The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (second edition) offers a comprehensive, detailed, and ground-breaking examination of soft power - a key factor in cultural diplomacy, cultural relations, and public diplomacy. Interrogating soft power as influence the handbook examines manifestations in media, public mind, policy and theory - in a fraught geopolitical climate, one demanding reconceptualization of soft power's role in state and civic society behaviour. * Part One provides important new conceptualization and critical analysis of soft power from international relations, philosophical and other social theoretical perspectives; analyses multiple methods of soft power measurement and makes proposals; connects soft power innovatively with other concepts. * Part Two addresses soft power and contemporary issues; examining new technology and soft power intentions, soft power and states' performance during the global pandemic; and soft power and values. * Part Three investigates cases from China, France, Greece, Israel, Japan, Kazhakstan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Turkiye, and USA - some in combination. This innovative handbook is a definitive resource for inquirers into soft power desiring to familiarize themselves with cutting-edge debates and research. It will be of interest and value to students, researchers and policy makers working in cultural relations, international communication, international relations, public diplomacy, and contiguous fields.

Unique volume articulating the "gender critical" feminist position 15 chapters by an interdisciplinary team of highly-regarded contributors Engages with an important - but highly polarised - political and social debate.

Closely examining how the news media reports economic and financial matters, this book equips students with solid methodological skills for reading and interpreting the news alongside a toolkit for best practice as an economic journalist. How to Read Economic News combines theory and practice to explore the discourse surrounding economics in the mass media and how this specialised form of reporting can be improved. Beginning by introducing major concepts such as financialised economic reporting, media amnesia and loss of trust, the book goes on to help students to interpret, understand and analyse existing news discourse and to identify subtle biases in news reports stemming from hegemonic belief systems. The final section puts this analytical knowledge into practice, providing students with methods for the critical production of news and covering such skills as identifying newsworthiness, story sourcing, achieving clarity, and using complex datasets in news stories. This is a key text for students and academics in the fields of financial journalism and critical discourse analysis who wish to approach the subject with a critical eye.

This book explores and explains how traditional and alternative media have framed the issues of gun trafficking into Mexico, drug-related violence, and spillover violence. It reveals how gun trafficking and drug-related violence are social problems for Mexico, while spillover violence is portrayed as a moral panic for the US. Readers will gain a better understanding of how the media portrays and frames the criminal activity that is occurring in Mexico and how it impacts the US. The book analyzes national newspapers from both sides of the US–Mexico border—The New York Times and El Universal—and draws on a theoretical framework of moral panics, social problems, and cultivation theory. It reveals six framing devices, "the blame game," "worthy and unworthy victims," "positive aspects," "negative aspects of gun trafficking," "indirect mention of gun trafficking," and "direct mention of gun trafficking," which are utilized by The New York Times and El Universal to discuss and frame the issue of gun trafficking into Mexico and its impact on Mexico’s border violence. Mexico’s Drug-Related Violence will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in the perception of media and crime, as well as those researching the topic of drug cartels and drug-related violence.

Closely examining how the news media reports economic and financial matters, this book equips students with solid methodological skills for reading and interpreting the news alongside a toolkit for best practice as an economic journalist. How to Read Economic News combines theory and practice to explore the discourse surrounding economics in the mass media and how this specialised form of reporting can be improved. Beginning by introducing major concepts such as financialised economic reporting, media amnesia and loss of trust, the book goes on to help students to interpret, understand and analyse existing news discourse and to identify subtle biases in news reports stemming from hegemonic belief systems. The final section puts this analytical knowledge into practice, providing students with methods for the critical production of news and covering such skills as identifying newsworthiness, story sourcing, achieving clarity, and using complex datasets in news stories. This is a key text for students and academics in the fields of financial journalism and critical discourse analysis who wish to approach the subject with a critical eye.

