In recent years, China has experienced a revolution in information and communications technology (ICT), in 2003 surpassing the USA as the world 's largest telephone market, and as of February 2008, the number of Chinese Internet users has become the largest in the world. At the same time, China has overtaken the USA as the world 's biggest supplier of information technology goods. However, this transformation has occurred against the backdrop of a resolutely authoritarian political system and strict censorship by the Party-state. This book examines China 's ICT revolution, exploring the social, cultural and political implications of China 's transition to a more information-rich and communication-intensive society. The pace of the development of ICT in China has precipitated much speculation about political change and democratisation. This book explores the reality of ICT in China, showing clearly that whilst China remains a one-party state, with an ever-present and sophisticated regime of censorship, substantial social and political changes have taken place. It considers the ICT revolution in all its aspects, outlining the dominant trends, the impact on other countries of China as an ICT exporter, strategies of government censorship and use of ICT for propaganda, the implications of censorship for Chinese governance, the political implications of internet culture and blogging, and the role of domestic and foreign NGOs. Overall, this book is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand a rapidly transforming China, both today and in the years to come.

Recent instances of global crisis reporting on climate change and the financial crisis are early embryos of a new form of journalism that is increasingly needed in global times: global journalism. Instead of associating global journalism with national comparisons of media systems or defining it as an ethically "corrective" form of journalism, Peter Berglez sets out to develop the idea of global journalism as an epistemological updating of everyday mainstream news media. He theoretically understands and explains global journalism as a concrete practice, which can be applied in research, training, and reporting. He argues that the future of professional news journalism is about leaving behind the dominant national outlook for the sake of a more integrated (global) outlook on society. Emerging examples of global journalism are analyzed throughout the book alongside the historical background and the challenges it faces.

This book is a critical introduction to code and software that develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. Written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background, the book provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms.

This book explores Bangladesh's shift from a 'bottomless pit' into a 'middle-income' category. Six chapters in the book cover topics on microfinance growth, ready-made garment production, and social safety net programs playing pivotal roles particularly for women empowerment. In doing so, the book shows that the net effect was not just a change to the country's limited number of representative brands, but also a realization of many more brands to have built up over time.

Modern Art Culture: A Reader provides an essential resource for understanding the culture of modern art since the 1960s.

In recent years, media theorists and historians have asked whether works of imaginative art can have any impact in our image-saturated culture. Given the power of institutions, how do radical artists produce effective cultural interventions? In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, many argue that pressing questions about works of art and their meanings are inseparable not only from contemporary social and political issues but also from major debates and developments in the last four decades.

To explore such questions and issues, the Reader is divided into six related parts with articles from journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues that exemplify important interventions from the 1960s onwards: Histories, Representations and Remembrance; Art and Visual/Mass/Popular Culture; Institutions; Inclusions/Exclusions; Bodies and Identities; Power and Permissibility.

Texts range from artists? engagement with the veil and veiling as metaphors for post-colonialist understandings of representation and contemporary art to early debates about, for example, ?activist art?, discourses of the ?body?, civil rights, ethnicity, and cultural power. Importantly these selected texts offer examples of analysis that can enable readers to examine, critically, their own selection of representations produced in a variety of contexts.

Jane Campion is one of the most celebrated auteurs of modern cinema and was the first female director to be awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or. Throughout her relatively short career, Campion has received extraordinary attention from the media and scholars alike and has provoked fierce debates on issues such as feminism, colonialism, and nationalism.

In this detailed account of Jane Campion's career as a filmmaker, Deb Verhoeven examines specifically how contemporary film directors 'fashion' themselves as auteurs ? through their personal interactions with the media, in their choice of projects, in their emphasis on particular filmmaking techniques and finally in the promotion of their films.

Through analysis of key approaches to Campion's films, such as The Piano; In the Cut; Sweetie; An Angel at My Table; and Holy Smoke Deb Verhoeven introduces students to the passionate debates surrounding this controversial and often experimental director

Featuring a career overview, a filmography, scene by scene analysis and an extended interview with Campion on her approach to creativity, this is a great introduction to one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema.

Our culture is one that speaks rather than listens. From reality TV to political rallies, there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate, and to receive attention. It reduces 'reality' to revelation and voyeurism. The Art of Listening argues that this way of life is having severe and damaging consequences in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected. It addresses the question: how can we listen more carefully? Social and cultural theory is combined with real stories from the experiences of the desperate stowaways who hide in the undercarriages of jet planes in order to seek asylum, to the young working-class people who use tattooing to commemorate a lost love. The Art of Listening shows how sociology is in a unique position to record 'life passed in living' and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care, providing a resource to understand the contemporary world while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future.

