Economic and political relations with Iran were a primary concern for the German Democratic Republic leadership and dominated the GDR's press. This is the first book to analyse the representation of Iran in the media, from the GDR's formation in 1949 until 1989, the last complete year before its demise. Covering key events, such as the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, the White Revolution, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war, the author reveals that only in periods where the two countries enjoyed less amicable or poor relations, was the press free to critically report events in Iran and openly support the cause of the country's communist party, the Tudeh. The book explores the use of the press as a tool for ideological education and propaganda. It also examines how the state's official Marxist-Leninist ideology, the GDR's international competition with West Germany, and cultural prejudices and stereotypes impacted reporting so powerfully.

* Highlighting the year's 25 most important under-reported news stories, this volume alerts readers to deficiencies in corporate media and the resurgence of alternative media.

Education, the production of knowledge, identity formation, and ideological hegemony are inextricably linked in early modern and modern Korea. This study examines the production and consumption of knowledge by a multitude of actors and across languages, texts, and disciplines to analyze the formulation, contestation, and negotiation of knowledge. The production and dissemination of knowledge become sites for contestation and struggle-sometimes overlapping, at other times competing-resulting in a shift from a focus on state power and its control over knowledge and discourse to an analysis of local processes of knowledge production and the roles local actors play in them. Contributors are Daniel Pieper, W. Scott Wells, Yong-Jin Hahn, Furukawa Noriko, Lim Sang Seok, Kokubu Mari, Mark Caprio, Deborah Solomon, and Yoonmi Lee.

Loki, ever the shapeshifter, has never been more adaptable across pop culture. Whether it's deep in the stories from Norse mythology, the countless offshoots and intepretations across media, or even the prolific Loki that has come to dominate our screens via the Marvel Cinematic Universe, each serves its own purpose and offers a new layer to the character we've come to know so well. By exploring contemporary variations of Loki from Norse god to anti-hero trickster in four distinct categories - the God of Knots, Mischief, Outcasts and Stories - we can better understand the power of myth, queer theory, fandom, ritual, pop culture itself and more. Johnson invites readers to journey with him as he unpicks his own evolving relationship with Loki, and to ask: Who is your Loki? And what is their glorious purpose?

How online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for young people Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found each other and formed community online, learning from one another along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age. These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they support "connected learning"-learning that brings together youth interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic, and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online communities is an established fixture of growing up in the networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and social development. While providing a wealth of positive examples for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning, the book also examines the ways in which these communities still reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for how the positive learning opportunities offered by online communities could be made available to more young people, at school and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected learning.

How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive introduction to the techniques used by the early Frankfurt School to study and combat authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the writings of the early Frankfurt School, at the same time as authoritarian populist movements are resurging in Europe and the Americas. This volume shows why and how Frankfurt School methodologies can and should be used to address the rise of authoritarianism today. Critical theory scholars are assembled from a variety of disciplines to discuss Frankfurt School approaches to dialectical philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, human subjects research, discourse analysis and media studies. Contributors include: Robert J. Antonio, Stefanie Baumann, Christopher Craig Brittain, Dustin J. Byrd, Mariana Caldas Pinto Ferreira, Panayota Gounari, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Imaculada Kangussu, Douglas Kellner, Dan Krier, Lauren Langman, Claudia Leeb, Gregory Joseph Menillo, Jeremiah Morelock, Felipe Ziotti Narita, Michael R. Ott, Charles Reitz, Avery Schatz, Rudolf J. Siebert, William M. Sipling, David Norman Smith, Daniel Sullivan, and AK Thompson.

Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City-American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city. Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, Maria Isabel Perez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramirez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates.

Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers emerging in the field of comics studies Across more than fifty original essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art. The essays also identify new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art that are traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative and aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms such as Trans*, Disability, Universe, and Fantasy; genre terms like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen, and Love and Rockets. This volume ties each specific comic studies keyword to the larger context of the term within the humanities. Essays demonstrate how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics, and more. Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field's most compelling and imaginative ideas.

