This book explores how the traditional ideal of Chinese manhood - the "wen" (cultural attainment) and "wu" (martial prowess) dyad - has been transformed by the increasing integration of China in the international scene. It discusses how increased travel and contact between China and the West are having a profound impact; showing how increased interchange with Western men, for whom "wu" is a more significant ideal, has shifted the balance in the classic Chinese dichotomy; and how the huge emphasis on wealth creation in contemporary China has changed the notion of "wen" itself to include business management skills and monetary power. The book also considers the implications of Chinese "soft power" outside China for the reconfigurations in masculinity ideals in the global setting. The rising significance of Chinese culture enables Chinese cultural norms, including ideals of manhood, to be increasingly integrated in the international sphere and to become hybridised. The book also examines the impact of the Japanese and Korean waves on popular conceptions of desirable manhood in China. Overall, it demonstrates that social constructions of Chinese masculinity have changed more fundamentally and become more global in the last three decades than any other time in the last three thousand years.

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1960s and onwards challenged the concept of art - hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures - manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history's most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices. By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

As China is increasingly integrated into the processes of economic, political, social, and cultural globalization, important questions arise about how Chinese people perceive and evaluate such processes. At the same time, international communication scholars have long been interested in how local, national, and transnational media communications shape people's attitudes and values. Combining these two concerns, this book examines a range of questions pertinent to public opinion toward globalization in urban China: To what degree are the urban residents in China exposed to the influences from the outside world? How many transnational social connections does a typical urban Chinese citizen have? How often do they consume foreign media? To what extent are they aware of the notion of globalization, and what do they think about it? Do they believe that globalization is beneficial to China, to the city where they live, and to them personally? How do people's social connections and communication activities shape their views toward globalization and the outside world? This book tackles these and other questions systematically by analyzing a four-city comparative survey of urban Chinese residents, demonstrating the complexities of public opinion in China. Media consumption does relate, though by no means straightforwardly, to people's attitudes and beliefs, and this book provides much needed information and insights about Chinese public opinion on globalization. It also develops fresh conceptual and empirical insights on issues such as public opinion toward US-China relations, Chinese people's nationalistic sentiments, and approaches to analyze attitudes toward globalization.

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that serve only to underpin the popular imagining of heavy metal as violent, homophobic and inherently masculine. This book queers heavy metal studies, bringing discussions of gender and sexuality in heavy metal out of that poorly theorized dichotomy. In this interdisciplinary work, the author connects new and existing scholarship with a strong ethnographic study of heavy metal's self-identified queer performers and fans in their own words, thus giving them a voice and offering an original and ground-breaking addition to scholarship on popular music, rock, and queer studies.

The concept of the cultural commons has become increasingly important for legal studies. Within this field, however, it is a contested concept: at once presented as a sphere for creativity, democratic access and freedom of speech, but one that denies property rights and misappropriates the public domain. In this book, Merima Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but in its connection to physical spaces such as museums and libraries. A legal cultural commons can, she argues, be envisioned as a lawscape that can quite literally be entered and engaged with. Focusing largely on art in the context of the copyright regime, but also addressing a number of cultural heritage issues, the book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine the realm of the commons as a potential space for overcoming the dichotomy between the owner and the consumer of culture. Challenging this dichotomy, it is the productive and creative potential of law itself that is elicited through the book's approach to the commons as the empirical basis for a new legal framework, which is able to accommodate a multitude of interests and values.

This book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to address critical perspectives on Chinese language social media, internationalizing the state of social media studies beyond the Anglophone paradigm. The collection focuses on the intersections between Chinese language social media and disability, celebrity, sexuality, interpersonal communication, charity, diaspora, public health, political activism and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The book is not only rich in its theoretical perspectives but also in its methodologies. Contributors use both qualitative and quantitative methods to study Chinese social media and its social-cultural-political implications, such as case studies, in-depth interviews, participatory observations, discourse analysis, content analysis and data mining.

The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice offers a critical reassessment of embodiment and materiality in rhetorical considerations of videogames. Holmes argues that rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of "habit" offer a critical resource for describing the interplay between thinking (writing and rhetoric) and embodiment. The book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of character (ethos), habit (hexis), and nature (phusis) can productively connect rhetoric to what Holmes calls "procedural habits": the ways in which rhetoric emerges from its interactions with the dynamic accumulation of conscious and nonconscious embodied experiences that consequently give rise to meaning, procedural subjectivity, control, and communicative agency both in digital game design discourse and the activity of play.

Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling is the Second Place Winner in the 2019 International Writers Awards! A vast majority of Academy Award-winning Best Pictures, television movies of the week, and mini-series are adaptations, watched by millions of people globally. Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling examines the technical methods of adapting novels, short stories, plays, life stories, magazine articles, blogs, comic books, graphic novels and videogames from one medium to another, focusing on the screenplay. Written in a clear and succinct style, perfect for intermediate and advanced screenwriting students, Great Adaptations explores topics essential to fully appreciating the creative, historical and sociological aspects of the adaptation process. It also provides up-to-date, practical advice on the legalities of acquiring rights and optioning and selling adaptations, and is inclusive of a diverse variety of perspectives that will inspire and challenge students and screenwriters alike. Please follow the link below to a short excerpt from an interview with Carole Dean about Great Adaptations: https://fromtheheartproductions.com/getting-creative-when-creating-great-adaptations/

Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in order to assert different histories and self-consciousness. As such, Sinophone cinemas and image production function as archives, with the capability of reinterpreting the multiple dimensions of past and present. The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines - artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars - to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions. This book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of film studies, China studies, East Asian studies, Taiwan studies, and Sinophone studies, as well as professionals who work in the film industry.

Film Comedy and the American Dream is an examination of national identity in the era of the American superpower as projected in popular comedic films that center on issues of upward mobility. It is the story of what made audiences laugh and why, and what this says about the changing shape of the American Dream from the end of the Second World War through the first part of the twenty-first century. Through a combination of narrative and thematic analyses of popular comedic films, contextualized within a dynamic historical framework, the book traces the increasing disillusionment with this central ideology in the face of multiple forms of systemic exclusion. It argues that film comedy is a major component of the discourse surrounding the American Dream because these movies often evoke humor by highlighting the incongruities that exist between the ideals that define this nation versus the actual lived experiences of its citizens.

This book analyzes constructions of injustice, group identification and participation in news and social media in anti-austerity protests within the European Union (EU). Since 2008, EU member-states have witnessed waves of protests and demonstrations against the adoption of austerity measures and alignment of domestic economies with the prevailing global neoliberal order. Understanding how the media represents dissent and how it influences public deliberation is of critical importance. It is accordingly necessary to explore the strategies deployed and role played by news and social media in representing and perhaps acting upon anti-austerity protests in the Eurozone crisis. This volume undertakes such a critical exploration.

This book rethinks Northeast India as a lived space, a centre of interconnections and unfolding histories, instead of an isolated periphery. Questioning dominant tropes and assumptions around the Northeast, it examines socio-political and historical processes, border issues, the role of the state, displacement and development, debates over natural resources, violence, notions of body and belonging, movements, tensions and relations, and strategies, struggles and narratives that frame discussions on the region. Drawing on current and emerging research in Northeast India studies, this work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, human geography, sociology and social anthropology, history, cultural studies, media studies and South Asian studies.

An Introduction to Rhetorical Communication offers a true integration of rhetorical theory and social science approaches to public communication. This highly successful text guides students through message planning and presentation in an easy step-by-step process. An Introduction to Rhetorical Communication provides students with a solid grounding in the rhetorical tradition and the basis for developing effective messages.

Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life. The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Music discusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.

Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change remains one of the most controversial issues of our time. Focusing on the rhetoric that surrounds the issue of climate change, this groundbreaking book analyses why the debate continues to rage and examines how we should argue when winning the argument really matters. Going beyond routine condemnations of the wildest statements made by religious fundamentalists or spokespeople for fossil fuel interests, the book explains the mutually exacerbating problems that permit many of us greet catastrophic predictions with an equivocal shrug. It argues that the argumentative situation around climate change makes a certain kind of skepticism - "fair-minded skepticism" - not only possible but likely. The book also strikes a hopeful note, reminding us that people do change their minds in response to effective argumentation that appeals to deeply shared values. Offering new insight into an ongoing academic discussion about the nature of argument and how it can be undertaken more effectively and ethically, as well as a new perspective on the rhetoric of science and technology, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of climate change, environmental humanities, rhetoric, environmental communication, sociology and science and technology studies.