Volume 3 of A History of Early Film examines critical responses to early cinema, including the impassioned thoughts of one of the first film critics, the American poet Vachel Lindsay and considers some contemporary judgements of the social aspects of moving pictures. The volume also includes the 1917 report The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities...which provides a unique record of the attitudes towards the cinema by its British audiences exhibitors, producers, guardians of morality and those responsible for licensing.

• Practical, with easy to follow rules, without getting into the technicalities of linguistics. • Includes examples of correct and incorrect ways to report stories, as well as examples of common mistakes, problem words, and real journalism headlines. • Suitable for practicing journalists as well as students of journalism. • Written by a respected and well known journalist, experienced in working on national newspapers and in teaching.

Liz Wells is a leading figure in the field and this collection brings together otherwise difficult to find works for the first time. There is a great depth and range of essays in this collection, both in terms of geographical coverage and artistic styles, and addressing the work of well-known and lesser-known artists. These essays draw on the key focal points of the author’s scholarly expertise. The collection opens with a conversation with Martha Langford, providing an excellent introduction to Wells’ thought and reflection and contextualization about each of the themes and the pieces and their contemporary relevance. Section introductions by Wells provide further context and tie older essays to current concerns in the field.

This book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.

This book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.

This collection aims to fill in the deep gaps of vital contributions that have been erased from the sexuality field, illuminating the historical and current work, strategies, solutions, and thoughts from sexologists that have been excluded until now. Historically, the US sexuality field has not included the experiences and wisdom of racialized sexologists, educators, therapists, or professionals. Instead, sexuality professionals have been trained using a color-free narrative that does an injustice by excluding their work as well as failing to offer a fuller examination of how they have expanded the field and held it accountable. The result of this wholesale erasure is that today many sexuality professionals understand these contributions as extra or tangential, and not part of the full vision and history of the field of sexology. Highlighting the voices and experiences of those who have been racialized and thus excluded, isolated, erased, and yet have still emerged as vital contributors to the North American sexuality field, this text offers a significant shift in the way we learn and understand sexuality, one that is expansive and committed to liberation, healing, equity, and justice. Divided into three sections addressing safety, movement, and oral narratives, the contributors offer insightful and provoking chapters that discuss reproductive justice, LGBTQ themes, racial and social justice, and gender, and disability justice, demonstrating how these sexologists have been leaders, past and present, in change and progression. This futuristic textbook includes correction, engaged reading, and lesson plans which offers community workers and trainers an opportunity to use the text in their non-traditional learning environments. Creating a path forward that many believed was impossible, this accessible book is for all who work in and around sexuality. It welcomes inquiry and celebrates our humanity for the worlds we are building now and for the future.

Positing the washroom as an onto-epistemological site which exemplifies the way in which school spaces govern how gender is experienced, normalized, and understood by youth, this text illustrates how current school policies and practices around bathrooms fail to dismantle cisnormativity and recognize trans lives. Drawing on media-policy analysis, empirical study, and arts-based methodologies, it demonstrates how school spaces must be re-thought via a trans-centred epistemology, to be reflected in teacher education, policy, and curricula. Beginning with a review of the theoretical constellation of the heterotopia and critical trans-ing informing the analysis of data, it moves to offer a critical media and policy analysis of how trans and gender diverse students are de-limited, erased, or harmed. This position is supported by analysis of empirical data from a school bathroom project, including student photographs of washrooms, and other visual expressions of gender diverse and gender complex individuals. These elements - the media-policy analysis, the empirical study, and the archival online material - ultimately combine to offer new justifications for critical trans-informed policies and practices in education that recognize and centre trans and gender diverse knowledges, expressions and experiences. Centering the specific and nuanced debates around trans phenomena via an innovative methodology, it makes a unique and extremely timely contribution to the debate on gender-inclusive bathrooms, as well as trans rights to self-identification. As such, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduates, educators, and faculty working in the area of gender and sexuality in education, with interests in trans phenomena.

