New Books In Communications

On this episode of New Books in Communications, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Bradford Vivian (he/his) of Penn State University on his fabulous new book Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). In this book, Dr. Vivian asks readers to reconsider our almost sacred regard for the act of witnessing in public culture and consider witnessing as a rhetorical act that we recognize not only because of the transparent truth of the witness testimony but because that testimony conforms to particular expectations of witnessing, which Dr. Vivian calls the “topoi” or commonplaces of witnessing including authenticity, impossibility, and regret. Investigating a variety of public culture texts—from 19th-century speeches to the 9/11 Memorial—Dr. Vivian explores the ambiguity of witnessing as an act of memory and culture and how that act normalizes who has the right to speak truth and how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Kendall Phillips (he) of Syracuse University on his fabulous new book A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema (University of Texas, 2018). In it, Phillips explores the emergence of the horror film genre before it was horror and a post-Civil War national American identity. Dr. Phillips discusses the unique role of Universal Studio’s 1931 Dracula, the turning point of the Phantom’s revelation in The Phantom of the Opera, and what horror was before it was horror. Along the way, Dr. Phillips discusses how shifts in filming technologies and international politics at the turn of the century forged a distinctly American identity based upon incredulousness, narrative depth, and rationality.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as a public utility made elite information technology accessible to a wide audience. In A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018), Joy Lisi Rankin seeks to restore this broader perspective by situating the history of educational computing within the arc of U.S. social politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a new perspective that challenges the business-dominated historiography of computing by explaining the convergence between the technical and social through efforts that began locally. As these projects expanded in scope, their advocates articulated a vision of "computing citizenship" throughout the rise of what we now call the "information age." Through a series of cases, beginning with timesharing at Dartmouth and the development of the BA

In Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (University of North Press, 2014), Margaret Peacock analyzes the various ways in which images of children were put to use, in Soviet and American Cold War propaganda. From the Boy Scouts to the Pioneers, ubiquitous images of children portrayed the superiority of communism/capitalism. Where children were used to showcase superiority, equally powerful were images of children as needing protection. In the United States, images of the child helped explain the need for nuclear testing and fallout shelters. From a Soviet point of view, children were likewise to be protected: from the evils of capitalist consumerism, from the rapacious nuclear warmongering of the West. Even as children were used to promote the officially sanctioned view of the American/Soviet state, those same images, Dr. Peacock shows, could be used to subvert that view. Post-Stalin Soviet films criticized the status quo using images of the child to do so. Suspect Am

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in the kind of information North Koreans have access to, and this is the subject of Jieun Baek's excellent North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press, 2016). Based on interviews with North Koreans who have settled in the South, Baek shows how everything from television programs to foreign affairs coverage and fashion has made its way into the country from the outside world. DPRK citizens today live in a much more informationally open society than the all-too-common ‘hermit kingdom’ label would imply. As well as getting a rich sense of the very personal stories that often underlie the movement of information, goods and cash into the coun

The story of Emmett Till’s death at the hands of white Mississippians is well known. For many Americans, it highlights the racism of the Jim Crow South and was a defining moment that helped galvanize a generation of civil rights leaders. In his new book, Elliott J. Gorn (Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago) tells the story of Till’s life and death. The death and trial was a national and international news story, but the exact meaning of events in Mississippi were contested. Moreover, the horrific images of Till’s badly beaten body were published in black publications at a time of a segregated media landscape. Most white Americans did not see them until decades later. In Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till (Oxford University Press, 2018), Gorn also tells this story of the story of Till’s death—examining how responses to the death varied across the population and showing how public memory of Till’s murder has changed over the intervening years. In this episode of the podcast, Gorn discuss

