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by Subject: Media Studies

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• eBook available May 2009

  Alarming Reports

  Communicating Conflict in the Daily News

  Arno†, A.

  News stories provide an essential confirmation of our ideas about who we are, what we have to fear, and what to do about it: a marketplace of ideas, shopped by rational citizen decision makers but also a shared resource for grounding our contested narratives of identity in objective reality. News as a fundamental social process comes into being not when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created but when that report becomes news to someone. As it moves off the page into the community, news discovers - through its interpretations - its reality in the lives of the consumers. This book explores the path of news as it moves through the tangled labyrinth of social identities and asserted interests that lie beyond the page or screen. The language and communication-oriented study of news promises a salient area of investigation, pointing the way to an expansion, if not a redefinition of basic anthropological ideas and practices of ethnography, participant observation, and “the field” in the future of anthropological research.

  Subjects: Media Studies Peace & Conflict Studies General Anthropology

• eBook available January 2018

  The Ethics of Seeing

  Photography and Twentieth-Century German History

  Evans, J., Betts P., & Hoffmann, S.-L. (eds)

  Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

  Subjects: 20th Century History Media Studies

• eBook available August 2016

  German Television

  Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

  Powell, L. & Shandley, Robert R. (eds)

  Long overlooked by scholars and critics, the history and aesthetics of German television have only recently begun to attract serious, sustained attention, and then largely within Germany. This ambitious volume, the first in English on the subject, provides a much-needed corrective in the form of penetrating essays on the distinctive theories, practices, and social-historical contexts that have defined television in Germany. Encompassing developments from the dawn of the medium through the Cold War and post-reunification, this is an essential introduction to a rich and varied media tradition.

  Subjects: Media Studies Film Studies

• eBook available August 2017

  Images from Paradise

  The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

  Salgó, E.

  Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies Media Studies

• eBook available July 2017

  Mad Mädchen

  Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film

  McCarthy, M.

  The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement’s strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Mädchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it processes political discourse to define itself through both differences and affinities among women. Ultimately, such a model suggests new ways of re-imagining feminist solidarity across generational, ethnic, and racial lines.

  Subjects: Gender Studies Media Studies Film Studies

• eBook available June 2012

  The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama

  Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa

  Pype, K.

  How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

  Subjects: Religion Media Studies General Anthropology Gender Studies

• eBook available May 2015

  Mass Media and Historical Change

  Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present

  Bösch, F.

  Media influenced politics, culture, and everyday life long before the invention of the Internet. This book shows how the advent of new media has changed societies in modern history, focusing not on the specifics of technology but rather on their distribution, use, and impact. Using Germany as an example for international trends, it compares the advent of printing in Europe and East Asia, and the impact of the press on revolutions, nation building, and wars in North America and Europe. The rise of tabloids and film is discussed as an international phenomenon, as the importance of media during National Socialism is looked at in comparison with Fascist Italy and Spain. Finally, this book offers a precise analysis of media during the Cold War, with divided Germany providing the central case study.

  Subjects: Media Studies General History

• eBook available May 2006

  Media and Nation Building

  How the Iban became Malaysian

  Postill, J.

  With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention — and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories.

  Subjects: Media Studies General Anthropology

• eBook available February 2014

  Media and Revolt

  Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present

  Fahlenbrach, K., Sivertsen, E. & Werenskjold, R. (eds)

  In what ways have social movements attracted the attention of the mass media since the sixties? How have activists influenced public attention via visual symbols, images, and protest performances in that period? And how do mass media cover and frame specific protest issues? Drawing on contributions from media scholars, historians, and sociologists, this volume explores the dynamic interplay between social movements, activists, and mass media from the 1960s to the present. It introduces the most relevant theoretical approaches to such issues and offers a variety of case studies ranging from print media, film, and television to Internet and social media.

  Subjects: Postwar History Media Studies

• eBook available July 2009

  Mediating Europe

  New Media, Mass Communications, and the European Public Sphere

  Harrison, J. & Wessels, B. (eds)

  The on-going constitutionalization of Europe has led to various changes in media and communications, opening up areas of debate regarding the role of traditional and new media in developing a specific European public sphere as part of the wider European Project. This timely volume addresses the little understood relationship between old and new media, communications policy at the European level, issues of regulation and competition within the EU, the role of the European Parliament in media policymaking, and the questions emerging about the sustainability of traditional public service broadcasting. To understand the concrete significance of these debates two contributions address specific practical areas, i.e. the potential of online environments and specific developments in European media contexts, such as channel strategies, web-related services, iDTV and community networks. Consequently, Mediating Europe provides an original and important contribution to understanding the role of the media in shaping a European public sphere.

  Subjects: Media Studies

• eBook available January 2019

  Monetising the Dividual Self

  The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia

  Hopkins, J.

  Combining theoretical and empirical discussions with shorter “thick description” case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers – precursors to current social media “microcelebrities” and “influencers.” It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous and authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles. It argues that lifestyle blogs are dialogically constituted between the blogger, the readers, and the blog itself, and challenges the assumption of a unitary self by proposing that lifestyle blogs can best be understood in terms of the “dividual self.”

