Although women constitute half of the world's population, their participation in the political sphere remains problematic. While existing research on women politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they face, we still have a very limited understanding of women's political participation in emerging democracies. "Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives From Nations in Transition" is the first collection to de-Westernize the scholarship on women, politics and media by: 1) highlighting the latest research on countries and regions that have not been 'the usual suspects'; 2) featuring a diverse group of scholars, many of non-Western origin; 3) giving voice through personal interviews to politically active women, thus providing the reader with a rare insight into women's agency in the political structures of emerging democracies. Each chapter examines the complex women, politics and media dynamic in a particular nation-state, taking into consideration the specific political, historic and social context. With 23 case studies and interviews from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Russia and the former Soviet republics, this volume will be of interest to students, media scholars and policy makers from developed and emerging democracies.

This unique text addresses the gap between journalism studies, which have tended to focus on national and international news, and the fact that most journalism is practised at the local level, where people live, work, play and feel most 'at home'. Providing a rich overview of the role and place of local media in society, Hess and Waller demonstrate that, in this changing digital era, the local journalist must not only specialize in niche 'place-based' news, but also have a clear understanding of how their locality and its people 'fit' in the context of a globalized world. Equipping readers with a nuanced and well-rounded understanding of the field today, this is an essential resource for students of journalism, media and communication studies, as well as for practising and aspiring journalists.

Culture is dependent upon intertextuality to fuel the consumption and production of new media. The notion of intertextuality has gone through many iterations, but what remains constant is its stalwart application to bring to light what audiences value through the marriages of disparate ideology and references. Videogames, in particular, have a longstanding tradition of weaving texts together in multimedia formats that interact directly with players. Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games brings together game scholars to analyze the impact of video games through the lenses of transmediality, intermediality, hypertextuality, architextuality, and paratextuality. Unique in its endeavor, this publication discusses the vast web of interconnected texts that feed into digital games and their players. This book is essential reading for game theorists, designers, sociologists, and researchers in the fields of communication sciences, literature, and media studies.

What is a medium? If Nietzsche was right in claiming that "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts," that media help us "think," and if different media allow for different ways of thinking, then the "body" of the respective medium in question, its materiality, shapes and influences the range and direction of how media make us think. Shouldn't we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized information? Launching Bloomsbury's Thinking Media series, Media Matter introduces readers to the nascent field of media-philosophy. Contributors urge readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies, by both extending the understanding of "medium" in such a way as to include a concept of materiality that also includes "non-human" transmitters (elements such as water, earth, fire, air) and by understanding media not only in the context of cultural or discursive systems or apparatuses, relays, transistors, hardware or "discourse networks," but more inclusively, in terms of a "media ecology." Beginning with more general essays on media and then focusing on particular themes (neuroplasticity, photography, sculpture and music), especially in relation to film, Herzogenrath and contributors redefine the concept of "medium" in order to think through media, rather than about them.

On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture offers a polyphonic account of mutual interpenetrations of literature and new media. Shifting its focus from the personal to the communal and back again, the volume addresses such individual experiences as immersion and emotional reading, offers insights into collective processes of commercialisation and consumption of new media products and explores the experience and mechanisms of interactivity, convergence culture and participatory culture. Crucially, the volume also shows convincingly that, though without doubt global, digital culture and new media have their varied, specifically local facets and manifestations shaped by national contingencies. The interplay of the common subtext and local colour is discussed by the contributors from Eastern Europe and the Western world. Contributors are: Justyna Fruzinska, Dirk de Geest, Maciej Jakubowiak, Michael Joyce, Kinga Kasperek, Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor, Aleksandra Malecka, Piotr Marecki, Lukasz Mirocha, Aleksandra Mochocka, Emilya Ohar, Mariusz Pisarski, Anna Slosarz, Dawn Stobbart, Jean Webb, Indre Zakeviciene, Agata Zarzycka.

