This edited book presents a cross-disciplinary and international conversation about the discursive nature of 'populist' politics. Based on the idea that language and meaning making are central to the political process, the authors present research originating from disciplines such as sociology, political science, linguistics, gender studies and education, giving credence to the variety and context dependence of both populist discourse and its analysis. Using a variety of different theoretical frames, the volume examines international case studies from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, looking at different modes of populism as well as the interaction of populism with other ideologies and belief systems. The chapters draw on several disciplines, and will be of interest to scholars working in linguistics, political studies, journalism, rhetoric and discourse analysis.

An intellectual history of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for better and worse. A fascinating account of the value and functions of the arts in society, in both the private sphere of individual emotions and self-development and public sphere of politics and social distinction.

Responding to the creative economy's status as an industry, education and government priority, this edited volume brings together original contributions to examine the experiences and realities of working within a number of creative sectors and addresses how higher education can both enable students to pursue and critically examine work in the cultural industries. Debates on cultural work are garnering more interest than ever before and this volume presents critical discussion based on research findings from academics and policy-makers in the fields of media and cultural studies, enterprise, employability, psychology, and education. The volume addresses: what cultural work is and how higher education is connected with its growth as a sector; educational initiatives that see students gaining ever more detailed experiences and insights; the ways in which students and cultural workers position their identities; and the politics of access and issues of exclusion as they relate to industry networks, race and gender.

As with many spheres of public life, public diplomatic communication is being transformed by the boom of social media. More than 165 foreign governmental organisations in China have embarked on the use of Weibo (a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter in China) to engage with Chinese citizens and reach out to youth populations, one of the major goals of current public diplomacy efforts. This exciting new pivot, based on systemic research of Weibo usage by embassies in China, explores the challenges and the limits that the use of Chinese Weibo (and Chinese social media in general) poses for foreign embassies, and considers ways to use these or other tools. It offers a systematic study of the effectiveness and challenges of using Weibo for public diplomatic communication in and with China. Addressing the challenges of e-diplomacy, it considers notably the occurrence of cyber-nationalism on Weibo and encourages a critical look at its practice, arguing how it can contribute to the goals of public diplomacy.

This book offers readers an understanding of the theoretical framework for the concept of Arts Talk, provides historical background and a review of current thinking about the interpretive process, and, most importantly, provides ideas and insights into building audience-centered and audience-powered conversations about the arts.

This edited collection explores the meaning of feminism in the contemporary moment, which is constituted primarily by action but also uncertainty. The book focuses on feminist modes of activism, as well as media and cultural representation to ask questions about organising, representing and articulating feminist politics. In particular it tackles the intersections between media technologies and gendered identities, with contributions that cover topics such as twerking, trigger warnings, and trans identities. This volume directly addresses topical issues in feminism and is a valuable asset to scholars of gender, media and sexuality studies.

This book is a transnational ethnographic study of Sri Lankan women's television soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka. Both Sri Lankan migrant women's soap opera clubs in Melbourne, Australia, and female friendship groups watching soap operas in Colombo, Sri Lanka, are examined. Conducted in the sociopolitical backdrop of post-civil war Sri Lanka, this study examines how nationalist ideologies of womanhood shape meanings in Sri Lankan television soap operas that predominantly cater to female audiences. How women interpret, resist, deconstruct, and reconstruct good-bad binaries of women's bodies, freedoms, and rights as represented in the soap operas are mapped, providing an ethnographic examination of how nationalist meanings translate into cultural capital in spaces of television production and reception, in national and diasporic everyday lives.

In 2000, for the first time in American political history, four former presidents were still alive after serving in the White House. This book critically and systematically examines press coverage of these four ex-presidents for three years after they left office. Through content analysis, the volume draws together the tone and major themes in press coverage of stories about Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. Bush. The study serves as a useful historic document, depicting the private lives of these former presidents from both parties as seen through the American press. The book is a unique examination of the relationship between ex-presidents and the press.

Examining the nature and scope of the relationship between the press and ex-presidents, the study assumes that although they are out of office and thus out of the limelight, ex-presidents still have powerful influence domestically and internationally. That influence makes it valuable to know how, and with what intensity, the press covers ex-presidents. This volume documents their post-White House careers through the prism of the press, enriching our understanding of life after the presidency.

The book analyzes the transition from communism and a planned economy to democracy and capitalism, focusing specifically on the case of Romania. More specifically it analyzes how the transition is reflected in the cultural space of films. The research highlights the importance of films in reflecting political struggles within society: struggles over basic definitions of the nation, state, (gendered) self, and symbolic Other. This is accomplished by building on the theory of cinematic nationhood and via the method of relational constructivism combined with insights from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It is an interdisciplinary research that would appeal to a wide postgraduate and undergraduate audience specializing in: transitions, nationalism and state formation, gender studies, Eastern European film and interdisciplinary methods.