. . . frustrated philosophers everywhere-especially epistemologists-will enjoy this work. It is written by someone who appreciates the occasional nuances afforded by languages other than English. Moreover, it has a handy list of references, a serviceable back-of-the-book index, and an author index that is a veritable Who's Who of people who, like the author, have committed monography in their quest for a better understanding of our field. - "Library and Information Science Research "The focus of this volume is on the creation of meaning in the practice of library and information studies, and the need for an overall view and methodology of what the field is, how it develops, and how we identify our place within it when it is changing so rapidly. Succeeding versions of what the field is and what its practitioners do have left us unsure of where legitimacy lies- and how our own future can be reconciled to prevailing trends and impending changes. At the same time, there has been a movement to get away from positivist, or scientific, models of research practice. This book argues that those models should be rejected because they take no account of how human science's work or how people in service professions construct theory.

This edited collection positions writing at the center of interdisciplinary higher education, and explores how writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration bring STEM and the humanities together in meaningful, creative, and beneficial ways. Writing professionals are at the forefront of a cross-pollination between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the arts and humanities. In their work as educators, scholars, and administrators, they collaborate with colleagues in engineering, scientific, technical, and health disciplines, offer new degree programs that allow students to bring the humanities to bear on design experiments, and build an academic culture that promotes a vision of the humanities in the twenty-first century, as well as a vision of technology that is decidedly human. This collection surveys and promotes that work through chapters focused on writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration, covering topics that include data-driven writing courses, public science communication, non-traditional college students, creative writing, gamification, skills transfer, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs. Writing STEAM will be essential reading for scholars, instructors, and administrators in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, STEM, and a variety of interdisciplinary programs; it will aid in teacher training for both humanities and STEM courses focused on writing and communication.

Emotions remain largely invisible in the management of criminal justice practice. This book seeks to uncover some of the underground emotional work of practitioners and make visible the impact of both positive and negative emotions, which play a crucial role in practitioner-offender relationships. Exploring how practitioners understand, regulate and work with emotion, Knight argues that the 'soft skills' of emotion are more likely to achieve motivation and change in offenders than the 'hard' skills of punishment, monitoring and surveillance. The book examines some of the gendered implications of this practice and develops an argument for the explicit building of emotional resources within organizations to sustain the development, enhancement and support of emotional literacy in the workforce. Using practice examples, Knight reveals how practitioners can benefit from having an understanding of their own emotions and how these can impact on their practice. This unique and accessible book will be a valuable resource to practitioners across the criminal justice sector including probation officers, youth justice workers, police and prison officers, social workers, policymakers and managers, as well as scholars working within criminology, criminal justice and probation.

Small group research is of particularly wide interest to people working in a fairly broad variety of areas concerned with understanding conflict, especially for practitioners and researchers concerned with conflict resolution, peace, and related areas.

The editors will focus on six main topical areas of small group research, which include:

- Cooperation, competition, and conflict resolution
- Coalitions, bargaining, and games
- Group dynamics and social cognition
- The group and organization
- Team performance
- Intergroup relations

By concentrating on issues in postcolonial nations, the authors decenter western notions of public relations practice and embrace the cultures, economies, and political structures that have been profoundly influenced by the legacy of colonialism. Instead, the authors conceptualize public relations as a communicative and relationship-building practice that can bridge the political- and cultural-economic spheres of globalization, recasting practice as a central tenet of a global social justice agenda. The purpose of this study is to examine critically how public relations is shaping globalization efforts and practices in countries that have historically experienced western control.

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book isunique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspectsof natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actorsin the field. It is a timely update of Multimodality in Language and SpeechSystems by Bjorn Granstrom, David House and Inger Karlsson and, at the sametime, it presents a much broader overview of the field. Its 17 chaptersprovide a broad and detailed impression of where the fairly new field ofnatural and multimodal interactivity engineering stands today. Topicsaddressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodaldialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation."

Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter. Contributors make use of critical discourse analyses, ethnographic inquiries, autoethnographic inquiries, case studies, and textual analyses to engage such mental health research topics as postpartum depression among Chinese mothers; insanity pleas; anosognosia; issues of intimacy, access, and embodiment in research projects; community support groups; Black mental health; women in Alcoholics Anonymous; and mental health in faculty workshops and university online health tools. The authors and editors create scholarship on mental health that explicitly builds productive methodological, theoretical, and practical bridges among scholars and teachers in the various specialties of writing and communication. This collection will interest scholars, students, and practitioners in health and medical humanities; rhetoric of health and medicine; health communication; medical anthropology; scientific and technical communication; disability studies; and rhetorical studies generally.

This book explores how academics at conferences co-construct their own and each other's professional identities. It is based on the detailed sequential analysis of audio recordings of conference discussions in the field of the humanities, the working languages being French and English. The analyses show that the delegates who actively participate in these interactions, whether as presenters, chairpersons or as members of the audience, carry out a considerable amount of identity work, attributing self and other to various categories of professional identity. The discussion participants co-construct themselves and each other discursively as academics, professionals, experts, junior or senior members of the scientific community; they also orient to this identity work as an important task to be achieved at conferences. This study provides detailed insights into the fine-grained mechanics of spoken academic discourse. From the perspective of applied research it serves the double purpose of raising experienced researchers' awareness of their own routines and introducing novices to the discourse practices of academia.

