Contributions by Phil Bevin, Blair Davis, Marc DiPaolo, Michele Fazio, James Gifford, Kelly Kanayama, Orion Ussner Kidder, Christina M. Knopf, Kevin Michael Scott, Andrew Alan Smith, and Terrence R. Wandtke In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing. Contributors weigh industry histories and marketing concerns as well as the fan community's changing attitudes towards class signifiers in superhero adventures. The often financially strapped Spider-Man proves to be a touchstone figure in many of these essays. Grant Morrison's Superman, Marvel's Shamrock, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and The Walking Dead receive thoughtful treatment. While there have been many scholarly works concerned with issues of race and gender in comics, this book stands as the first to deal explicitly with issues of class, cultural capital, and economics as its main themes.

This volume advances the data-based study of multimodal artefacts and performances by showcasing methods and results from the latest endeavors in empirical multimodal research, representing a vibrant international and interdisciplinary research community. The collated chapters identify and seek to inspire novel, mixed-method approaches to investigate meaning-making mechanisms in current communicative artifacts, designs, and contexts; while attending to their immersive, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions. Each contribution details innovative aspects of empirical multimodality research, offering insights into challenges evolving from quantitative approaches, particular corpus work, results from eye-tracking and psychological experiments, and analyses of dynamic interactive experiences. The approaches and results presented foreground the inherent multidisciplinary nature and implications of multimodality, renegotiating concepts across linguistics, media studies, (social) semiotics, game studies, and design. With this, the volume will inform both current and future developments in theory, methods, and transdisciplinary contexts and become a landmark reference for anyone interested in the empirical study of multimodality.

The first book in English on Chinese-language media in Australia, Digital Transnationalism explores the challenges, opportunities and development of this sector against the backdrop of China's rise, its soft power agenda, and renewed hostility between China and the global West. Situated in the Australian context, this study nevertheless is essential to understand the complex and evolving nature of Chinese-language digital media, and the role they play in fostering digital transnationalism among first-generation Chinese migrants across the globe.

In this highly readable and well-arranged compilation-including his much-celebrated "The Practice of Reading Good Books" and award-winning "Playing with Bateson"-Corey Anton brings together some of his most accessible and well-received essays. The collection, in addition to advancing and integrating the fields of media ecology and general semantics, will be of great interest to people who are concerned over the changing role of reading and literacy in contemporary life. A stimulating and provocative book having wide relevance to scholars and students in the areas of semiotics, rhetorical theory, orality/literacy studies, philosophy of communication, pedagogical theory, and communication theory, Communication Uncovered offers countless insights and broad-based orientations regarding the nature of language, linguistic and communicative habits, communication technologies, and symbolic practices more generally. This is a "must have" resource for anyone interested in multidisciplinary communication theory.

In the literature of information science, a number of studies have been carried out attempting to model cognitive, affective, behavioral, and contextual factors associated with human information seeking and retrieval. On the other hand, only a few studies have addressed the exploration of creative thinking in music, focusing on understanding and describing individuals' information seeking behavior during the creative process. Trends in Music Information Seeking, Behavior, and Retrieval for Creativity connects theoretical concepts in information seeking and behavior to the music creative process. This publication presents new research, case studies, surveys, and theories related to various aspects of information retrieval and the information seeking behavior of diverse scholarly and professional music communities. Music professionals, theorists, researchers, and students will find this publication an essential resource for their professional and research needs.

Concepts seem to work best when created in that interspace between theory and praxis, between philosophy, art, and science. Deleuze himself has generated many concepts in this encounter between philosophy and non-philosophy (art, literature, film, botany, etc): his ideas of affects and percepts, of becoming, the stutter, movement-image and time-image, the rhizome, to name but a few. In the case of this volume, the "other" is the "other" to English language/culture (and its philosophy): what happens, if instead of "other disciplines," we take other cultures, other languages, other philosophies? Does not the focus on English as a hegemonic language of academic discourse deny us a plethora of possibilities, of possible Denkfiguren, of possible concepts? This collection is a kind of travelogue. The journey does not follow a particular trajectory-some countries are not on the map; some are visited twice. So, there is no claim to completeness involved here-it is rather an invitation to answer to the call ... there is much to explore!