Media plays a specific role within modern society. It has been and continues to be a tool for spreading terrorist messages. However, it can just as easily be used as a tool for countering terrorism. During these challenging times where both international and domestic terrorism continue to threaten the livelihoods of citizens, it is imperative that studies are undertaken to examine the media's role in the spread of terrorism, as well as to explore strategies and protocols that can be put in place to mitigate the spread. Media and Terrorism in the 21st Century presents the emerging ideas and insights from experts, academicians, and professionals on the role media and new media plays in terrorist propaganda from a critical international perspective. It examines the historical relation between media and terror and analyzes the difficulties and obstacles presented by the relation in the 21st century. Covering topics such as AI-based dataveillance, media development trends, and virtual terrorism, this book is an indispensable resource for government officials, communications experts, politicians, security professionals, sociologists, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai's autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire's Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

The eighth edition of The Dynamics of Persuasion again guides readers in understanding the power and limits of persuasion in contemporary society. This edition continues its accessible and detailed illustration of the theoretical underpinnings of persuasive communication through contemporary and relevant examples of persuasion in action. It features coverage of new scholarship on misinformation, health communication, and persuasion effects, including careful attention to persuasion's role in the Covid-19 pandemic. Important issues such as racial injustice, climate change, and barriers to persuading the politically and psychologically polarized also receive a fresh examination. The book brings together classic terms and approaches from earlier editions with new global developments to help readers adopt a more thoughtful perspective on persuasion. The eighth edition is an essential resource for courses in persuasion at the undergraduate and graduate levels within communication studies, psychology, and business programs. Online resources also accompany the text: an Instructor Manual that contains sample syllabi, key terms, chapter outlines, sample discussion questions, and links to relevant news articles and other online resources such as videos; Lecture Slides; and a Testbank. Please visit: www.routledge.com/9781032268187.

In The Anti-Heroine on Contemporary Television: Transgressive Women, Molly Brost explores the various applications and definitions of the term anti-heroine, showing that it has been applied to a wide variety of female characters on television that have little in common beyond their failure to behave in morally "correct" and traditionally feminine ways. Rather than dismiss the term altogether, Brost employs the term to examine what types of behaviors and characteristics cause female characters to be labeled anti-heroines, how those qualities and behaviors differ from those that cause men to be labeled anti-heroes, and how the label reflects society's attitudes toward and beliefs about women. Using popular television series such as Jessica Jones, Scandal, and The Good Place, Brost acknowledges the problematic nature of the term anti-heroine and uses it as a starting point to study the complex women on television, analyzing how the broadening spectrum of character types has allowed more nuanced portrayals of women's lives on television.

A sociological approach to understanding new media's impact on society We use cell phones, computers, and tablets to access the Internet, read the news, watch television, chat with our friends, make our appointments, and post on social networking sites. New media provide the backdrop for most of our encounters. We swim in a technological world yet we rarely think about how new media potentially change the ways in which we interact with one another or shape how we live our lives. In New Media and Society, Deana Rohlinger provides a sociological approach to understanding how new media shape our interactions, our experiences, and our institutions. Using case studies and in-class exercises, Rohlinger explores how new media alter everything from our relationships with friends and family to our experiences in the workplace. Each chapter takes up a different topic - our sense of self and our relationships, education, religion, law, work, and politics - and assesses how new media alter our worlds as well as our expectations and experiences in institutional settings. Instead of arguing that these changes are "good" or "bad" for American society, the book uses sociological theory to challenge readers to think about the consequences of these changes, which typically have both positive and negative aspects. New Media and Society begins with a brief explanation of new media and social institutions, highlighting how sociologists understand complex, changing relationships. After outlining the influence of new media on our identities and relationships, it discusses the effects new media have on how we think about education, practice our religions, understand police surveillance, conceptualize work, and participate in politics. Each chapter includes key sociological concepts, engaging activities that illustrate the ideas covered in the chapter, as well as links, films, and references to additional online material.

The Wasted Years records the painful role of Nigeria's political class in the under development of the country between 1999 and 2007. The extensive and almost irreparable damage done the nation's economy and social structures by those who pull the strings of the nation's machinery of government cannot be cataloged in one expression. Regrettably, the media, which is the citizens' beacon of hope for responsible and accountable leadership seem to have compromised its professional ethics and looked the other ways as those in government pillage and ravage the country's resources. Perhaps understandably. In a country where corruption and mediocrity tear through the heart of her economy, integrity counts for nothing, if at all retained in the lexicography of the people. Unfortunately the few media practitioners and visionary political leaders that exist are drowned in the sea of the infamous group. This has resulted in the many years the nation has wasted by taking so much from the land to feed so few, and to impoverish so large a population of the Nigerian people. Nigeria is like an arable land invaded and infested by locusts.

A collaboration of political activism and participatory culture seeking to upend consumer capitalism, including interviews with The Yes Men, The Guerrilla Girls, among others. Coined in the 1980s, "culture jamming" refers to an array of tactics deployed by activists to critique, subvert, and otherwise "jam" the workings of consumer culture. Ranging from media hoaxes and advertising parodies to flash mobs and street art, these actions seek to interrupt the flow of dominant, capitalistic messages that permeate our daily lives. Employed by Occupy Wall Street protesters and the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot alike, culture jamming scrambles the signal, injects the unexpected, and spurs audiences to think critically and challenge the status quo. The essays, interviews, and creative work assembled in this unique volume explore the shifting contours of culture jamming by plumbing its history, mapping its transformations, testing its force, and assessing its efficacy. Revealing how culture jamming is at once playful and politically transgressive, this accessible collection explores the degree to which culture jamming has fulfilled its revolutionary aims. Featuring original essays from prominent media scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts such as Mark Dery's culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance and participatory culture.

The News Untold offers an important new perspective on media narratives about poverty in Appalachia. It focuses on how small-town reporters and editors in some of the region's poorest communities decide what aspects of poverty are news, how their audiences interpret those decisions, and how those two related processes help shape broader understandings of economic need and local social responsibility. Focusing on patterns of both media creation and consumption, The News Untold shows how a lack of constructive news coverage of economic need can make it harder for the poor to voice their concerns. Critical and inclusive news coverage of poverty at the local level, Michael Clay Carey writes, can help communities start to look past old stereotypes and attitudes and encourage solutions that incorporate broader sets of community voices. Such an effort will require journalists and community leaders to reexamine some of the professional traditions and social views that often shape what news looks like in small towns.

Public Opinion is Walter Lippmann's groundbreaking work which demonstrates how individual beliefs are swayed by stereotypes, the mass media, and political propaganda. The book opens with the notion that democracy in the age of super fast communications is obsolete. He analyses the impact of several phenomena, such as the radio and newspapers, to support his criticisms of the sociopolitical situation as it stands. He famously coins the term 'manufactured consent', for the fomenting of views which ultimately work against the interests of those who hold them. Lippmann contends that owing to the masses of information flung at the population on a daily basis, opinions regarding entire groups in society are being reduced to simple stereotypes. The actual complexity and nuance of life, Lippmann contends, is undermined by the ever-faster modes of communication appearing regularly.

Since 2010 "curation" has become a marketing buzzword. Wrenched from its traditional home in the world of high art, everything from food to bed linens to dog toys now finds itself subject to this formerly rarified activity. Most of the time the term curation is being inaccurately used to refer to the democratization of choice - an inevitable development and side effect of the economics of long tail distribution. However, as any true curator will tell you - curation is so much more than choosing - it relies upon human intelligence, agency, evaluation and carefully considered criteria - an accurate, if utopian definition of the much-abused and overused term. Television on Demand examines what happens when curation becomes the primary way in which media users or viewers engage with mass media such as journalism, music, cinema, and, most specifically, television. Mass media's economic model is based on mass audiences - not a cornucopia of endless options from which individuals can customize their intake. The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the post-network television industry - one whose ultimate effects and outcomes remain unknown. Curatorial culture is a revolutionary new consumption ecology - one that the post-network television producers and distributors have not yet figured out how to monetize, as they remain in what anthropologists call a "liminal" state of a rite of passage - no longer what they used to be, but not yet what they will become. How does an advertiser-supported medium find leave alone quantify viewers who DVR This is Us but fast-forward through the commercials; have a season pass to The Walking Dead via iTunes to watch on their daily commutes; are a season behind on Grey's Anatomy via Amazon Prime but record the current season to watch after they're caught up; binge watched Orange is the New Black the day it dropped on Netflix; are watching new-to-them episodes of Downton Abbey on pbs.org; never miss PewDiePie's latest video on YouTube, graze on Law & Order: SVU on Hulu and/or TNT and religiously watch Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show via digital rabbit ears? While audiences clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their transformed viewing habits undermine the dominant economic structures that fund quality episodic series. Legacy broadcasters are producing more scripted content than ever before and experimenting with new models of distribution - CBS will premiere its new Star Trek series on broadcast television but require fans to subscribe to its AllAccess app to continue their viewing. NBC's original Will & Grace is experiencing a syndication renaissance as a limited-run season of new episodes are scheduled for fall 2017. At the same time, new producing entities such as Amazon Studios, Netflix and soon Apple TV compete with high-budget "television" programs that stream around traditional distribution models, industrial structures and international licensing agreements. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV explains and theorizes curatorial culture; examines the response of the "industry," its regulators, its traditional audience quantifiers, and new digital entrants to the ecosystem of the empowered viewer; and considers the viable future(s) of this crucial culture industry.