Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

This volume considers the rise of a new mode of creating, spreading, and encountering moral claims and ideas as they are expressed within spectacles. Brian M. Lowe explains how spectacles emerge when we are saturated with mediated representations-including pictures, texts, and videos-and exposed to television and movies and the myriad stories they tell us. The question of which moral issues gain our attention and which are neglected increasingly relates to how societal concerns are supported-or obscured-by spectacles. This project explores how this new form of moral understanding came to be. Through a series of case studies, including the use of radio and comic books; the crafting of Russian national identity through art; television and film; the evolution of human rights law through film and journalism; and the promotion of animal rights campaigns, this book unveils some of the ways in which our spectacular environment shapes moral understanding, and is in turn shaped by spectacle.

One of the central observations of the social sciences has been that the modern age is an age of constant change. This change has resulted in the emergence of new moral and ethical claims and understanding, which author Brian Lowe refers to as "moral vocabularies." Lowe skillfully seeks to explain under what conditions certain moral vocabularies are more likely to gain acceptance in the wider host society. By focusing on the animal rights and tobacco control movements, this absorbing work explores the process of moralization and the fragmentary nature of the emergence of new forms of moral and ethical meanings within the wider host society. Emerging Moral Vocabularies challenges the broad assertion that Western post-industrial societies are inevitably becoming more individualistic and self-centered, and instead encourages scholars to examine emerging forms for moral and ethical meaning, which form new moral boundaries.

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.