Science communication, as a multidisciplinary field, has developed remarkably in recent years. It is now a distinct and exceedingly dynamic science that melds theoretical approaches with practical experience. Formerly well-established theoretical models now seem out of step with the social reality of the sciences, and the previously clear-cut delineations and interacting domains between cultural fields have blurred. Communicating Science in Social Contexts examines that shift, which itself depicts a profound recomposition of knowledge fields, activities and dissemination practices, and the value accorded to science and technology.

Communicating Science in Social Contexts is the product of long-term effort that would not have been possible without the research and expertise of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Network and the editors. For nearly 20 years, this informal, international network has been organizing events and forums for discussion of the public communication of science.

This book provides a critical assessment of progress towards the Information Society. Drawing upon unique empirical data, this book lays the foundation for more useful theories of the process of change, and more effective strategies and policies for increasing the benefits from the Information Society. The authors provide insights into the social, economic, and political forces that are structuring the pathway to the Information Society-and its consequences for business and individuals in their everyday lives.

Egyptians are known among the Arabs as awlad al-nukta, Sons of the Jokes, for their ability to laugh in face of adversity. This creative weapon has been directed against socio-political targets both in times of oppression and popular upheaval, such as the 2011 Tahrir Revolution. This book looks at the literary expression of Egyptian humour in the novels of Muhammad Mustajab, Khayri Shalabi, and Hamdi Abu Julayyil, three writers who revive the comic tradition to innovate the language of contemporary fiction. Their modern tricksters, wise fools, and antiheroes play with the stereotypical traits attached to the ordinary Egyptians, while laughing at the universal contradictions of life. This ability to combine local and global culture, literary traditions and popular references, makes them a stimulating read in an intercultural perspective. Combining humour studies and literary criticism, this book examines language play and narrative creativity to understand which strategies craft Egyptian literary humour. In doing so, it sheds light on the contribution of humour to literary innovations of Egyptian fiction since the late Seventies, while adding new writers to those who are considered the masters of humour in the Arab novel.

Learn how to master and apply strong communication principles in both your personal relationships and on the job with Adler/Proctor/Manning's popular LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN, 16E. Written with you in mind, this market-leading book connects today's latest research and theories to your everyday life. This is a textbook you'll actually enjoy reading with current, captivating magazine-style readings and the latest pop culture references -- from recent Marvel movies to viral stars rising through TikTok. This edition continues to focus on the impact of social media and technology on relationships, whether it's "Netflix and chill" or families tethered to cell phones during dinner. You explore the lives of diverse people as you gain a wide sense of understanding about relationships. Compelling photos and cartoons, thought-provoking prompts and hands-on activities bring principles to life. MindTap digital resources are also available to reinforce learning.

Bloggers around the world produce material for local, national and international audiences, yet they are developing in ways that are distinct from the U.S. model. Through case studies of blogs written in English, Chinese, Arab, French, Russian, and Hebrew, this book explores the way blogging is being conceptualized in different cultural contexts. The authors move beyond the most highly trafficked sites to shed light on larger developments taking place online, calling into question assumptions that form the foundation of much of what we read on blogging and, by extension, on global amateur or do-it-yourself media. This book suggests a more nuanced approach to understanding how blogospheres serve communication needs, how they exist in relation to one another, where they exist apart as well as where they overlap, and how they interact with other forms of communication in the larger media landscape.

The 1980s witnessed a rapid growth of communication technology and an immense expansion of new media around the globe. The development of new information and communication technologies has emphasized again the importance of economic, social, political, and cultural institutions associated with the definitions of new technologies. Many of the traditional conceptions of the relation of the media to democracy were predicated upon a certain perception of communication technology and the major contemporary debates related to democratization have to do, again, with the deployment of technologies. How do all these developments affect society? How is the communications explosion related to democracy? What are the implications for the social functions of communications, people's activities, consciousness and values, media ownership and control, both nationally and internationally? These are some of the questions discussed in this volume.

