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Books > Humanities > General
How are businesses responding to global changes in markets driven by changes in technology? Whatever the industry, the trends are familiar: globalization and the rise of industrial conglomerates, mergers and acquisitions, the networking of businesses and markets, outsourcing and shifts in the distribution of resources and production, all reflected in the emergence of new players, new products and services and new forms of competition. As arguably the first knowledge-based business, book publishing provides an ideal setting for the study of challenge and opportunity. The industry is currently experiencing fierce levels of competition, extreme financial pressures, restructuring and the threat of technology-induced obsolescence. Added to these are the challenges posed by new and potential entrants to the market, the emergence of new products and services, new ways of doing business, including trading in virtual markets, and the vulnerability of traditional business models. The suitability of book publishing as a context for researching the emergence of knowledge-based business becomes all too apparent. Through combining primary research with secondary analysis drawn from the relevant literatures, Books, Bytes and Business is both a readable and informative account of business in the knowledge-based economy.
Here is a provocative book that examines precisely how and why mass communication has an impact upon the sexual realities of our lives. Written in response to a demand for information that cuts across many of the boundaries found in more traditional books on sexuality and mass communication, Gay People, Sex, and the Media covers a broad range of sexual identity, socialization, and mass communication issues and represents a variety of theoretical and methodological orientations. Although the chapters are diverse, they all focus on how the mass media--television, radio, films, newspapers, magazines, and recorded music--contribute significantly to the very definitions we form of ourselves and of each other. In part, this informative volume discusses and analyzes several concerns regarding minority perspectives in the context of the the study of mass media content and effects; analyzes mediated information about AIDS and highlights the responsibility of the mass media to disseminate more accurate information; addresses the relationships between mass media content (primarily television) and sexual socialization; explores issues confronted by individuals whose sexual orientations are generally perceived as falling out of the mainstream; and provides a selective bibliography of print, aural, and visual resources on gay men, lesbians, and the mass media. Unique in contrast to other books of research on human sexuality and mass communication, Gay People, Sex, and the Media gives more than a passing reference to issues concerning sexual identity and gay and lesbian concerns. Scholars and students of human sexuality, especially those who wish to explore their field from a communications perspective, will find this to be a valuable book. It is also useful to communications researchers and teachers, particularly those studying mediated communications in society, media ethics, and sex and the media. Finally, for professionals involved in creating or monitoring media content or forging public policy and community action programs in response to these issues, this volume serves as an essential sourcebook.
Drawing on contemporary and historical case studies from Finland, Sweden and Norway, Progress or Perish highlights the roles that art, culture and academic research play alongside technology and economics as bearers of change, approaching the study of progress from the human level. By turning attention towards communities and the everyday social activities of individuals in their socio-cultural and microhistorical contexts, this volume links the idea of progress to the emancipation and empowerment of collectives. Multidisciplinary in nature, Progress or Perish brings together the work of leading scholars to explore the changes that individual and social agency can effect. It engages with the wider theoretical and methodological debates to be of key interest to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists, as well as those with interests in gender studies, cultural and environmental history, literary studies and political science.
Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.
This book offers clear and detailed strategies for tackling every stage of the documentary editing process, from organizing raw footage and building select reels to fine cutting and final export. Written by a Sundance award-winning documentary editor with a dozen features to his credit and containing examples from over 100 films, this book presents a step-by-step guide for how to turn seemingly shapeless footage into focused scenes, and how to craft a structure for a documentary of any length. The book contains insights and examples from seven of America's top documentary editors, including Geoffrey Richman, ACE (The Cove, Tiger King), Kate Amend, ACE (The Keepers, Serena), and Mary Lampson (Harlan County U.S.A.), and a companion website contains easy-to-follow video tutorials. Written for both practitioners and enthusiasts, this book offers unique and invaluable insights into the documentary editing process. The second edition is completely revised and updated with contemporary examples and contains a new chapter titled, "Editing the Short Documentary."
In public debates, communication campaigns and public policies, it is increasingly common to attribute to consumers and their agency an ability to help solve a broad array of societal problems. This tendency is particularly clear in the field of food consumption, owing to the fact that food is both materially and symbolically central for consumers in everyday life as well as for large scale institutionalized dynamics. In order to shed light on the challenges facing food consumption, this volume takes an innovative theoretical approach, presenting four empirical Danish case studies which are compared with other analyses drawn from the wider international context. Consumption Challenged will appeal not only to sociologists of consumption, risk and the environment, but also to policy makers and researchers in the fields of geography, communication, media, governance and social psychology.
The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars. Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism. As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.
Everyday Life in Asia offers a range of detailed case studies which present social perspectives on sensory experiences in Asia. Thematically organized around the notions of the experience of space and place, tradition and the senses, cross-border sensory experiences, and habitus and the senses - its rich empirical content reveals people's commitment to place, and the manner in which its sensory experience provides the key to penetrating the meanings abound in everyday life. Offering the first close analysis of various facets of sensory experience in places that share a geographical location or cultural orientation in Asia, this collection links the conception of place with understandings of 'how the senses work'. With contributions from an international team of experts, Everyday Life in Asia will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers and sociologists with interests in culture, everyday life, and their relation to the senses of place and space.
Covering"the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song"has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records, and other artists and their catalogues of works.The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts, and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. Play it Again represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.
Classed Intersections examines the salience, transformation and tension of class analysis at a crucial juncture in its return to and reinvention of sociological agendas. The contributors, including both established and emerging academics, examine class as produced through combined social, cultural and economic practices but are clear not to reify class over and above other paradigms; instead a number of key intersections are fore grounded including gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The collection draws on a variety of methodological positions, including in-depth interviews, ethnographies, and auto-biographical approaches. It scrutinizes classed intersections across a wide range of social spheres and practices, including education, the workplace, everyday life, citizenship struggles, consumption, the family and sexuality. Taken together, this volume will enhance efforts to establish 'new' working class studies both in the UK and around the world.
Liberalizing, Feminizing and Popularizing Health Communications in Asia provides insights into the manner in which biomedical discourses are communicated and portrayed in Asia in light of the rapidly evolving socio-cultural, technological and epidemiological undercurrents. Highlighting the more pluralized and interactive dynamics in the appropriation and dissemination of medical and public health knowledge, its specific case studies challenge the notions of the one way transmission of medicine by modern Western trained doctors and public health officials to ignorant patients and masses, particularly in the non-Western world. With specific examples drawn from popular media, this volume examines the extent to which these developments have given the broader public both greater access to information and choices. Multidisciplinary in scope and truly international in focus, it relates the everyday of health communications to more macro social trends on the Asian continent and will be of interest to scholars within science and technology studies, media and cultural studies and sociology alike.
The book offers a unique model in an area where research is much-needed: the cognitive underpinnings, interactions and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and gifs to images, video and social media apps The book gives attention to how both the particular interfaces of different apps and users' personal attributes influence the contexts and uses of smartphone communication The book includes insights from related disciplines such as media studies and sociology in an attempt to unpack the timeliest questions of our digitally mediated age This book will prove valuable for scholars and graduate students of communication, linguistics, pragmatics, media studies and sociology of mass media and will likewise engage upper-level undergraduate students
Photography, Anthropology and History examines the complex historical relationship between photography and anthropology, and in particular the strong emergence of the contemporary relevance of historical images. Thematically organized, and focusing on the visual practices developed within anthropology as a discipline, this book brings together a range of contemporary and methodologically innovative approaches to the historical image within anthropology. Importantly, it also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of both the historical image and the notion of the archive to recent anthropological thought. As current research rethinks the relationship between photography and anthropology, this volume will serve as a stimulus to this new phase of research as an essential text and methodological reference point in any course that addresses the relationship between anthropology and visuality.
The book explores key South Asian writings on cultural theory and literary criticism. It discusses the dynamics of textual contents, rhetorical styles, and socio-political issues through an exploration of seminal South Asian scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The volume examines concepts and methods of critical studies. It also discusses colonial and postcolonial discourses on art, religion, nationalism, identity, representation, resistance, and gender in the South Asian context. The essays are accompanied by textual questions and intertextual discussions on rhetorical, creative, and critical aspects of the selected texts. The exercise questions invite the reader to explore the mechanics of reading about and writing on discursive pieces in South Asian studies. Comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this textbook will be indispensable for students and researchers of South Asian studies, cultural theory, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, literary and language studies, women and gender studies, rhetoric and composition, political sociology, and cultural studies.
Network Art brings an international group of leading theorists and artists together to investigate how the internet, in the form of websites, mailing lists, installations and performance, has been used by artists to develop artwork. Covering a period from the mid 1990s to the present day, this fascinating text includes key texts by historians and theorists such as Charlie Gere, Josephine Bosma, Tilman Buarmgartel and Sarah Cook, alongside descriptions of important projects by Thomson and Craighead, Lisa Jevbratt and 0100101110101101.org amongst many others. Fully illustrated throughout, and including many pictures of artworks never before seen in print, Network Art represents one of the first substantial attempts to place major artist's writings on network art alongside those of critics, curators and historians. In doing so it takes a unique approach, offering the first comprehensive attempt to understand network art practice, rooted in concrete descriptions of the systems and the process required to create it.
Covers all aspects of broadcast journalism, beginning with the basic principles of having a career in the field, the principles of journalism and basic broadcast skills, and continuing with in-depth practical aspects of radio and television news. A new dedicated chapter on social media discusses sourcing news, approaching witnesses, verifying information and subsequent changes in the production flow. New chapters discuss the rise of mobile journalism and podcasting, specifically looking at the kit involved, the production process and how audio and broadcast journalism can be incorporated.
Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.
Through the analysis of over seventy films and thirty television series, ranging from Shortbus, Sweet Home Alabama, and Poseidon to Noaha (TM)s Arc, Brothers & Sisters, and Dawsona (TM)s Creek, Goltz examines reoccurring narrative structures in popular media that perpetuate the extreme value placed upon "young" gay male bodies, while devaluing health, aging, and longevity. Alienated from the future -- outside of limited and exclusionary systems of marriage and procreation -- the gay male is narrated within a circular tragedy that draws upon cultural mythologies of "older" gay male predation, the absence of gay intergenerational mentorship, and the gay male as sacrificial victim. Using a Burkean framework, Goltz makes a theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural investigation of how the increased visibility of "positive" gay representation in dominant media shapes contemporary meanings of gay aging, heteronormative future, homonormative future, and queer potential.
This collection of essays and interviews investigates current practices that expand our understanding and experience of performance through the use of state-of-the-art technologies. It brings together leading practitioners, writers and curators who explore the intersections between theatre, performance and digital technologies, challenging expectations and furthering discourse across the disciplines. As technologies become increasingly integrated into theatre and performance, Interfaces of Performance revisits key elements of performance practice in order to investigate emergent paradigms. To do this five concepts integral to the core of all performance are foregrounded, namely environments, bodies, audiences, politics of practice and affect. The thematic structure of the volume has been designed to extend current discourse in the field that is often led by formalist analysis focusing on technology per se. The proposed approach intends to unpack conceptual elements of performance practice, investigating the strategic use of a diverse spectrum of technologies as a means to artistic ends. The focus is on the ideas, objectives and concerns of the artists who integrate technologies into their work. In so doing, these inquisitive practitioners research new dramaturgies and methodologies in order to create innovative experiences for, and encounters with, their audiences.
The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has, to date, written and directed nine films, winning an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013. In 2016, he created and directed his first TV series, The Young Pope, which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films. This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film. International contributors from the UK, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada and the United States, Italy, Israel, France, UK, Australia, Canada, offer original interpretations of Sorrentino's work. They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory, nostalgia, ageing, love, thirst for fulfilment, search for the self, identity crisis, human estrangement, marginality, irony and power. In so doing, they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion, challenging established assumptions and interpretations. Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino's highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture. While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian, none of these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership. This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino, arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker. The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY, and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli, who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions. Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS - The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019. The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field. Primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies. Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates. Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses Given the subject, there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership, but this is primarily a scholarly text.
In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.
This book presents over twenty authors' reflections on 'curating care' - and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life, and for more 'caring curating' that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving. Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life is reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and nonhuman interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics, and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care. Practicing curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today's general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social, and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.
This comprehensive revision guide contains everything students need to know to succeed on their A Level Film Studies course. Essential Revision for A Level Film Studies features engaging and accessible chapters to help learners develop a deeper understanding of the key elements of film form, including cinematography, mise en scene, performance, lighting, editing and sound. The book offers detailed explanations of the specialist study areas required for the A Level course, including auteur theory, spectatorship, genre, key critical debates, narrative and ideology, as well as overviews of key film movements like French New Wave cinema, German Expressionism and Soviet Montage. Also included are practical exercises designed to help students apply essential concepts to film set texts, sample exam responses for both Eduqas and OCR exam boards, and challenge activities designed to help students secure premium grades. With its practical approach and comprehensive scope, Essential Revision for A Level Film Studies is the ideal resource for students and teachers. The book also features a companion website at EssentialFilmRevision.com, which includes a wide range of supporting resources including revision flashcards and worksheets, a bank of film set text applications for exam questions for all film specifications, and classroom-ready worksheets that teachers can use alongside the book to help students master A Level Film exam content.
Certain bizarre spaces, where disruption or disarray rule, leave us estranged and 'out of place'. This book examines such spaces, highlighting the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and the state of being 'in-between'; of cognitive displacement, loss, fear, or exhilaration. It expands on why space is sometimes estranging and for whom it is strange. It is the first book to link strangeness and spatial production, as well as empirical explorations of strange spaces within a profound theoretical discussion of 'what is strange about strange spaces' and how they evolve in a modern media age.
Internet censorship is a controversial topic - while the media periodically sounds alarms at the dangers of online life, the uncontrollable nature of the internet makes any kind of pervasive regulatory control impossible. This book compares the Australian solution, a set of laws which have been criticized as being both draconian and ineffectual, to major regulatory systems in the UK and US and understanding what drives them. The 'impossibility' of internet regulation opens deeper issues - what do we mean by regulation and how do we judge the certainty and effectiveness of law? These questions lead to an exploration of the theories of legal geography which provide tools to understand and evaluate regulatory practices. The book will be a valuable guide for academics, students and policy makers working in media and censorship law, those from a civil liberties interest and people interested in internet theory generally. |
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