This is the first monograph of its kind to introduce and theorise empowerment as a new critical concept within contemporary literary studies. This book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in David Mitchell’s fictional universe as it offers fresh perspectives on his composition of an "Über-book", his narrative strategies and agenda, and ways of engaging the reader. This study is the first to situate David Mitchell’s novels within the context of eudaimonic reading and provide a comprehensive framework for reading fiction through the lens of empowerment. This book argues for a stronger interdisciplinary orientation of literary studies to understand how practices of storytelling are enmeshed in discourses of power. It may thus be relevant to academics and practitioners from fields such as history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology, pedagogy or economics.

This volume brings a critical lens to dance and culture within North East India. Through case studies, firsthand accounts, and interviews, it explores unique folk dances of Indigenous communities of North East India that reflect diverse journeys, lifestyles, and connections within their ethnic groups, marking almost every ritual and festival.

This book explores the moral and representational issues associated with engaging young people with popular media depictions of death and dying. Emotionally charged depictions of death play an important role in contemporary media directed toward teen and young adult audiences. Across creative works as diverse as interactive digital games, graphic novels, short form serial narratives, television and films, young people gain opportunities to engage with representations of death. In some cases, representations of death, dying, and the decision to end one's own life have been subject to public outcry and criticism related to its perceived potential impact on impressionable audiences. Death in/as entertainment can also be fleeting, commonplace and used for humour making it trivial. The chapters in this volume particularly consider the types of engagement made possible through different contemporary creative mediums and the ways in which they might distinctively capture or arouse thoughts and feelings on the end and loss of a human life. Death as Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students interested in new media and its cultural and psychological impact. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

In the time of agrarian crisis and movement, Remembering India’s Villages centralises the rural India—examining its stubborn past and dynamic present. Departing from the myth of little republics, it sees villages in cinema, development discourses, and debates among the founders of modern India like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar. Empirical research, multidisciplinary perspective, and cross-cultural insights are useful aids in this book toward understanding the reality of the rural that comprises structural anomalies and social possibilities. The book remembers India’s villages under the trope of reconstitution rather than disappearance. The book adds to the renewed interest in village studies, rural sociology, development studies, and intellectual history. This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

Provides journalism students and professionals with clear practical advice on using digital technologies alongside a critical analysis of the impact these technologies have on news reporting. Set in an international context, the new edition features updated discussions of key issues such as Blockchain, 360 degree photography, VR, AR and artificial intelligence. Includes expanded chapters on writing for both social media and chat apps and email, with updated interviews and examples to trace the development of both platforms. The dynamic and engaging companion website features cutting edge supporting resources that illustrate the content and link the book’s material to the web.

A cutting edge edited collection investigating the range of meanings associated with the local newspaper, its future and, ultimately, the value of its continued existence. Includes contributions from a range of scholars engaged with researching the local newspaper and its relationship to place, people and commercial imperatives. Explores how local newspapers function in different cultures and contexts through an array of case studies from such countries as Spain, Ireland, Denmark, the UK and the US.

Journalism Practice and Critical Reflexivity is a theoretical- and practice-based response to the crisis of mission and credibility in journalism studies that is heightened by online and social media. It describes, analyses and offers new approaches and models for critically reflexive journalism research, practice and education. With specific theoretical and conceptual approaches employed, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology along with the analytical, practice-based, reflective and narrative techniques of Donald Schön and autoethnography, this book provides possible responses to these crises of purpose and legitimacy, and to transformation, in Western corporate journalism. With journalists working in mainstream media under increasing pressure, the book considers the possibility of either slowing journalism down or having elements of a more reflexive journalism practice set alongside other routine practices. It proposes reciprocity as a core value to guide much investigative and news journalism. Scholars and practitioners of journalism, researchers and post-graduate students interested in journalism, critical reflexivity and reflective practice in relevant disciplines can apply the concepts and techniques of critical reflexivity in their own research or teaching. Journalists, criminologists and others concerned with Indigenous deaths in custody, prisons, the institutional duty of care, social and/or legal justice and effective government administration will also find the study rewarding.