This book brings specialists in religious studies, African-American studies, history, and political science, together with a media librarian to examine violence as it is presented in films and how instructors can use films to teach about violence. The object of inquiry is the vulnerability of socially oppressed people to physical violence and to institutionalized patterns of discrimination, herein termed structural violence. The susceptibility of women to violence provides an example that is discussed in detail, revealing both merits and weaknesses in film treatment of gender. The full effect of violence is considered, from the abuse of the individual to the wartime mobilization of entire societies. Chapters also look at the benefits and problems of using films in the classroom and provide resources helpful to instructors, such as sample discussion and study guides, a bibliography, and a filmography.

Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America is the first book-length study of one of the most unique communications enterprises in U.S. history. It is the remarkable account of how the nation's most exploited minority group overcame adversity by embracing the airwaves. Through their own radio and television stations, American Indians have found a way to keep their cultures and languages from perishing. This book examines the impetus behind the development of Native-run stations and how these stations operate today. It assesses the influence and impact of Native broadcasts in the indigenous community and seeks to chronicle the formidable challenges confronting Indian broadcasters as they provide vital programming services to the often impoverished inhabitants of the nation's remote reservations.

'Media and Nostalgia' is an interdisciplinary and international exploration of media and their relation to nostalgia. Each chapter demonstrates how nostalgia has always been a media-related matter, studying also the recent nostalgia boom by analysing, among others, digital photography, television series and home videos.

Research shows that, while people around the world consistently nominate television as their most important news source, much of the content of news bulletins is lost to viewers within moments. In response, Barrie Gunter argues that this can be explained by the way in which televised news is written, packaged and presented.

Most people have, at some point, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this book argues that the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of film and television viewing in the home is in fact extraordinary.

Music, magic and myth are elements essential to the identities of New Orleans musicians. The city's singular contributions to popular music around the world have been unrivaled; performing this music authentically requires collective improvisation, taking performers on sonorous sojourns in unanticipated, 'magical' moments; and membership in the city's musical community entails participation in the myth of New Orleans, breathing new life into its storied traditions. On the basis of 56 open-ended interviews with those in the city's musical community, Michael Urban discovers that, indeed, community is what it is all about. In their own words, informants explain that commercial concerns are eclipsed by the pleasure of playing in 'one big band' that disassembles daily into smaller performing units whose rosters are fluid, such that, over time, 'everybody plays with everybody'. Although Hurricane Katrina nearly terminated the city, New Orleans and its music-in no small part due to the sacrifices and labors of its musicians-have come back even stronger. Dancing to their own drum, New Orleanians again prove themselves to be admirably out of step with the rest of America.

This book focuses on recent technical advancements and state-of-the art technologies for analyzing characteristic features and probabilistic modelling of complex social networks and decentralized online network architectures. Such research results in applications related to surveillance and privacy, fraud analysis, cyber forensics, propaganda campaigns, as well as for online social networks such as Facebook. The text illustrates the benefits of using advanced social network analysis methods through application case studies based on practical test results from synthetic and real-world data. This book will appeal to researchers and students working in these areas.

Austin City Limits is the longest running musical showcase in the history of television, and it still captivates audiences forty years after its debut on the air. From Willie Nelson's legendary pilot show and his fourteen magical episodes running through the years to Season 35, to mythical performances of BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughn, to repeat appearances from Chet Atkins, Bonnie Raitt and Ray Charles, and recent shows with Mumford & Sons, Arcade Fire and The Decemberists, the show has defined popular roots music and indie rock. This is why country rocker Miranda Lambert - relatively unknown when she taped a show almost a decade ago - gushed to the studio audience, "Now I know I have arrived!" Austin City Limits: A History tells this remarkable story. With unprecedented access behind the scenes at the tapings of shows with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Mos Def, Wilco, and many more, author Tracey Laird tells the story of this landmark musical showcase whose history spans dramatic changes in the world of television, the expansion of digital media, and the ways in which we experience music. Beginning as a simple weekly broadcast, it is today a multifaceted "brand" in contemporary popular music, existing simultaneously as a program available for streaming, a presence on Twitter and other social media, a major music festival, and a state-of-the-art performance venue. Laird explores the ways in which the show's evolution has driven, and been driven by, both that of Austin as the "Live Music Capital of the World," and of U.S. public media as a major player in the dissemination and sponsorship of music and culture. Engagingly written and packed with anecdotes and insights from everyone from the show's producers and production staff to the musicians themselves, Austin City Limits: A History gives us the best seat in the house for this illuminating look at a singular presence in American popular music. Timed to publish with the airing of Austin City Limits 2014 - the 40th anniversary celebratory broadcast featuring an all-star lineup of musicians including the Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, and others - here is a book for all fans of this beloved music institution.