How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018),  Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, explores this question using a mixture of dramatic and social theory, along with examples from a variety of theatre performances and forms. The book sets out the history of social housing and the council estate, along with a reading of the (mis)representations of the estate across contemporary media. The book shows the longstanding and complex relationship between theatre, class, and the estate, using examples including high profile state pieces, as well as site specific theatre. The book will be essential reading for theatre and performance scholars, along with anyone interested in issues of class and culture, as well as housing, space and place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regia Rini is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at the York University. Her research resides at the intersections of moral philosophy, psychology, and political epistemology. She also publishes popular work on topics concerning the social and political impacts of technology. She is currently working on a book about social media and democracy. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their government and publishers? Volker Berghahn examines the lives and careers of three media giants with his latest book Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany(Princeton University Press, 2019). In it, Berghan's exploration of German journalists' compromises and moral vision for their country illuminates perennial issues around press freedom and the place of media in modern societies. Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. His numerous contributions to the field have covered the social and cultural history of modern Germany and Euro-American relations. He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and going on to Columbia ten years later. A selected list of Berghahn's books includes A

Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media bots as much as we learn from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. In The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2017), Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an internet of people and devices, after millennia of local, ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children learn more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the futur

When "Dirty Harry" first premiered in 1971, it was both praised and condemned for its portrayal of a rogue policeman fighting crime by ignoring many of the rules and procedures of the profession. Yet director Don Siegel denied any attempt to make a political statement with the film. Joe Street’s book Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash (University Press of Florida, 2016) discusses all five "Dirty Harry" films and helps to better explain the importance of them both cinematically and socially. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following Du Vernet’s journey westward across Canada, Klassen examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement. Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perhaps no form of popular art has appeared as poised to resist subversive sexual themes as the television situation comedy. But Tison Pugh writes that the sitcom’s historic dogmatic insistence on an earnest innocence was doomed to fail, and that the weight of this strain reveals itself under close scrutiny. In The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Pugh looks at six beloved sitcoms throughout television history in a way you have probably never viewed them before. “Sexuality and queerness can never be banished from family sitcoms but instead percolate throughout various story lines that attempt to quell their disruptive force," Pugh writes. “In brief, queerness as a critical concept fractures cultural constructions of gendered and erotic normativity, dismantling rigid binary codes of licit and illicit desires and identities. Queer refers to contested sexual and gender identities but extends further to include identities that challenge regimes of normativity. More s

In her new book, Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen (Otago University Press, 2018), Annabel Cooper, an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Otago, explores how filmmakers have portrayed the New Zealand wars of the 19th century and how those productions serve as a snapshot of the complex cultural moment of their creation. Exploring today's new forms of media and innovative platforms, Cooper charts the growth of Maori creative control in telling these important national stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications and Head of Department at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, explores these two interrelated ideas in order to analyse a range of examples including the body positivity movement, confidence, #gamergate, seduction communities, and women in tech. These examples, along with extensive discussion of media examples including advertising, and a theorisation of the 'economy of visibility', demonstrate the important work of popular feminism, its limits, and the misogynist backlash aimed at arresting feminism's progress. The book engages and explains our current politics, with important lessons for both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a media analysis with global implications. As a result the book is an important read across the social sciences, politics, and beyond. Learn more about your ad ch

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the major aspects of the end of the Cold War has been the discovery and release of records related to many government activities from the period. In Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman tell the story of a movie studio created by the United States government soon after the end of World War 2: Lookout Mountain Laboratory, known during the 1960s as the 1352nd Photographic Group of the United States Air Force. The studio made hundreds of films. You may have seen one, but probably don't know it. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark Polizzotti challenges that idea in a provocative treatise on his craft, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). “A good translation, created by a thoughtful and talented translator,” Polizzotti writes, “aims not to betray the original but to honor it by offering something of equal–possibly even greater–beauty in its name. Polizzotti has translated over 50 books and authored or co-authored four of his own. He is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arabic script is astounding!  Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages over the course of human history from the Middle East to Asia, to Europe, and to the tip of South Africa. Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a recent example of the scholarship on the aesthetics of Arabic script and what it communicates. Author J.R. Osborn writes, not quite a standard history, not quite a work of communication studies, not quite a linguistic study, but a combination of all three that tells the story of Arabic script over ten centuries: from the formation of the calligraphic tradition to the rise of Unicode. J.R. Osborn is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program.  His work explores media history, design, semiotics, communication technologies, and aesthetics with a