Practice-oriented approach gives students a clear view of how the public relations profession is structured and practiced today, while also providing relevant backgrounds in theory and research. Particular attention given to pedagogical features such as scenario-based questionnaires to encourage learning and assist students in developing key competencies. Suitable for introductory public relations courses or modules, most usefully at the undergraduate level.

A cutting edge edited collection investigating the range of meanings associated with the local newspaper, its future and, ultimately, the value of its continued existence. Includes contributions from a range of scholars engaged with researching the local newspaper and its relationship to place, people and commercial imperatives. Explores how local newspapers function in different cultures and contexts through an array of case studies from such countries as Spain, Ireland, Denmark, the UK and the US.

Focusing on Netflix's child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science-fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix's 'Family Watch Together TV' tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate, family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. Chapters explore how this 'Netflixication' of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations. This book will be of particular interest to upper level undergraduates, graduates and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

This volume traces the interconnections between myth, environmentalism, narrative, poetry, comics and innovative artistic practice, using this as a framework through which to examine strategies for repairing our unhealthy relationship with the planet. Challenging late capitalist modes encouraging mindless consumption and the degradation of human-nature relations, this collection advocates a re-evaluation of the ethical relation to "living with" and sharing the earth. Myth and the environment have shared a rich common cultural history travelling as far back as the times of storytelling and legend, with the environment often the central theme. Following a robust introduction, the book is organised into three main sections: Myth, Disaster and Present-Day Views on Ecological Damage; Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Myths and Ecological Knowledge; Art Practices Myth and Environmental Resilience; and concludes with a Coda from Jeanette Hart-Mann. The methodology draws from diverse perspectives, such as ecocriticism, new materialism and Anthropocene studies, offering a truly interdisciplinary discussion that reflects on the dialogue among environment and myth, whilst a broad range of contributions are included from Canada, United States, the Caribbean, Ukraine, Japan, Morocco, and Brazil. This volume will be of interest for students, scholars, activists and experts in environmental humanities, myth and myth criticism, literature and art on more-than human and nature interaction, ecocriticism, environmental activism, and climate change.

This volume traces the interconnections between myth, environmentalism, narrative, poetry, comics and innovative artistic practice, using this as a framework through which to examine strategies for repairing our unhealthy relationship with the planet. Challenging late capitalist modes encouraging mindless consumption and the degradation of human-nature relations, this collection advocates a re-evaluation of the ethical relation to "living with" and sharing the earth. Myth and the environment have shared a rich common cultural history travelling as far back as the times of storytelling and legend, with the environment often the central theme. Following a robust introduction, the book is organised into three main sections: Myth, Disaster and Present-Day Views on Ecological Damage; Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic Myths and Ecological Knowledge; Art Practices Myth and Environmental Resilience; and concludes with a Coda from Jeanette Hart-Mann. The methodology draws from diverse perspectives, such as ecocriticism, new materialism and Anthropocene studies, offering a truly interdisciplinary discussion that reflects on the dialogue among environment and myth, whilst a broad range of contributions are included from Canada, United States, the Caribbean, Ukraine, Japan, Morocco, and Brazil. This volume will be of interest for students, scholars, activists and experts in environmental humanities, myth and myth criticism, literature and art on more-than human and nature interaction, ecocriticism, environmental activism, and climate change.

Masculinities in the US Hangout Sitcom examines how four sitcoms - Friends, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, and New Girl - mediate the tense relationship between neoliberalism and masculinities. Why is Ross in Friends so worried about everything? This book argues that the men in Friends and similar shows that follow young, straight, white twentysomethings in major US cities, are beset by a range of social and economic concerns about their place in society. Using multiple methods of analysis to examine these shows - including conjunctural analysis, historiographical method, and critical discourse analysis - a range of topics in these shows are examines, from sexuality through to homosociality, from race through to nationality. This book makes an insightful contribution to work on the television sitcom and on neoliberalism in culture and society. It will be an ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, post-graduates, and researchers in a range of disciplines including television and screen studies, critical studies on men and masculinities and humor studies.