New Books In Communications

Aline B. Louchheim (1914-1972) was an art critic on assignment for the New York Times in 1953 when she first met the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. She would become his wife and the driving force behind his rise to critical prominence. When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect (Princeton UP, 2022) draws on the couple's personal correspondence to reconstruct the early days of their thrilling courtship and traces Louchheim's gradual takeover of Saarinen's public narrative in the 1950s, the decade when his career soared to unprecedented heights. Drawing on her own experiences as an architecture journalist on the receiving end of press pitches and then as a secret publicist for high-end architects, Eva Hagberg paints an unforgettable portrait of Louchheim while revealing the inner workings of a media world that has always relied on secrecy, friendship, and the exchange of favors. She describes how Louchheim codified the practices of architectural publicity that ha

The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization. Moreover, the Internet gives rise to new ethical and epistemological problems – fake news, sock-puppetry, internet hoaxes, disinformation, and so on. In Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet (Oxford University Press 2023), Karen Frost-Arnold proposes a multi-layered social epistemology designed to assist us in navigating the fraught normative landscape of the online world. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world. Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people. Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive hist

Ioannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternativity as a framework to understand how it has been framed in relation to something else. This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to

LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imaginations, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) is a tour de force that weaves together the various narratives about the transformation of a counter public, in this case, LBGT citizens, into rights bearing citizenship, and the transformation of mainstream political and cultural narratives, incorporating shifting conceptions that open up space for this integration. As Political Scientist Susan Burgess explains throughout the book, a basic exploration of public opinion data reflects the substantial shift that many Americans have had in their thinking about individuals who are part of the LGBT community, and about the community itself. But the public opinion data only goes so far in telling the story of this rapid transformation. Using the American political development framework of political time, Burgess sees profound political transformation, but through what she describes as queered political time, noting that substantive ideas in this context are vita

Dr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer. Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The book incorporates autoethnography and asks readers to consider writing histories, influences, processes, and tools in their own lives. Designed for composition courses with a Writing about Writing focus or courses in writing studies, A Writing Studies Primer is a unique introduction to writing through its material culture. Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean fo

The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing traditions around the world, now also have contemporary analogues in virtual worlds found on the internet. In this innovative book, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass argues that avatars allow for the ecstatic projection of consciousness into alternate realities, potentially providing both the spiritually possessed and gamers access to superior secondary identities with elevated social standing. Even if only temporary, self-transformations of these kinds can help reduce psychosocial stress and positively improve health and well-being. Jeff

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them. In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information. Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, H

Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously. Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected. Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decis

In this episode of International Horizons, journalist and UN director of Human Rights Watch Louis Charbonneau describes the US's government misinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath. Charbonneau also discusses the role of media in the lack of questioning of the information they were spreading and contrasts it with the right practices journalists should conduct in their reporting. Finally, the interviewee talks about the consequences of lies from an official source in the spread of fake news, and how the government's actions in 2002 are being used by Russia to respond to the US's criticisms of its invasion of Ukraine. International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in

This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture. From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has captured the imaginations of so many creators. The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey Through Imaginary Medieval Worlds (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2022) aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so applicable to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the a

Today I talked to Felix Zimmermann about his book Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Virtuelle Wirklichkeiten: Atmosphärisches Vergangenheitserleben im Digitalen Spiel (Büchner-Verlag, 2023) Atmospheres are everywhere: at the workplace, in the soccer stadium, in front of the crackling fireplace. They shape our everyday language and have become quite natural expressions of how we find ourselves in certain environments and how we feel about them. Their influence is far-reaching: aesthetic atmospheres are closely linked to a contemporary experience-oriented historical culture whose products and practices claim to establish an immediate contact with the past. With 'Vergangenheitsatmosphären' Felix Zimmermann offers for the first time a term to adequately describe this striving for immediacy. Using in-depth analyses of the digital games Anno 1800 (2019), Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015), and Dishonored: The Mask of Wrath (2012), the concept is contoured and the productivity of

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the b

The relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detached from external interests gave rise to artistic production of images that were read with epistemic authority. But the advent of modernity has at once shaken this certainty and reinforced it. No sooner than we reckoned with the singular history painting and illustrated magazines, we have landed in a mass-media world where any possible image can and does exist. And the more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn’t true. The crime scene photograph is now as likely to be used in a court of law as in a newspaper infographic explainer. The artifact is at once the evidentiary carrier of truth and a visualisation used to confirm it. It creates meaning and it argues for it Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics (Routledge, 2022) bridges

Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border policies are underpinned by unending wars. At this critical juncture, how can journalists, especially those engaged in foreign correspondence, tell these stories? How can they make connections across time and space, and across politics, economics, environments, and crucially, people? Given its colonial history, are these connections possible for the profession of foreign correspondence? In Borderland: Decolonising the Words of War (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Chrisanthi Giotis argues that decolonization is possible and necessary for the development of a truly global, public sphere. New global narratives need to meaningfully include the voices, and k

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Rosenberg is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Professor Brantley’s new book is Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. After giving a comprehensive survey of writing surfaces, writing instruments, and other aspects of material culture, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms takes a fresh look at some of the most widely studied texts of the medieval period—the Beowulf manuscript, the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, and the Book of Margery Kempe—alongside less canonical manuscripts. In addition to rich analyses of these books as textual artifacts, the book contains 200 high-quality illustrations that will pique the interest of readers looking to deepen their familiarity

In Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a liberatory force in an age dominated by markets. By exploring the nuances of artistic production, Autonomy is a feast of delicious and insightful appraisals of artwork—with surprising turns and twists—within a larger context of the dialectics between art and market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Sally Wilson, VP of Publishing at Emerald opens up about the challenges publishers are facing in contending with the onset of the mass adoption of AI tools including ChatGPT, and its ramifications for scholarly publishing. She also talks about the potential positive use cases for ChatGPT for reducing inequality in publishing. In addition, Sally discusses the nature of mission-based publishing and leading the charge in tackling United Nations SDG goals in publishing. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’. – Michael Walzer, NBN interview (2023) In the 1990 collection What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Solomon and Murphy and published by Oxford, teachers had a textbook to help introduce students to a broad cross-section of political thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel to Hayek to Mill, Nozick, Rawls, Sandel, Taylor and Walzer among others. It is worth mentioning because Michael Walzer insists he is not a formal philosopher, does not in fact, deserve to be grouped with the likes of a Dewey or a Hegel, as Richard Rorty had done in the introduction of his 1999 collection of essays in Philosophy and Social

If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses? Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2022) shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results. Popular but highly misleading claims about a so-called free speech crisis and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education across party lines. Such disingenuous claims impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while normalizing suspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation. Taking a non-partisan approach, Bradford Vivian argu