  Subjects: General Anthropology Media Studies

• eBook available April 2015

  Music and International History in the Twentieth Century

  Gienow-Hecht, J. (ed)

  Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.

  Subjects: 20th Century History Media Studies

• eBook available October 2008

  Narrating the Nation

  Representations in History, Media and the Arts

  Berger, S., Eriksonas, L. & Mycock, A. (eds)

  A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

  Subjects: General History Media Studies

• eBook available June 2016

  Narratives in Motion

  Journalism and Modernist Events in 1920s Portugal

  Trindade, L.

  Interwar Portugal was in many ways a microcosm of Europe’s encounter with modernity: reshaped by industrialization, urban growth, and the antagonism between liberalism and authoritarianism, it also witnessed new forms of media and mass culture that transformed daily life. This fascinating study of newspapers in 1920s Portugal explores how the new “modernist reportage” embodied the spirit of the era while mediating some of its most spectacular episodes, from political upheavals to lurid crimes of passion. In the process, Luís Trindade illuminates the twofold nature of that journalism—both historical account and material object, it epitomized a distinctly modern entanglement of narrative and event.

  Subjects: Media Studies 20th Century History

• eBook available January 2010

  The New Media Nation

  Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

  Alia†, V

  Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.

  Subjects: Media Studies General Anthropology

• eBook available July 2016

  New Uses of Bourdieu in Film and Media Studies

  Austin, G. (ed)

  Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu’s theories are, however, they have only intermittently been used to study some of the most important forms of cultural production today: cinema and new media. With topics ranging from film festivals and photography to constantly evolving mobile technologies, this collection demonstrates the enormous relevance that Bourdieu’s key concepts hold for the field of media studies, deploying them as powerful tools of analysis and forging new avenues of inquiry in the process.

  Subjects: Media Studies Film Studies Sociology

• eBook available May 2010

  News as Culture

  Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions

  Rao, U.

  At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics. Positioned at a historical junction where India is clearly feeling the effects of market liberalization, this study demonstrates how journalists and informants interactively create new forms of political action and consciousness. The book explores English and Hindi newsmaking and investigates the creation of news relations during the production process and how they affect political images and leadership traditions. It moves beyond the news-room to outline the role of journalists in urban society, the social lives of news texts and the way citizens bring their ideas and desires to bear on the news discourse.

  This important volume contributes to an emerging debate about the impact of the media on Indian society. Furthermore, it convincingly demonstrates the inseparable link between media related practices and dynamic cultural repertoires.

  Subjects: Media Studies General Anthropology

• eBook available March 2019

  Persistently Postwar

  Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan

  Guarné, B., Lozano-Méndez, A., & Martinez, D. P. (eds)

  From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

  Subjects: Media Studies Film Studies General Cultural Studies

• eBook available July 2009

  The Political Economy of Germany under Chancellors Kohl and Schröder

  Decline of the German Model?

  Leaman, J.

  While unification has undoubtedly had major effects on Germany's political economy, the pattern of current policy-making preferences was established at an earlier stage, in particular, at the beginning of the 'Kohl-era' in 1982. This essentially neo-liberal pattern can be seen to have dominated the modalities chosen to guide Germany through the process of unifi cation and was mirrored in developments in other OECD countries and in particular within the EU. This book demonstrates that the three policy imperatives (neo-liberal structural reform, European monetary integration, and unification) produced a policy-mix which, together with other structural economic and demographic factors, has had disappointing results in all three areas and hampered Germany's overall economic development.

  Subjects: Postwar History Media Studies

• eBook available September 2014

  Sounds of Modern History

  Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe

  Morat, D. (ed)

  Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History 20th Century History Media Studies

• eBook available September 2017

  Spanish Lessons

  Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain

  Smith, P. J.

  Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of innovation in the production of “transmedia” works that bridge narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the work of key figures like Pedro Almodóvar, comparing media depictions of Spain’s economic woes, or giving long-overdue critical attention to quality television series, Smith’s book is a consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.

  Subjects: Media Studies Film Studies

• eBook available December 2016

  Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema

  Bergfelder, T., Shaw, L. & Viera, J. L. (eds)

  Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in “star studies,” Brazilian film has received comparatively little attention. As this volume demonstrates, however, the richness of Brazilian stardom extends well beyond the ubiquitous Carmen Miranda. Among the studies assembled here are fascinating explorations of figures such as Eliane Lage (the star attraction of São Paulo’s Vera Cruz studios), cult horror movie auteur Coffin Joe, and Lázaro Ramos, the most visible Afro-Brazilian actor today. At the same time, contributors interrogate the inner workings of the star system in Brazil, from the pioneering efforts of silent-era actresses to the recent advent of the non-professional movie star.

  Subjects: Film Studies Media Studies

• eBook available January 2018

  The Witness as Object

  Video Testimony in Memorial Museums

  Jong, S. de

  In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of "museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance are now integral to the collections and research activities of museums. They have also become important components in narrative and exhibition design strategies. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time the new global phenomenon of the "musealization" of the witness to history, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

  Subjects: Museum Studies 20th Century History Media Studies