While there exists a wide range of material covering violence against women, very little scholarly attention has been paid to international media treatments of gendered violence. This volume addresses the gap by providing a broad overview of contemporary representations of gendered violence, enabling comparison and contrast in forms of violence and constructions of gender across a wide range of political and geographic contexts. From nonfictional accounts of the mass rapes during the Rwandan genocide to the sexual objectification of women in Serbian media and depictions of prostitute murders in the Chinese media, this book provides an overview of media representations of gendered violence around the globe. In addition to documenting specific challenges and shortcomings of mainstream representations, chapters present insight into the various forms of resistance and hope that exist in each particular area, and analytical essays open up new lines of inquiry by offering an assessment of the uneven changes that feminist activism has enabled around the world. Suitable for students and scholars in women's studies, gender studies, media, sociology, and education, Local Violence, Global Media can be used as a supplementary text in courses on media violence, sociology of media, gendered violence in media, and international perspectives on women's studies.

This volume focuses on the use of dialogue journals in classrooms with students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds whose proficiency with spoken and written English is limited. The companion volume to Dialogue Journal Communication (Ablex, 1988), it carefully describes, from a teacher's experience, how dialogue journal writing can be effectively implemented in the multilingual classroom, with practical tips for starting and maintaining the practice, exploiting the benefits, and avoiding the pitfalls. It presents a model of researchers working in close collaboration with teachers and shows the development in the journals of individual students, with extended examples of student and teacher writing so that teachers can see research results that are not hopelessly extracted from the context in which they were produced. At the same time, it has a strong research orientation.

Virtual worlds are most often three dimensional locales, where people create virtual personae (called avatars) who come to play, socialize, and work. This edited collection of groundbreaking research on virtual worlds offers a wide-ranging look at the sociology, politics, and communication practices in virtual worlds from a group of scholars in the United States and abroad.

Wenshan Jia demonstrates that a true liberation of Chinese civic discourse can start with a focus on indigenous cultural practices, such as face practices--the understanding that every human face offers a distinct cultural grammar for acting, speaking, and feeling. Chinese character and identity, the author argues, are primarily functions of communication, and as such, these practices are of enormous consequence to the necessary reconstruction of Chinese identity in the changing socioeconomic context of the 21st century. In this way, Jia finds a middle ground between the advocacy of complete Westernization and radical Chinese nationalism: as a pragmatic alternative, communication is key. Never before has facework research been approached so systematically from the standpoint of its relationship to character and identity. Jia's work substantially advances the literature on Chinese communication and presents a unique perspective on its relationship to social transformation. This new paradigm of facework--including analytical methods such as Circular Questioning in addition to major case studies--challenges traditional views while pointing the way toward a new and valuable social-constructionist view.

Sport, Beer, and Gender: Promotional Culture and Contemporary Social Life brings together a group of esteemed international scholars to focus on the important, complex, and mutually reinforcing relationships between sport, beer, and gender in fashioning promotional strategies and shaping global cultures of consumption. Collectively, the book examines a well-known social constellation that has received little specific scholarly attention although it sits at the axis of many lines of expanding inquiry in sport studies, media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, consumer studies, and the study of alcohol and substance abuse. The essays gathered here interrogate and trace beer as a commodity as it circumnavigates the circuit of commodification including: (1) institutions and production, (2) texts and representation, and (3) consumption and reception; they explore how it moves from concept to reality, from the private to the public realm, and ultimately its effects on contemporary gendered identity.

This book provides a practical and theoretical look at how media education can make learning and teaching more meaningful and transformative. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes a case study involving an elementary school that received a federal grant to integrate media literacy and the arts into the curriculum. The ideas and experiences of working teachers are analyzed through a critical media literacy framework that provides realistic challenges and hopeful examples and suggestions. The book is a valuable addition to any education course or teacher preparation program that wants to promote twenty-first century literacy skills, social justice, civic participation, media education, or critical technology use. Communications classes will find it useful as it explores and applies key concepts of cultural studies and media education.

Foremost scholars explore new directions in communication research in the light of social, economic, and technological changes in recent years. They analyze differing perspectives historically, problems and opportunities in terms of information flows and filters, and new public policy and social issues and challenges. They raise major questions about future needs and trends. This interdisciplinary study delves into a number of basic concerns, such as how public agendas are formed, how shifting groups in society interpret messages differently, and how technology has changed profoundly the ways in which we communicate in the world today. This overview of the state of communication research is designed for scholars, professionals, and for student use in research methods courses.