Broadcasting was born just as the British empire reached its greatest territorial extent, and matured while that empire began to unravel. Radio and television offered contemporaries the beguiling prospect that new technologies of mass communication might compensate for British imperial decline. In Broadcasting Empire, Simon J. Potter shows how, from the 1920s, the BBC used broadcasting to unite audiences at home with the British settler diaspora in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. High culture, royal ceremonial, sport, and even comedy were harnessed to this end, particularly on the BBC Empire Service, the predecessor of today's World Service. Belatedly, during the 1950s, the BBC also began to consider the role of broadcasting in Africa and Asia, as a means to encourage 'development' and to combat resistance to continued colonial rule. However, during the 1960s, as decolonization entered its final, accelerated phase, the BBC staged its own imperial retreat.
This is the first full-length, scholarly study to examine both the home and overseas aspects of the BBC's imperial mission. Drawing on new archival evidence, it demonstrates how the BBC's domestic and imperial roles, while seemingly distinct, in fact exerted a powerful influence over one another. Broadcasting Empire makes an important contribution to our understanding of the transnational history of broadcasting, emphasising geopolitical rivalries and tensions between British and American attempts to exert influence on the world's radio and television systems.

With the wealth of information that you can find on the internet today, it is easy to find answers and details quickly by entering a simple query into a search engine. While this easy access to information is convenient, it is often difficult to separate fallacy from reality when dealing with digital sources. Establishing and Evaluating Digital Ethos and Online Credibility features strategies and insight on how to determine the reliability of internet sources. Highlighting case studies and best practices on establishing protocols when utilizing digital sources for research, this publication is a critical reference source for academics, students, information literacy specialists, journalists, researchers, web designers, and writing instructors.

Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell's adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation's boys. Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between "good" and "bad" girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship.By the serial's conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for "weak and wayward boys" that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Andersontreats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous "normal" American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.

This volume advances the data-based study of multimodal artefacts and performances by showcasing methods and results from the latest endeavors in empirical multimodal research, representing a vibrant international and interdisciplinary research community. The collated chapters identify and seek to inspire novel, mixed-method approaches to investigate meaning-making mechanisms in current communicative artifacts, designs, and contexts; while attending to their immersive, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions. Each contribution details innovative aspects of empirical multimodality research, offering insights into challenges evolving from quantitative approaches, particular corpus work, results from eye-tracking and psychological experiments, and analyses of dynamic interactive experiences. The approaches and results presented foreground the inherent multidisciplinary nature and implications of multimodality, renegotiating concepts across linguistics, media studies, (social) semiotics, game studies, and design. With this, the volume will inform both current and future developments in theory, methods, and transdisciplinary contexts and become a landmark reference for anyone interested in the empirical study of multimodality.

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. * The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics * Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism * Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media * Questions existing frameworks in Media Ethics in light of the impact of global media * Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication

Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices presents texts by international media and cultural scholars that address the relationship between symbolic and infrastructural dimensions of media, analysing traffic in terms of media ecology, as epistemological principle, and as (trans-)formative power. Contributors are: Menahem Blondheim, Grant David Bollmer, Richard Cavell, Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Norm Friesen, Elihu Katz, Peter Krapp, Martina Leeker, Jana Mangold, John Durham Peters, Gabriele Schabacher, Michael Steppat, Wolfgang Sutzl, Hartmut Winkler

As the global COVID-19 pandemic that broke out over two years ago is showing signs of relenting, and the world's attention draws towards yet another military conflict in Ukraine, the roles of crisis communication and media research couldn't be more critical. These roles, particularly in a post-truth and post-COVID era, call for new knowledge and enlightenment around discourses on: the infodemic of misinformation, information and communication rights, the role of online social networks, critical media literacy and the changes occuring in media and journalism ecosystems. Drawing on the region's distinct geo-political, economic, socio-cultural and technological contexts, COVID-19 and the Media in Sub-Saharan Africa brings together diverse interdisciplinary and multi-country perspectives, innovative methodologies as well rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume helps us deconstruct COVID-19 discourses on crisis communication and media developments focusing on three areas: Media viability, Framing and Health crisis communication. The chapters unpack issues on marginalisation, gender, media sustainability, credibility, priming, trust, sources, behavioural change, mental health, (mis)information, vaccine hesitancy and myths and more. Ultimately, this volume roots for sustainable and quality journalism, human (information and communication) rights, commitment to truth and efficacious (health) crisis communication. It is an excellent resource for academics, media industry, Journalism and media students, public health communication specialists, policy and advocacy groups in the region and globally.

Second-Generation Korean Americans and Transnational Media: Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and Korean popular culture. Specifically looking at Korean films, celebrities, and popular media, David C. Oh combines intrapersonal processes of identification with social identities to understand how these individuals use Korean popular culture to define authenticity and construct group difference and hierarchy. Oh highlights new findings on the ways these Korean Americans construct themselves within their youth communities. This work is a comprehensive examination of second-generation Korean American ethnic identity, reception of transnational media, and social uses of transnational media.

Contributions by Phil Bevin, Blair Davis, Marc DiPaolo, Michele Fazio, James Gifford, Kelly Kanayama, Orion Ussner Kidder, Christina M. Knopf, Kevin Michael Scott, Andrew Alan Smith, and Terrence R. Wandtke In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing. Contributors weigh industry histories and marketing concerns as well as the fan community's changing attitudes towards class signifiers in superhero adventures. The often financially strapped Spider-Man proves to be a touchstone figure in many of these essays. Grant Morrison's Superman, Marvel's Shamrock, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and The Walking Dead receive thoughtful treatment. While there have been many scholarly works concerned with issues of race and gender in comics, this book stands as the first to deal explicitly with issues of class, cultural capital, and economics as its main themes.

This is a book about the dynamics of the aspirational society. It explores the boundaries of permissible thought--deviations and transgressions that create constant innovations. When confronted with a problem, an innovative mind struggles and brings forth something distinctive--new ideas, new inventions, and new programs based on unconventional approaches to solve the problem. But this can be done only if the culture creates large breathing spaces by leaving people alone, not as a matter of state generosity but as something fundamental in being an American. Consequently, the Constitutional mandate of "Congress shall make no law..." has encouraged fearless speech, unrestrained thought, and endless experimentation leading to newer developments in science, technology, the arts, and not least socio-political relations. Most of all, the First Freedoms liberate the mind from irrational fears and encourage an environment of divergent thinking, non-conformity, and resistance to a collective mindset. The First Freedoms encourage Americans to be iconoclastic, to be creatively crazy, to be impure, thus, enabling them to mix and re-mix ideas to design new technologies and cultural forms and platforms, anything from experimental social relations and big data explorations to electing our first black president.

This book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.

Many believe that religion plays a positive role in men's identity development, with religion promoting good behavior, and morality. In contrast, we often assume that the media is a negative influence for men, teaching them to be rough and violent, and to ignore their emotions. In Does God Make the Man?, Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats draw on extensive interviews and participant observation with both Evangelical and non-Evangelical men, including Catholics as well as Protestants, to argue that neither of these assumptions is correct. Dismissing the easy notion that media encourages toxic masculinity and religion is always a positive influence, Hoover and Coats argue that not only are the linkages between religion, media, and masculinity not as strong and substantive as has been assumed, but the ways in which these relations actually play out may contradict received views. Over the course of this fascinating book they examine crises, contradictions, and contestations: crises about the meaning of masculinity and about the lack of direction men experience from their faith communities; contradictions between men's religious lives and media lives, and contestations among men's ideas about what it means to be a man. The book counters common discussions about a "crisis of masculinity," showing that actual men do not see the world the way the "crisis talk" has portrayed it-and interestingly, even Evangelical men often do not see religion as part of the solution.

Central Asia has long stood at the crossroads of history. It was the staging ground for the armies of the Mongol Empire, for the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian and British empires, and for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Today, multinationals and nations compete for the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and for control of the pipelines. Yet "Stanland" is still, to many, a terra incognita, a geographical blank. Beginning in the mid-1990s, academic and journalist David Mould's career took him to the region on Fulbright Fellowships and contracts as a media trainer and consultant for UNESCO and USAID, among others. In Postcards from Stanland, he takes readers along with him on his encounters with the people, landscapes, and customs of the diverse countries-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan-he came to love. He talks with teachers, students, politicians, environmental activists, bloggers, cab drivers, merchants, Peace Corps volunteers, and more. Until now, few books for a nonspecialist readership have been written on the region, and while Mould brings his own considerable expertise to bear on his account-for example, he is one of the few scholars to have conducted research on post-Soviet media in the region-the book is above all a tapestry of place and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.