In this day and age, much has been discussed as to what it means 'to be an Arab'. However, this enlightening volume seeks instead to invite us deeper into young Arab-Australian men's lives as we explore their vocational aspirations and working experiences within highly racialised and hierarchical industries. Young Migrant Identities is an in-depth exploration into the lives of Arab-Australian young men living in Western Sydney with creative career aspirations. Indeed, not only does Idriss explore how these men develop interests in fields such as music, filmmaking, and design, but she also examines the multilinear routes that they take to turn these interests into vocational identities. However, in the local migrant communities in which these young men live, creative identities are seen to compromise individual and familial prospects for social mobility, and artistic interests tend to go unsupported. Thus, this book also strives to offer new insights about how notions of gender, ethnicity, and social class are experienced because of these young men's 'risky' career ambitions. A timely volume, Young Migrant Identities draws together a range of theoretical issues and debates, engaging with sociological approaches to race and social class, creative and cultural economies, and studies on youth. It will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers interested in fields such as Youth Studies, Ethnicity Studies, Cultural Economy, and Migration Studies.

During the last two decades Spain has undergone an unprecedented transformation from being a country of emigrants to receiving a significant number of migrants from all around the world. This book focuses on the analysis of documentaries and fiction films representing migrants in Spain in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Guillen Marin explores the ways in which migrant and non-migrant filmmakers reframe the urban and rural space to create opportunities for a free, although contested, exchange between marginal voices and mainstream Spanish society. She analyzes the extent to which the films challenge forms of exclusion and represent ethnicity in a space that includes some and excludes others.

WHY PUBLISH: - Highly accessible and digestible, and informs students about complex topics such as political economy and ideology. - Contains globally applicable theoretical and applied examples. - New content addresses hot topics like self-branding / influencers and the blurring of entertainment and journalism.

Subcultures: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to subcultures in a global context. This fully revised new edition adds new case studies and an additional chapter on the digital lives of subculturists as well as reflections on the relationships between subcultures and globalisation and the resurgence of the far-right. Blending theory and practice, this text examines a varied range of subcultures including hip hop, graffiti writing, heavy metal, punk, gamers, burlesque, parkour, riot grrrl, straight edge, roller derby, steampunk, b-boying/b-girling, body modification, and skateboarding. Subcultures: The Basics answers the key questions posed by those new to the subject, including: * What is a subculture? What are the significant theories of subculture? * How do subcultures emerge, who participates and why? * How do subcultural identities interact with other aspects of self, such as social class, race, gender, and sexual identity? * What is the relationship between deviance, resistance and the 'mainstream'? * How have both progressive and reactionary subculturists contributed to social change? * How does society react to different subcultures? * How have subcultures spread around the world? * In what ways do digital technologies and social media influence subcultures? * What happens when subculturists age? Tracing the history and development of subcultural theory to the present day, this text is essential reading for all those studying subcultures in the contexts of sociology, cultural studies, history, media studies, anthropology, musicology, and criminology. It pushes the field forward with cutting-edge theories of resistance and social change, place and space, critical race and queer studies, virtual participation, and ageing and participation across the life course. Key terms and concepts are highlighted throughout the text whilst each chapter includes boxed case studies and signposts students to further reading and resources.

From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women's self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture. This book examines the relationship between normative femininity and women's self-directed violence in contemporary Japanese culture. To theoretically define the complexities that constitute normativity, the book develops the concept of 'contradictive femininity' and shows how in Japanese culture, women's paradoxical roles are thematised through three character construction techniques, broadly derived from the doppelganger motif. It then demonstrates how eating disorders and self-harm are included in normative femininity and suggests that such self-directed violence can be interpreted as coping strategies to overcome feelings of fragmentation related to contradictive femininity. Looking at novels, artwork, manga, anime, TV dramas and news stories, the book analyses both globally well known Japanese culture such as Murakami Haruki's literary works and Miyazaki Hayao's animation, as well as culture unavailable to non-Japanese readers. The aim of juxtaposing such diverse narrative and visual culture is to map common storylines and thematisation techniques about normative femininity, self-harm and eating disorders. Furthermore, it shows how women's private struggles with their own bodies have become public discourse available for consumption as entertainment and lifestyle products. Highly interdisciplinary, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society and gender and women's studies, as well as to academics and consumers of Japanese literature, manga and animation.

