Sports stars are omnipresent icons of popular culture. In the global age of celebrity, few public personae enjoy greater popularity and recognition than professional athletes. Yet, beyond their sporting achievements, athletes - from stars with near-global appeal such as Muhammad Ali or Tiger Woods to local and national sporting heroes - embody and reflect key political, social, and cultural discourses of our time. This anthology investigates sports stardom in its global context across the spectrum of spectator sport: from the quest of Japanese star athletes to exorcise the cultural demons of postwar Japan, to the Mexican pitcher celebrating victory in the first major league baseball game played on Mexican soil; from the naturalization of a Croatian footballer in Israel, to the marginalization of Scottish women curlers at the Winter Olympics. Reflecting this focus, Bodies of Discourse conceptualizes the discourses surrounding sports stars as part of an increasingly transnational and fragmented public sphere and thus traces the economic, social, and cultural roles of these discourses, ranging from nationalism and racism to foreign affairs and sexual politics.

Embedded librarianship is “not one size fits all,” yet many books on the subject treat it in a cold, objective manner that doesn’t adequately communicate how becoming an embedded librarian actually works in the real world. Here, Reale shares her own university classroom experiences to offer a step-by-step primer for those contemplating the practice. Demystifying what can sometimes feel intimidating to academic librarians, this down to earth resource defines what embedded librarianship is, and isn’t; explains why being in the classroom is so important, and how it creates communities of learning; shows how to clarify the role of the librarian in a classroom by being a “facilitator of process”; offers strategies for relationship building, setting goals, and honing a teaching style; and discusses embedded librarianship and branding. Readers will feel confident applying the lessons learned from Reale’s first-hand account to their own experiences both in and out of the classroom.

Most academic libraries could not operate without a host of part-time student workers. But employing students is different from filling a professional position with an experienced worker; often their library employment will be their first job experience. Since many student positions make them the public face of the library, effective mentoring of such student employees is vital. In this book Reale explores the challenges and opportunities involved in recruitment. Her guide Shows how a library job can be more than just employment, teaching students important responsibilities and life-skills Covers the entire scope of a student’s tenure at an academic library, from bringing new hires on board and training them to disciplining student employees and the unpleasant but sometimes necessary task of firing Offers mentoring advice for helping students navigate the cultural contrasts, irregular hours, and other day-to-day issues faced by young people away from home for the first time With Reale’s guidance, supervising academic librarians can effectively mentor students while maintaining an enjoyable, productive workplace that functions efficiently in support of the institution.

Traditionally, academic librarians have delivered "beck and call" service to educators both in and out of the classroom. However, far from being merely auxiliary to the learning cycle, academic librarians are educators in their own right. If the primary challenge before them is to change how they're perceived within their institutions, Reale proposes, the key lies in becoming a proactive teacher and collaborator. Offering strategies applicable to many different areas, this book shows how the academic librarian can be an educator in both structured and unstructured spaces on campuses. Blending practice-based evidence with a warm approach, Reale discusses the changing perception of academic librarians, how they are seen and how they see themselves; shows how academic librarians can and should assert their rightful place in the learning cycle; looks at how to match teaching goals with academic librarians' mission; advocates for the indispensable roles the academic librarian should play, including co-collaborator, one-on-one research consultant, expert-at-large in non-structured spaces such as the dorm or student lounge, and embedded librarian in the classroom; offers talking points for self-advocacy, looking at the many ways academic librarians are making a difference; and explores activities and programming for engagement and learning. This book will empower and validate academic librarians by demonstrating their indispensable roles as educators.

While the profession has generated many books on information literacy, none to date have validated exactly why it is so difficult to teach. In her new book, Reale posits that examining and reflecting on the reality of those factors is what will enable practitioners to meet the challenge of their important mandate. Using the same warm and conversational tone as in her previous works, she: uses personal anecdotes to lay out the key reasons that teaching information literacy is so challenging, from the limited amount of time given to instructors and lack of collaboration with faculty to one's own anxieties about the work; examines how these factors are related and where librarians fit in; validates readers' struggles and frustrations through an honest discussion of the emotional labor of librarianship, including "imposter syndrome," stress, and burnout; offers a variety of approaches, strategies, and topics of focus that will assist readers in their daily practice; looks at how a vibrant community of practice can foster positive change both personally and institutionally; and presents "Points to Ponder" at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to self-reflect and then transform personal insights into action. Reale's book is a valuable springboard for reflection that will help academic librarians understand the complexity of the challenges they face and then forge a path forward.

"Michael R. Real is one of our best writers in the arena of critical studies in mass communication, and he has made his most significant contribution to date with Exploring Media Culture. The book is insightful, thought-provoking, and authoritative yet is highly accessible to undergraduate and graduate students alike. Professor Real knows where to find his college readers, and he meets them where they live. His explanations are candid, his examples timely, and his positions compelling. The case studies afford some of the best exemplars of the intersection of ritual participation and media texts in everyday life ever published. Exploring Media Culture is no ordinary textbook. It is a primer for life in the information age. In fact, this may be the first media criticism book that students will want to keep on their bookshelves long after they have graduated from college."

--Robert K. Avery, Professor of Communication, University of Utah

"Exploring Media Culture is a beautifully written, intellectually challenging, and highly readable exploration of the mysterium of contemporary mass media and popular culture. Michael R. Real does a masterful job of empowering his readers--teaching them how to make sense of everything from Madonna to postmodernism. Students will find this book - which deals with texts that many of them are familiar with -- fascinating, and in some cases terrifying."

--Arthur Asa Berger, Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts Department,

San Francisco State University

Providing a timely, fresh interpretation of media analysis, Exploring Media Culture is an engaging alternative to the typical mass communication text. Expanding on the approach used in his previous work, author Michael R. Real examines the interplay between popular culture and the media. Each chapter uses an aspect of popular culture to explicate a variety of complex topics such as ritual, postmodernism, identity, and political economy. Real includes analysis of such cultural phenomena as:

- Hollywood films, the Superbowl, and presidential elections

- MTV, video games, and the Internet

- Music, aerobics classes, and the Olympics

By staying close to texts, narratives, interpretations, and rituals of actual people, readers can "lay open" great ranges of media culture without getting lost in the most esoteric, though important of scholarly debates today. Exploring Media Culture is a guide for those who expect to attend to film, television, popular music, and similar media culture or conduct formal research on media. Students in communication, media studies, mass communication sociology, cultural studies, and popular culture will find this text is ideal for the classroom; it synthesizes a wide range of recent scholarship in an understandable format.

Selected as One of Media & Values' Best Books Using varying approaches, researchers have tried to capture the actual dynamics and role of media in culture and society, but do we really understand this relationship? Super Media introduces and illustrates the newly emerging cultural studies approach to understanding the media in society. Drawing from both humanities and the social sciences, cultural studies centers its analysis in text, meaning, representation, interpretation, conflict, ideology, hegemony, and culture. In his analysis, Michael Real first provides a critical review of previous traditions of media research and theory--illustrated with tables and comparative charts--and then reintegrates media study around cultural studies. He then presents extensive case studies that illustrate the concepts and theories of the cultural studies approach. Included are the most widely available expressions of culture in history: the Olympics, superpower politics, Oscar-winning films, prime time television, and other transnational cases. Original in perspective, Super Media examines top research in media communication and provides a synthesis between research and the media experiences that affect people's everyday lives. The result is a provocative volume that will provide useful insights to professionals and advanced students in all areas of communication and popular culture. "In many overviews of the field, the canon provides the student and mere tourist alike a standard guide to familiar sights assumed to embody enduring lessons about our mass-mediated world. Contemporary media studies, however, comprise a sprawling network of alternative routes that offer access to more intriguing, dynamic sites of cultural production. In Super Media, Michael Real charts some of these alternative perspectives, broadly related as critical culture studies, in terms that can be understood by the initiate. Further, he attempts to synthesize `the best' of behavioral and critical media research toward a new reference guide." --Communication Quarterly "Super Media is the smartest and most accessible volume available that introduces the fundamental theoretical and methodological positions and practices in cultural studies. It challenges the reader to think through the very issues that cultural studies research and theorizing promotes. Real's touch as an author has produced a very readable text. Super Media helps signal the relevance of cultural studies for communication studies in America." --Journal of International and Intercultural Relations "The book aims to simplify several aspects of critical theory into easily accessible concepts which can be applied to cultural phenomena by the general media consumer. The book succeeds in its goal of raising the reader's awareness of the ways the media pervade our daily existence." --Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media "This is a serious attempt to make cultural studies' insights accessible to U.S. students. Many teachers should find it helpful and stimulating. It will challenge students and teachers to grasp the tools of cultural studies and apply them to super media." --Journal of Communication "Has much to recommend it. . . . Super Media is the most comprehensive of all popular culture volumes with textbook potential. It generously embraces both the American and European cultural studies traditions. . . . Besides comprehensive range, Super Media has textbook potential because it also provides and illustrates methodological approaches. . . . In many ways, and perhaps most importantly though, the book makes a tacit statement about the nature of a cultural studies approach. . . . It integrates explication of theory, methodology, and topic discussion throughout. . . . The thoughtful organization of this book thus says much about the organization of meaning, society, culture and, of course, cultural study itself." --Popular Communication Newsletter and Review "Real provides a clear and compelling introduction to the cultural studies approach and provides a series of innovative and insightful studies that illustrate the cogency of this approach. . . . A valuable source of critical analyses and methods. His presentations are equally lucid and illuminating and this book should find a large audience among students studying media criticism and those who want to develop tools and strategies for analyzing and criticizing our media culture." --Journalism Quarterly "Michael R. Real's Super Media is an important book at an important time... Many who know of Real's work realize that he has been perhaps the key player in the emergence of the cultural studies tradition in American media research. . . .perceptive and engaging. . . .a telling analysis. . . .Michael Real's Super Media offers complex and important understandings of the working of media on us. His arguments are convincing. . . .McLuhan placed us in a new media world. Michael Real has taken us a step farther. He has provided us with some tools to understand super media and to dissect what parts of its mirror are distinctly clouded and harm our view of what we want to become..." --Lawrence Wenner, Television Quarterly "Selected among the "16 best books on television, mass media and communications." --Media and Values magazine "Real's Super Media has much to recommend it as the new text anchor, especially for those wanting to deal in their courses with the central, theoretical contribution offered by popular communication and culture scholars: how the construing and maintenance of meaningful reality occur in everyday experience in a culture (rather than as a result of a simple message or media system). Super Media is the most comprehensive of all popular culture volumes with textbook potential. It generously embraces both the American and European cultural studies traditions, ranging from American studies of icons, genres, myths, and ritual to European concerns with discourse systems and ideology. Diverse schools and concepts are tellingly introduced by Real, and then interwoven to advance the field's common inquiry: into the organization and reorganization of meaning. . . . Besides comprehensive range, Super Media has textbook potential because it also provides and illustrates methodological approaches: empirical, structuralist, critical, and ritual analysis. . . .In many ways, and perhaps most importantly though, the book makes a tacit statement about the nature of a cultural studies approach. . . .it integrates explication of theory, methodology, and topic discussion throughout. . . .the thoughtful organization of this book thus says much about the organization of meaning, society, culture, and, of course, cultural study itself." --Dennis Corrigan, Popcom Newsletter