the legitimate aim of social knowledge. | |
Ted Magder | ||
 | The development of the feature film industry in Canada has been uncertain and difficult, with problems usually attributed to the country's small population and US domination of the movie industry. Ted Magder goes beyond these obvious influences in his examination of Canada's state policies as they affected the production of Canadian feature films from the First World War to the present. He presents a study focusing on the interplay between government policy and the dynamics of the industry, and undertakes an examination of cultural dependency in Canada. State policies, Magder points out, are related to domestic forces that impinge upon and set limits to policy decisions and their implementation. | |
Allen FeldmanFormations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland | ||
 | "A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"-- Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist | |