Theories help to troubleshoot gaps in our understanding, and to make sense of a world that is constantly changing. What this book tries to do, in part, is blur the lines between the differences between today's college students - the millennial generation - and their professors, many of whom hail from the Boom Generation and Generation X. In the following chapters, contributors build upon what both parties already know. Writing in a highly accessible yet compelling style, contributors explain communication theories by applying them to "artifacts" of popular culture. These "artifacts" include Lady Gaga, Pixar films, The Hunger Games, hip hop, Breaking Bad, and zombies, among others. Using this book, students will become familiar with key theories in communication while developing creative and critical thinking. By experiencing familiar popular culture artifacts through the lens of critical and interpretive theories, a new generation of communication professionals and scholars will hone their skills of observation and interpretation - pointing not just toward better communication production, but better social understanding. Professors will especially enjoy the opportunities for discussion this book provides, both through the essays and the "dialogue boxes" where college students provide responses to authors' ideas.

Theories help to troubleshoot gaps in our understanding, and to make sense of a world that is constantly changing. What this book tries to do, in part, is blur the lines between the differences between today's college students - the millennial generation - and their professors, many of whom hail from the Boom Generation and Generation X. In the following chapters, contributors build upon what both parties already know. Writing in a highly accessible yet compelling style, contributors explain communication theories by applying them to "artifacts" of popular culture. These "artifacts" include Lady Gaga, Pixar films, The Hunger Games, hip hop, Breaking Bad, and zombies, among others. Using this book, students will become familiar with key theories in communication while developing creative and critical thinking. By experiencing familiar popular culture artifacts through the lens of critical and interpretive theories, a new generation of communication professionals and scholars will hone their skills of observation and interpretation - pointing not just toward better communication production, but better social understanding. Professors will especially enjoy the opportunities for discussion this book provides, both through the essays and the "dialogue boxes" where college students provide responses to authors' ideas.

This volume occasions a dialogue between major authors in the field who engage in a conversation on cosmopolitanism and provinciality from a communication ethics perspective. There is no consensus on what constitutes communication ethics, cosmopolitanism, or provinciality: the task is more modest and diverse and began with contributors being asked what the bias of their work suggests or offers for understanding the theme Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. Rather than responding authoritatively, each essay acknowledges the contributor's own work. This book offers no answers, but invites a conversation that is more akin to a beginning, a joining, an admission that there is more than "me," "us," or "my kind" of people, theory, or wisdom. The book will be an excellent resource for instructors and for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in communication.

Roberts argues that identity and the history of alterity in the West can be understood more clearly through narrative motifs. She provides analyses of these motifs, including infanticide, universalism, the Tower of Bbael, the warrior Other, the noble savage entropology, and the trickster.