This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.

This edited collection calls for renewed attention to the concept of the sociological imagination, allowing social scientists to link private issues to public troubles. Inspired by the eminent Glasgow-based sociologist, John Eldridge, it re-engages with the concept and shows how it can be applied to analyzing society today.

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

The rising popularity of political communication research warrants this second volume. In 1990, the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) elevated the Political Communication Research Group (PCRG) to section status. The American Political Science Association recently formed a Political Communication section, and the International Communication Association's Political Communication section continues to thrive.

The rising popularity of political communication research warrants this second volume. In 1990, the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) elevated the Political Communication Research Group (PCRG) to section status. The American Political Science Association recently formed a Political Communication section, and the International Communication Association's Political Communication section continues to thrive.

The Yearbook addresses the overriding question: what are the effects of the 'opening up' of science to the media? Theoretical considerations and a host of empirical studies covering different configurations provide an in-depth analysis of the sciences' media connection and its repercussions on science itself. They help to form a sound judgement on this recent development.

This book is a study of contemporary Radio 4 output, covering the entire broadcast day. Radio is largely neglected by media and cultural studies. The small body of existing work on Radio 4 is predominantly historical, focusing on institutional history, or sociological, focusing on contemporary BBC editorial and journalistic practices. Reading Radio 4, by contrast, analyses contemporary Radio 4 programmes entirely from the point of view of today's listener. Individual chapters correspond to all existing Radio 4 timeslots in the entire broadcast day of 19 hours 40 minutes, from 5.20am to 1.00am. The study, while academic in approach, aims to promote an informed and critical appreciation of Radio 4 for all listeners, as well as students of the media.

This collection brings together new research on contemporary media, politics and power. It explores ways and means through which media can and do empower or dis-empower citizens at the margins that is, how they act as vehicles of, or obstacles to, civic agency and social change.

Throughout American history, the press has been incredibly adept at making the public aware. The history of the press in crisis situations is in many ways the story of public attitudes and the story of America. This book looks at the press over time and the way it has functioned in times of crisis. It considers press coverage of 13 events, spanning a time frame that includes the birth of the nation, its political, economic, and social struggles as a young country, and its civil war. It tells how a young agrarian society grew into an industrial giant, and how it changed from isolationist to a world power. It relates how this country coped with the growth of socialism, two world wars, civil unrest, and with the problem of world overpopulation.

The American press has performed various functions throughout the years. "The Colonial Press" served as a vehicle of discussion, debate, and finally agitation and, in the process, may have defined itself and laid a groundwork for the press's future roles. The press has agitated, advocated, and persuaded. It has been duped, it has been unfair, and it has misled. This volume considers such concepts as advocacy journalism, a central theme of the chapters on abolitionists and David Duke, and social responsibility, a primary part of the chapter on Japanese-American internment. The press's attempt to lead public opinion is the focus of the chapters on the partisan press, the antebellum period, and the first Red Scare in 1919. The chapter on Joseph McCarthy looks at the concepts of objectivity and the use and misuse of pseudo news. The final chapter, on overpopulation, deals extensively with agenda setting.

Representing a detailed analysis of footballers' wives and their role in contemporary British culture, this books explores how the generic and stereotypical 'Wag' has been created by newspaper and magazine coverage, auto/biographies and influential television programmes.

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now "spectacle" can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin's plea to "explode the continuum of history" and bring our attention to now-time.

Multimedia Modernism explores the complex effects of a new media environment on avant-garde literary production in the early twentieth century. During this period, the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky wrote works which, in one way or another, attest to the immense effect that photography, cinematography, mechanical print technology and visual advertising had on the established arts. Re-reading modernism's technological origins through the lens of media theory, this innovative study proposes a serious new methodological approach to modernism in general. Examining a wide range of literature that includes Gertrude Stein's contributions to Camera Work, Louis Zukofsky's groundbreaking poem 'A' and Wyndham Lewis's celebrated Blast, this book embeds literary revolution within media evolution to show that literary criticism and media history have a lot to learn from each other.

This book examines how identities associated with cycling are evoked, narrated and negotiated in a media context dominated by digital environments. Arguing that the nature of identity is being impacted by the changing nature of the material and semiotic resources available for making meaning, the author introduces an approach to exploring such identity positioning through the interrelated frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, and illustrates how this happens in practice. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of identity and media environment. Part I considers celebrity identities in the conventional media of print and television. Part II investigates community and leisure / sporting identity through an online cycling forum, while Part III examines corporate identity realised through corporate websites, consumer reviews and Youtube channels. This unique volume will appeal to students and scholars of discourse analysis, applied linguistics and the world of cycling.

This collection reflects on the international political economy of media and the valuable lessons to be learned from the media reforms currently taking place across South America. The contributors present a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives on the ongoing battle for media space in South America, and the volume includes a foreword by Ernesto Laclau.

The Battle of Britain lasted for sixteen weeks during later 1940, yet this struggle for air supremacy was vital in thwarting Hitler's invasion threat. The Good Fight discusses wartime propaganda where "The Few," the RAF's fighter and bomber pilots, captivated the world through their combat prowess and valour. Projected through press, film, radio broadcasts and publications, this book assesses the constituencies, organisations, censorship and approaches deployed in exploiting this fortuitous opportunity, and the impact upon British morale. Charting its roots in the run up to war, it discusses the evolving propaganda coverage throughout the war years, and the post-war historiography.