Domestic Disputes is the first monograph in German studies to offer a critical examination of the home ownership crisis in the former East Germany that resulted from unification policy, taking as its focus news media, made-for-television movies, cinematic releases, and prose fiction that depict property disputes between former East and West Germans. In the cultural productions discussed in this book, anxieties about social disenfranchisement through unification policy are dramatized in narratives in which Westerners acquire, or attempt to acquire, property in the former East Germany. Each chapter addresses a different type of narrative that has emerged to frame those anxieties, including those of neocolonial Western takeover, the engagement with difficult family histories, masculinity crises in the West, and the corporatization of home. Domestic Disputes is the first book-length study to outline the way in which homes were awarded to individuals and families as the former East Germany privatized and to offer in-depth examinations of the narratives that emerged from that social phenomenon.

This book examines democratizing media reforms in Latin America. The author explains why some countries have recently passed such reforms in the broadcasting sector, while others have not. By offering a civil society perspective, the author moves beyond conventional accounts that perceive media reforms primarily as a form of government repression to punish oppositional media. Instead, he highlights the pioneering role of civil society coalitions, which have managed to revitalize the debate on communication rights and translated them into specific regulatory outcomes such as the promotion of community radio stations. The book provides an in-depth, comparative analysis of media reform debates in Argentina and Brazil (analyzing Chile and Uruguay as complementary cases), supported by original qualitative research. As such, it advances our understanding of how shifting power relations and social forces are affecting policymaking in Latin America and beyond.

This book diagnoses the social, mental and political consequences of working and economic organizations that generate value from communication. It calls for the role of communication technologies to be reimagined in order to create a healthier, fairer society.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, American media abound with images and narratives of bodily transformations. At the crossroads of American, cultural, literary, media, gender, queer, disability and governmentality studies, the book presents a timely intervention into critical debates on body transformations and contemporary makeover culture.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the theory and praxis of Big Data Analytics and how these are used to extract cognition-related information from social media and literary texts. It presents analytics that transcends the borders of discipline-specific academic research and focuses on knowledge extraction, prediction, and decision-making in the context of individual, social, and national development. The content is divided into three main sections: the first of which discusses various approaches associated with Big Data Analytics, while the second addresses the security and privacy of big data in social media, and the last focuses on the literary text as the literary data in Big Data Analytics. Sharing valuable insights into the etiology behind human cognition and its reflection in social media and literary texts, the book benefits all those interested in analytics that can be applied to literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, media & communication studies and computational/digital humanities.

Bringing together the voices of scholars from Europe and North America with those of key contest stakeholders, Performing the 'New' Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest argues that this popular music competition is a symbolic contact zone between European cultures: an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed, and a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe are enacted. This exciting collection explores the ways in which European artists perform, disavow, and contest their racial, national, and sexual identities in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), and asks difficult questions about European inclusions and exclusions the contest reflects. It suggests the ESC as an ever-evolving network of peoples and places transcending both historical and geographical boundaries of Europe that brings into being new understandings of the relationship between culture, space, and identities.

This one-volume sourcebook draws together the scholarly literature assessing news coverage in the U.S. mainstream media of Americans of African, Native, Asian, Hispanic, or Pacific Islander origin. The work covers over 60 years, beginning in 1934, and examines the 50 states and the territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean that are currently under U.S. governance. The categories of racial and cultural groups follow the scheme of the 1990 U.S. Census, which provided the most detailed breakdown of race and ethnicity of the American population in the 200-year history of the census. This sourcebook gives parallel treatment to each of these five census groups. Every chapter begins with a history of that group as it came under U.S. jurisdiction. Then, each chapter is divided into six periods suggested by pivotal news events and discusses studies of news coverage of that group during that period. Each chapter also contains extensive endnotes and a selected bibliography on a racial or cultural group. Also included are chapters on investigative reporting and federal regulation of broadcasting as they relate to minorities.

This book examines race relations in Australia through various media representations over the past 200 years. The early colonial press perpetuated the image of aboriginal people as framed by early explorers, and stereotypes and assumptions still prevail. Print and television news accounts of several key events in recent Australian history are compared and reveal how indigenous sources are excluded from stories about their affairs. Journalists wield extraordinary power in shaping the images of cultures and people, so indigenous people, like those in North America, have turned away from mainstream media and have acquired their own means of cultural production through radio, television, and multimedia. This study concludes with suggestions for addressing media practices to reconcile indigenous and non-indigenous people.

This study will appeal to students and scholars studying mass media, particularly journalism and public relations, Australian history, and sociology.