Media is rapidly evolving, from social media to news channels, individuals are being bombarded with headlines, new technologies, and varying opinions. Teaching the next generation of communication professionals how to interact with varying forms of media is paramount as they will be the future distributors of news and information. The Handbook of Research on Media Literacy in Higher Education Environments provides emerging research on the role of journalism and mass communication education in the digital era. While highlighting topics such as community media labs, political cognition, and public engagement, this publication explores the impact of globalization and a changing and diversified world within the realm of higher education. This publication is an important resource for educators, academicians, professionals, and researchers seeking current research on applications and strategies in promoting media and digital studies in higher education.

No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing. To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors--one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn--with scissors. Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, ""New Orleans--We Put the Fun in Funeral.""

This books aims to demonstrate how semiotic models of textual analysis can be used to study any social reality or cultural process. In addition, it shows how semiotic models work by using examples from everyday life and social praxis, communicative processes and modes of consumption, online interactions and cross-media procedures, political experiences and scientific universes.

This book provides a rich description of the shifting production cultures in convergent Chinese television industries, through the examination of daily production practices, showing how they embody a new set of opportunities and tensions across strategic, programming and individual levels. Lin argues that the current Chinese television landscape is an ideological, cultural and financial paradox in which China's one-party ideological control clashes with consumer-orientated capitalism and technological advancement. These tensions are finely poised between new opportunities for innovation and creative autonomy, and anxiety over political interference marked by censorship and state surveillance. Through its in depth study of ethnographic data across Chinese broadcast and digital streaming sectors (including CCTV, Hunan Broadcasting System, and Tencent Video), this book illuminates how Chinese producers have placed their aspirations for creative freedoms within technological advancements and rhetorical strategies, both demonstrating compliance with ideological control, and leaving room for resistance and resilience to one-party state ideology. Nuanced and timely, Convergent Chinese Television Industries unveils a complex picture of an industry undergoing dramatic transformations.

Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019 analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, on-site vigil surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. The book demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While Memories of Tiananmen mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and the Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong's autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.

Academic libraries have traditionally had two key functions, to support teaching and to support research. In an evolving and competitive university environment, along with the emergence of various technologies and substantial changes in scientific communication, university management has reached a turning point. Academic libraries are facing a paradigm shift in the role they need to play to achieve the research objectives of universities. Research support services in academic libraries have evolved as a response to these changes. They are heterogeneous, adapt to their university culture, adopt different points of view, take different approaches in their organizational structures, and include a diverse catalog of activities. Having an overview of different experiences will allow libraries to adopt best practices, redefine services, and even establish new management and collaboration models. Cases on Research Support Services in Academic Libraries is a critical scholarly resource that uses case studies to systematize the experiences of research support services in academic libraries for the support of higher education faculty. The cases focus on such items as the role of technology and its impact as well as how these services help to improve the excellence of universities. Featuring a wide range of topics such as library services, data management, and open science, this book is ideal for librarians, academicians, professionals, researchers, and students.

This collection examines law and justice on television in different countries around the world. It provides a benchmark for further study of the nature and extent of television coverage of justice in fictional, reality and documentary forms. It does this by drawing on empirical work from a range of scholars in different jurisdictions. Each chapter looks at the raw data of how much "justice" material viewers were able to access in the multi-channel world of 2014 looking at three phases: apprehension (police), adjudication (lawyers), and disposition (prison/punishment). All of the authors indicate how television developed in their countries. Some have extensive public service channels mixed with private media channels. Financing ranges from advertising to programme sponsorship to licensing arrangements. A few countries have mixtures of these. Each author also examines how "TV justice" has developed in their own particular jurisdiction. Readers will find interesting variations and thought-provoking similarities. There are a lot of television shows focussed on legal themes that are imported around the world. The authors analyse these as well. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in law, popular culture, TV, or justice and provides an important addition to the literature due to its grounding in empirical data.