Information and Communication Technologies - Visions and Realities, based on Britain's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT), illuminates the social and economic implications of the digital revolution. The thirty contributors include such leading scholars as Walter Baer, Jay Blumler, Peter Cochrane, Rod Coombes, Bill Dutton, Chris Freeman, Nicholas Garnham, John Goddard, Kenneth Kraemer, Donald MacKenzie, Robin Mansell, Bill melody, Roger Silverstone, Robin Williams, and Steve Woolgar.

This volume contains a further selection of the best papers presented at the Seventh Emonet conference (Montreal, Canada, August 2010), following on from Volume 7 and augmented once again with invited chapters authored by leading scholars in the field. "Experiencing and managing emotions in the workplace" comprises fourteen chapters arranged in four sections: The experience of emotion; The dynamics of emotion; Regulating emotion; and The emotionally intelligent organization. These encompass a variety of methodological approaches, including qualitative and quantitative research, sourced from research conducted in organizations in the USA, Europe, and Australasia. The volume's secondary theme is "care and compassion", the theme of the Academy of Management meetings that followed the Emonet conference in Montreal. In effect, organizations that understand their members' emotions and utilize this information in their management practices become "emotionally intelligent" and capable of showing care and compassion to all stakeholders. The chapters in this book provide a rich and varied coverage of the latest developments in the study of the role of emotions in organizational settings.

This book is located at the interface of online learning within a context of English language studies and academic literacy and is underpinned, from a critical theoretical perspective, by an understanding of the implications of the digital divide for developing countries worldwide. The work is an exploration of online learning in an undergraduate English language and academic literacy classroom at a university in South Africa, and theorises the need for technology in developing countries as a means of social inclusion. The aim is to explore the extent to which communities of practice are enabled in an online environment, among English non-mother tongue speakers from technologically under-resourced backgrounds. This study examines the extent to which the students participate, negotiate meaning, and construct identities in online spaces. From a sociocultural perspective this book locates learning as a form of interaction and co-participation, and argues that learning occurs within specific contexts, hence the focus on how individuals become members of 'communities of practice'.

A particular dark triumph of modern nationalism has been its ability to persuade citizens to sacrifice their lives for a political vision forged by emotional ties to a common identity. Both men and women can respond to nationalistic calls to fight that portray muscular warriors defending their nation against an easily recognizable enemy. This "us versus them" mentality can be seen in sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalas, Serbs and Kosovars, and Protestants and Catholics. In Muscular Nationalism, Sikata Banerjee takes a comparative look at India and Ireland and the relationship among gender, violence, and nationalism. Exploring key texts and events from 1914-2004, Banerjee explores how women negotiate "muscular nationalisms" as they seek to be recognized as legitimate nationalists and equal stakeholders in their national struggles. Banerjee argues that the gendered manner in which dominant nationalism has been imagined in most states in the world has had important implications for women's lived experiences. Drawing on a specific intersection of gender and nationalism, she discusses the manner in which women negotiate a political and social terrain infused with a masculinized dream of nation-building. India and Ireland-two states shaped by the legacy of British imperialism and forced to deal with modern political/social conflict centering on competing nationalisms-provide two provocative case studies that illuminate the complex interaction between gender and nation.

Healthcare organizations depend on managers to build effective peer relationships to manage complex patient needs. Today, top management is fighting the many headed monster Hydra from Greek Mythology. The organization is steeped in conflict between peers. But, as soon as one problem is resolved, two more have grown in its place. These appear to be personal conflicts, but instead follow patterns of dysfunction. This book provides the conceptual frameworks for identifying these and for developing peer to peer relationship competence in the healthcare organization.

Advances in Group Processes publishes theoretical analyses, reviews, and theory based empirical chapters on group phenomena. The series adopts a broad conception of 'group processes.' This includes work on groups ranging from the very small to the very large, and on classic and contemporary topics such as status, power, trust, justice, social influence, identity, decision-making, intergroup relations and social networks. Previous contributors have included scholars from diverse fields including sociology, psychology, political science, economics, business, philosophy, computer science, mathematics and organizational behavior. Volume 37 brings together papers related to a variety of topics in small groups and organizational research. The volume includes papers that address theoretical and empirical issues related to consumer social privilege, group processes and disrupted environments, the use of time as a construct and the affective bases of self. Other contributions examine solving problems of cooperation, the effects of identity non-verification, and a series of papers addressing Stryker's identity theory. Overall, the volume includes papers that reflect a wide range of theoretical approaches from leading scholars who work in the general area of group processes.