What would it mean to conceive of the sacred as a source of knowledge that is as vital as the secular? What insights does a contemplative approach yield in analysing neoliberal globalisation or Hindu fundamentalism? Is a dew drop sacred, or is it secular? In today's charged atmosphere many believe that the sacred is best kept firmly apart from the realm of the secular. SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique offers a contrasting view. It argues that the two are indivisible and can productively interweave in illuminating key contemporary issues. Essays investigate the quotidian (trash, cut flowers), the philosophical (advaita, karma), the economic (work, globalisation) and the political (war, violence). Mani invites us to rethink the prevailing view that secularism is the only progressive response to religious authoritarianism. SacredSecular proposes a conceptual approach in which body, mind, heart, nature, matter and spirit are not merely equals, but equally crucial to crafting an inclusive vision and practice. This book addresses several audiences: scholars of contemporary Indian society and culture, spiritual practitioners striving to integrate their practice with their politics, and all those interested in contemplating the present and what it portends for our collective future.

Travel journalism about natural attractions is environmental communication at the cusp of consumerism and concern. Countries and regions that market forests, rivers and wildlife to international tourists drive place-of-origin brand recognition that benefits exporters in other sectors. Place-branding in such destinations is not just PR for environmentally sustainable development and consumption, but also a political enterprise. Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism considers tourism public relations as elite reputation management, and applies models of political conflict and source-media relations to the analysis of the 'soft' genre of travel journalism. The book seeks to understand how, in whose interests and against what odds discourses of cosmopolitanism and place-branding influence the way travel journalists represent vulnerable and contested environments. Informed by interviews with journalists and their sources, Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism identifies and theorises networks, cultures, discursive strategies and multiple loyalties that can assist or interrupt flows of environmental concern in the cosmopolitan public sphere. The book should be of interest to scholars of environmental communication, environmental politics, journalism, tourism, marketing and public relations.

This project is a critical, rhetorical study of the digital text we call the Internet, in particular the style and figurative surface of its many pages as well as the conceptual, design patterns structuring the content of those same pages. Handa argues that as our lives become increasingly digital, we must consider rhetoric applicable to more than just printed text or to images. Digital analysis demands our acknowledgement of digital fusion, a true merging of analytic skills in many media and dimensions. CDs, DVDs, and an Internet increasingly capable of streaming audio and video prove that literacy today means more than it used to, namely the ability to understand information, however presented. Handa considers pedagogy, professional writing, hypertext theory, rhetorical studies, and composition studies, moving analysis beyond merely "using" the web towards "thinking" rhetorically about its construction and its impact on culture. This book shows how analyzing the web rhetorically helps us to understand the inescapable fact that culture is reflected through all media fused within the parameters of digital technology.

The revitalisation of audience studies is not only about new approaches and methods; it entails a crossing of disciplines and a bridging of long-established boundaries in the field. The aim of this volume is to capture the boundary-crossing processes that have begun to emerge across the discipline in the form of innovative, interdisciplinary interventions in the audience research agenda. Contributions to this volume seek to further this process though innovative, audience-oriented perspectives that firmly anchor media engagement within the diversity of contexts and purposes to which people incorporate media in their daily lives, in ways often unanticipated by industries and professionals.

Landscape and branding explores the way landscape is conceptualised, conceived, represented and designed by professionals in a brand-driven age. Landscape - incorporating tangible physical space as well as intangible concepts, narratives, images, and experiences of place - is constructed by a number of creative industries. This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotion of landscape and its production in design terms. Place branding involves the strategic and systematic composition of single-minded, experiential and market-friendly place identities which are consistently communicated across various media, including physical space. How does this implicate or transform notions of place, nature, landscape experience, and the qualitative value of landscape itself? How does this affect the role of landscape architecture? To answer these questions, place branding theory and practice is critically examined alongside an in depth case study of one specific landscape - the Blue Mountains (Australia). Projects undertaken between 1995 and 2015, including a branding strategy for the region, media campaigns, television, cinema, and several landscape architectural works in the public and private domain are comparatively analysed, focusing on the discourse, conventions and values informing their production, and the landscape narratives they convey.