This expanded collection of new and fully revised explorations of media content identifies the ways we all have been negatively stereotyped and demonstrates how careful analysis of media portrayals can create more beneficial alternatives. Not all damaging stereotypes are obvious. In fact, the pictorial stereotypes in the media that we don't notice could be the most harmful because we aren't even aware of the negative, false ideas they perpetrate. This book presents a series of original research essays on media images of groups including African Americans, Latinos, women, the elderly, the physically disabled, gays and lesbians, and Jewish Americans, just to mention a few. Specific examples of these images are derived from a variety of sources, such as advertising, fine art, film, television shows, cartoons, the Internet, and other media, providing a wealth of material for students and professionals in almost any field. Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, Third Edition not only accurately describes and analyzes the media's harmful depictions of cultural groups, but also offers creative ideas on alternative representations of these individuals. These discussions illuminate how each of us is responsible for contributing to a sea of meaning within our mass culture. 33 distinguished authors as well as new voices in the field combine their extensive and varied expertise to explain the social effects of media stereotyping. Includes historical and contemporary illustrations that range from editorial cartoons to the sinking of the Titanic Richly illustrated with historical and up-to-date photographic illustrations Every chapter's content is meticulously supported with numerous sources cited A glossary defines key words mentioned in the chapters

Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of southerners-and people in general-are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South, particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the history of border crossings to the issues being considered in today's national landscape.

A fascinating look into what happens when comedy becomes political and politics becomes comedy Satirical TV has become mandatory viewing for citizens wishing to make sense of the bizarre contemporary state of political life. Shifts in industry economics and audience tastes have re-made television comedy, once considered a wasteland of escapist humor, into what is arguably the most popular source of political critique. From fake news and pundit shows to animated sitcoms and mash-up videos, satire has become an important avenue for processing politics in informative and entertaining ways, and satire TV is now its own thriving, viable television genre. Satire TV examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny. A series of original essays focus on a range of programs, from The Daily Show to South Park, Da Ali G Show to The Colbert Report, The Boondocks to Saturday Night Live, Lil' Bush to Chappelle's Show, along with Internet D.I.Y. satire and essays on British and Canadian satire. They all offer insights into what today's class of satire tells us about the current state of politics, of television, of citizenship, all the while suggesting what satire adds to the political realm that news and documentaries cannot.

Choices Behind Human Communication The Interpersonal Communication Book approaches the subject of communication through integrative theory, research, and hands-on methods. A threefold approach identifies important communicative concepts: choices in interpersonal situations, the theories and research that support these choices, and the communication skills necessary to effectively use these theories. The text allows students to examine the question of how, when, and through which channels they should communicate in different contexts. The Fourteenth Edition provides the newest insights and research in person-to-person interaction, making for an up-to-date source for communication study. New features and chapter-by-chapter updates make Interpersonal Communication the most comprehensive, relevant source on the topic.

On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology consists of a series of explorations into our use of symbols, language, and media to relate to our environment, and how our different modes of perception and communication influence human consciousness, culture, and social organization. These essays draw upon and integrate the perspectives of general semantics, systems theory, and media ecology, bringing them to bear upon a diversity of topics that include the future of consciousness, identity and meaning, the Ten Commandments, media literacy, The Lord of the Rings, and our relationship to time. Throughout this volume, Strate grapples with the question of what it means to be human, and what the prospects may be for humanity's continued survival. As he concludes in the title essay of this book: "As a species, we are binders of time, bound up by our biases of time; we are moved by our consciousness of time, as we tell time, and as we tell ourselves that only time will tell; as we play for time, and as we pray, as we pray for time."