This book provides perspectives on how South Asian -- often, more specifically, Indian -- diasporas inhabit techno-mediated environments through their economic and socio-cultural activities. The themes examined include religion, caste, language, and gender in online communities and call centers, and the roles of these factors in the global economy, Bollywood online and offline, digital music, websites for arranging marriages, and so on. The book attempts to map -South Asia in relation to global technospaces produced through and as a consequence of economic globalization efforts."

Why does your mouth suddenly go dry, your throat tighten, your face get hot, and your knees buckle when you have to address a group of people? The old story goes that more people are afraid of public speaking than they are of death. So people at a funeral would prefer to be the person in the casket than the person delivering the eulogy!

Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education is the first international and multidisciplinary effort to coalesce knowledge on education and popular culture studied as broad phenomena and not as a collection of case studies. In this volume, popular culture has been thematically treated as it appears in a variety of media, including movies, digital games, advertising, television, popular songs, and the internet. The book considers education in both formal and informal settings, and looks critically at the accepted dichotomy between education and popular culture. It argues that popular culture is capable of educating and that education shares many characteristics with popular culture, and tries to overcome these dichotomous relationships while also trying to clarify the reciprocal effects between the two. The book calls disciplinary and media boundaries into question in an effort to widen the possibility of enlarging the vocabulary and the verbs of all that stays unnamed by what is considered knowledge.

"The Political Marketing Game identifies what works in political marketing, drawing on 100 interviews with practitioners. It also shows that authenticity, values and vision are as much a part of a winning strategy as market-savvy pragmatism"--

The book aims to introduce a research concept called "Numanities", as one possible attempt to overcome the current scientific, social and institutional crisis of the humanities. Such crisis involves their impact on, and role within, society; their popularity among students and scholars; and their identity as producers and promoters of knowledge. The modern western world and its economic policies have been identified as the strongest cause of such a crisis. Creating the conditions for, but in fact encouraging it. However, a self-critical assessment of the situation is called for. Our primary fault as humanists was that of stubbornly thinking that the world's changes could never really affect us, as - we felt - our identity was sacred. In the light of these approaches, the main strengths of humanities have been identified in the ability to: promote critical thinking and analytical reasoning; provide knowledge and understanding of democracy and social justice; develop leadership, cultural and ethical values. The main problems of humanities are the lack economic relevance; the socio-institutional perception of them as "impractical" and unemployable; the fact that they do not match with technological development. Finally, the resulting crisis consists mainly in the absence (or radical reduction) of funding from institutions; a decrease in student numbers a decrease in interest; a loss of centrality in society. A Numanities (New Humanities) project should consider all these aspects, with self-critical assessment on the first line. The goal is to unify the various fields, approaches and also potentials of the humanities in the context, dynamics and problems of current societies, and in an attempt to overcome the above-described crisis. Numanities are introduced not as a theoretical paradigm, but in terms of an "umbrella-concept" that has no specific scientific content in it: that particularly means that the many existing new fields and research trends that are addressing the same problems (post-humanism, transhumanism, transformational humanities, etc.) are not competitors of Numanities, but rather possible ways to them. Therefore, more than a theoretical program, Numanities intend to pursue a mission, and that is summarized in a seven-point manifesto. In the light of these premises and reflections, the book then proceeds to identify the areas of inquiry that Numanities, in their functions and comprehensive approach, seek to cover. The following list should also be understood as a statement of purposes for this entire book series. These, in other words, will be the topics/areas we intend to represent. Once elaborated on the foundations of Numanities, the book features a second part that presents two case studies based on two relatively recent (and now updated) investigations that the author has performed in the fields of musical and animal studies respectively. The two cases (and relative areas of inquiry) were selected because they were considered particularly relevant within the discussion of Numanities, and in two different ways. In the first case-study the author discussed the most typical result (or perhaps cause?) of the technophobic attitude that was addressed in the first part of the book: the issue of "authenticity", as applied, in the author's particular study, to popular music. In the second case-study, he analyzes two different forms of comparative analysis between human and non-human cognition: like in the former case, this study, too, is aimed at a critical commentary on (what the author considers) redundant biases in current humanistic research - anthropocentrism and speciesism.