How is The Simpsons a satirical artwork engaged with important social, political, and cultural issues? Matthew A. Henry offers the first comprehensive understanding of the show as a satire and explores the ways in which The Simpsons participates in the so-called "culture war" debates taking place in American society. Situating The Simpsons within the framework of satirical humor in American media, the tradition of the nuclear family sitcom, and the history of the Fox Television network, this book explores American culture thematically, examining how the show satirically engages with issues of race and ethnicity, national identity, gender and sexuality, social and economic class, and religion.

Despite the boom in scholarship in both Comics Studies and Memory Studies, the two fields rarely interact-especially with issues beyond the representation of traumatic and autobiographical memories in comics. With a focus on the roles played by styles and archives-in their physical and metaphorical manifestations-this edited volume offers an original intervention, highlighting several novel ways of thinking about comics and memory as comics memory. Bringing together scholars as well as cultural actors, the contributions combine studies on European and North American comics and offer a representative overview of the main comics genres and forms, including superheroes, Westerns, newspaper comics, diary comics, comics reportage and alternative comics. In considering the many manifestations of memory in comics as well as the functioning and influence of institutions, public and private practices, the book exemplifies new possibilities for understanding the complex entanglements of memory and comics.

This book is available open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The so-called Arab Spring challenged conventional wisdom and certainties about the Arab world where its effects continue to be felt as well as in the diaspora. This book provides an original contribution to current social and cultural theory on Arab social movements by giving a fuller historical and critical treatment of contemporary artistic and cultural production from the region and beyond. Thematically structured and covering culture, media, politics, and literary studies, the book uses a range of theoretical material that engages readers in three key ways. First, it adopts a critical standpoint with respect to the term "Arab Spring," recognizing the multiple interpretations and varied geographical, historical, and political realities of the term. Second, its focus on carefully selected case studies - namely, Egypt, Tunis, Syria, and Yemen - adds depth to analysis of the cultural, literary and artistic dimensions that operate fluidly across the Arab world. Third, it presents a methodological case study for the growing community of researchers involved in interdisciplinary education. Together, the contributors to the book show how the interplay of politics, culture, and media across varied locations has and continues to shape emergent Arab social forms and a region on the cusp of historical and cultural change.

Public Space, Media Space asks how public space is being mediatised in different ways in different cities around the world today. Urban public spaces today are saturated by media, perhaps more than ever before. These range from highly visible large LED screens in cities like Tokyo, through the cassette sermons one hears in the streets of Cairo, to the invisible, inaudible satellite surveillance systems that are everywhere. They include personal media like MP3 players and mobile phones, public information systems, commercial advertising, and more. How do these media shape, interconnect, or constitute physical public space, and how do they connect to virtual public spaces? How should we understand these phenomena? Is this simply a process of ever greater degradation of the public as direct face-to-face communication is replaced by ever more mediated and commercialized forms of communication among strangers? Or are new publics, new public processes, and new public spaces being constituted?

Bringing together contributions from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, arts, politics, science and technology studies, political communication theory and popular culture studies, this volume engages both with theoretical debates and detailed empirical studies, showcasing how the public sphere is transformed by digital media, and in turn how this digital public sphere shapes and is shaped by debates surrounding crisis, conflict, migration and culture. Case studies from Bulgaria, Nigeria, China, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, UK, Mexico and India are discussed in detail.

Twitter has become a household name, discussed both for its role in prominent national elections, natural disasters, and political movements, as well as for what some malign as narcissistic "chatter." This book takes a critical step back from popular discourse and media coverage of Twitter, to present the first balanced, scholarly engagement of this popular medium.

In this timely and comprehensive introduction, Murthy not only discusses Twitter's role in our political, economic, and social lives, but also draws a historical line between the telegraph and Twitter to reflect on changes in social communication over time. The book thoughtfully examines Twitter as an emergent global communications medium and provides a theoretical framework for students, scholars, and tweeters to reflect critically on the impact of Twitter and the contemporary media environment. The book uses case studies including citizen journalism, health, and national disasters to provide empirically rich insights and to help decipher some of the ways in which Twitter and social media more broadly may be shaping contemporary life.

Explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and online media. This edited collection focuses on the links between youth and African popular culture. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars explore popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. Essays cover a variety of cultural representations--visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual--created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public and shared locally and globally. The volume examines the range of music, art, and media African youth produce, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, and the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Essays further explore why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as symbols of the cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world-a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems.

This book examines the ways in which the study and practice of international relations are misunderstood, both by scholars and politicians. It begins by examining critical errors in reasoning and argument which determine the way key issues in the field are discussed and explained. It then explores a number of case studies which are affected by these errors, including the legal status of the modern nation-state, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the idea of the Deep State, the relationship between the West and radical Islam, the impact of moral righteousness on historical understanding, and the role of class in modern Western politics.

This book presents the current state of the art in the field of e-publishing and social media, particularly in the Arabic context. The book discusses trends and challenges in the field of e-publishing, along with their implications for academic publishing, information services, e-learning and other areas where electronic publishing is essential. In particular, it addresses (1) Applications of Social Media in Libraries and Information Centers, (2) Use of Social Media and E-publishing in E-learning (3) Information Retrieval in Social Media, and (4) Information Security in Social Media.