This sourcebook demonstrates the vigorous work being done in the field of technical and scientific communication. Collectively, the essays offer researchers a basis from which to begin constructing the theoretical framework necessary for the study of technical communication. The book begins with general concerns and progresses to particular applications. The chapters comprising Part I outline larger theoretical perspectives from which to examine techical communication: humanistic approaches to technical communication, the history of technical communication, communication theory and technical writing, and the teaching of technical writing. Part II examines the relationship of technical communication to traditional rhetorical concerns such as invention, audience, modes of organization, and style. Specific types of technical communication--proposals, reports, and business correspondence, among others--are discussed in Part III. The use of the computer, oral presentations, and specialized forms of technical communication are examined in Part IV. The appendixes offer guides to textbooks and style manuals and an overview of the technical writing profession.

Advertising is one of the most prominent, powerful, and ubiquitous contemporary uses of language. Its seductive and controversial quality has attracted consistent and intense attention across a range of academic disciplines including linguistics, media studies, politics, semiotics, and sociology. The reasons for this academic interest are far from superficial. The study of advertising brings together many of the key social and political issues of our time: the new capitalism; globalization; overconsumption and the environment; cultural and individual identities; and the communications revolution. It provides insight into the ideologies and values of contemporary societies. Advertising's creative use of language makes it a particularly rich site for language and discourse analysis. Operating in all media and exploiting the interaction between word, sound, and image, it provides a key location for studies of multimodal communication. Simultaneously poetic and commercial, it raises questions about the nature of creativity and art. Ever since the intensification of advertising in the 1950s, leading scholars have analysed its use of language. This new four-volume Routledge Major Work brings together for the first time the most seminal and controversial works, allowing users to obtain a wide and inclusive view of this rewarding topic. It will be welcomed by scholars and other researchers in the field as an invaluable 'mini library' on the language of advertising.

Public policy education is oriented around the development of innovative ideas for how to improve governance and make society better. However, it undervalues a critical tool for translating policy ideas into action: the ability to communicate ideas broadly, strategically, and effectively. Drawing on his past frustration with translating his research from academia to the public sphere, Justin Gest has written a primer for public policy students, researchers, and policy professionals on how to turn analyses and memos into clear and persuasive campaigns. This book outlines the principles, structure, and target audience for different media essential to policy communication. Including advice from practitioners and illustrative examples, Gest explains the indispensability of pithiness to clear communication and how to achieve it.

A beautifully simple guide to the relationship skills we all so deeply need, but most of us don't know how to access. This book belongs firmly on the curriculum for creating a more peaceful world. Dr Scilla Elworthy, three times Nobel Peace Prize nominee This book is a tool box. Keep it close at hand and dip in often. Jim Carter OBE and Imelda Staunton CBE, actors Brilliant, easy to understand, and applies with equal force in personal and professional contexts. Sharif Shivji QC, barrister specialising in commercial law Why weren't we taught this at school? introduces Needs Understanding, a fresh approach for finding creative solutions and building relationships at home and at work. It's based on one simple idea: we're all on a quest to meet our underlying human needs - such as belonging, knowing we matter, and fun. Whether you are trying to make a tricky decision, communicate more effectively, parent the way you want to, or make a difference in the world, Needs Understanding can help. Understand the 'fingerprint needs' that drive your behaviour Discover 10 ways you listen that alienate other people, and what to do instead Stop blaming yourself and others, and fix what's going on underneath Find creative solutions to difficult problems by 'walking around the mountain' Empower yourself to change the world. Alice Sheldon is the creator of Needs Understanding and shares it globally with individuals and organizations. www.needs-understanding.com

Studies in Symbolic Interaction (SSI) is an ISI listed serial that locates current symbolic interactionist thought and provides contemporary readings of social situations. The papers are longer than the average journal article allowing more scope for expansion and development. To reflect the wide range of perspectives in symbolic interactionism, SSI draws on many interpretative resources including: Post-structuralism Reconstructivism Performativity Critical race theory Feminist theory Posthumanism Materials theory Post-colonialism Affective theories Queer theory

"Political Communications" offer a unique insight into the 2005 British General Election from the perspectives of those responsible for organizing, reporting, and understanding the campaign. It contains definitive accounts of what happened from those most intimately involved in preparing the main party strategies as well as leading academic, media and polling experts.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, typical households were equipped with a landline telephone, a desktop computer connected to a dial-up modem, and a shared television set. Television, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media. Today, homes are now network hubs for all manner of digital technologies, from mobile devices littering lounge rooms to Bluetooth toothbrushes in bathrooms-and tomorrow, these too will be replaced with objects once inconceivable. Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software-all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging explains how girls use instant messaging - a primary mode of new media communication for their generation - in order to flirt, bond, fight, and generally relate to peers in ways that both transcend and play into their culture's dominant gender norms. Examining IM conversations and interviews with the girls, Shayla Thiel Stern demonstrates exactly how girls use IM to construct identity and negotiate sexuality, as they constantly move between childhood and adulthood in their language and actions online. This book is among the first of its kind to truly explore the millennial generation's prevalent use of instant messaging and its implications for the future.