New Books In Communications

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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

Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communicat

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces. Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny explores the competing values and publics journalists must negotiate to provide objective news and to build trust. Exploring the complexities of ‘doing journalism’ in the 21st century with competing technological platforms he attempts to answer the question: what is the role of journalism and freedom of the press in the modern era?   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative theorizing about why people choose to record experiences. In her new book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018), Cornell University associate professor Lee Humphreys argues that selfies and other social media life logging, like traditional journaling, is media accounting, which offers us a deeper understanding of ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in her book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (University of California Press, 2017). The book recently received a Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of various books on film history, including At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How does the seduction, or “pick-up artist,” industry work? In her new book Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018), Rachel O’Neill provides a sociological analysis of the seduction industry. By using ethnographic and interview methods, O’Neill engages with the industry to better understand how intimacy is portrayed through media, trainings, and men’s experiences using these techniques in the field. This book is rich with accessible and interesting discussions of masculinity. For instance, O’Neill explores how men who attend seduction trainings, as well as the trainers themselves, “brand” their “sexual selves.” The book covers many interesting topics including social hierarchies and the importance of style. O’Neill also tackles issues relevant to current cultural discussions around consent and the intersection and discord between feminism and masculinity. O’Neill’s next project includes turning an eye to mediated health through studying “wellness culture” and practices of health enh

If you watch old movies or study film history, you may know that early 20th-century Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, which dictated what could and couldn’t be portrayed onscreen. But did you know that television had a code of its own? Its story has never been told at length until now. Deborah Jaramillo, Associate Professor of Film and Television at Boston University, is the author of a new book called The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry (University of Texas Press, 2018). Jaramillo tells the story of a young television industry’s attempt to police itself on controversial questions about content, fending off pressure from government regulators and finicky viewers. Jaramillo explores whether the federal government could have played a stronger role at this formative time in the industry, and what the code did and didn’t accomplish in its three decades of existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture and modern conflict.  The authors make comparisons to previous technological advancements (such as telegraph and radio) and connect the use of social media to a Clausewitzian view of war. The use of social media by insurgents, criminal organizations, and nation-states raises questions about whether the medium is the message or if new communication channels are propaganda in another form. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In a time where concepts such as gender pronouns, sexual assault and harassment, and toxic masculinity are entering and shaping public discourse, knowing the ways in which gender and language interact is key. In her new book, Speaking Up: Understanding Language and Gender (Multilingual Matters, 2018),  Dr. Allyson Jule describes the ways in which gender and language intersect in various parts of life. Jule examines gender and language in media and technology, education, the workplace, religion, and relationships. Each chapter offers the latest research in that area as well as major works that preceded our current time. Jule provides an excellent primer that could be used at all levels of higher education along with being accessible to the general public, which makes this an outstanding contribution to the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How do social movements remember the past? How do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements (Palgrave, 2018), Lorenzo Zamponi provides an answer to these questions by analyzing the representations of specific episodes related to the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the recollection of those events by current student activists. By bridging the disciplines of memory studies and social movement studies, Lorenzo makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how cultural factors shape political action. Collective memories can serve as a way of legitimation and mobilization to social movements, but they can also limit their strategic choices by imposing certain past identities and contentious repertoires. Researchers from all disciplines interested in the intersect between memory and social movement studies are encouraged to answer to the Ca

The study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talking with three scholars who have made substantial contributions to this field by introducing an innovative perspective to the studies of educational policy—the discursive perspectives. In their new edited volume, Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), editors Jessica Lester, Chad Lochmiller, and Rachael Gabriel, together with other contributors of the book, argue that we should pay close attention to how language is used as a mediation in the entire process of education policy conceptualization and implementation. The book offers compelling and diverse examples to demonstrate how researchers interested in different aspects of policy studies may employ language-based methodologies to enrich our understanding of crucial issues in the realm of policymaking. Thoughtful

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! 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 Support

Ben Epstein’s new book, The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation over Time (Oxford University Press, 2018), traces communication changes and innovations in the United States from the time of the Founding to the present, while also exploring how and where innovative use of communication becomes viable for political actors. Epstein connects a number of threads within the book, including a qualitative approach to communications studies that makes use of the American Political Development, or APD, framework as the structure to explore the disruptions in technology that allow for new forms of political communication operations to come forward and for political actors to choose to make use of these innovative forms for communication. Making central claims about how technological and political forces disrupt political communication activity and how these disruptions lead to new political communication orders, Epstein also examines who makes the most use of new information and

Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administration that provides the reader with a broad and expansive understanding of different aspects of presidential politics, political rhetoric, communication between elected officials and constituents, and the shifting perceptions of the role of the executive in the American political system. This snapshot in time, in this case, 1935, provides a much bigger picture of power, political change, and the sense of the country as a whole. Stuckey integrates aspects of these letters into her analysis as she explores rhetorical authority and differing political vocabularies as seen while the power and structural dynamics in the United States shifted during this period. She also examines how these letters between clergy members and the president provide readers with an underst

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm or evoking emotion. Science is complex and often cannot provide the easy “soundbite” worthy answers that celebrities and politicians truly comprehend. Americans are flooded with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In his book Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information (Columbia University Press, 2018), Dr. Paul Offit sets the record straight. In this book, Dr. Offit shares his advice from his years of experience battling misinformation in science and public health. He has often found himself in the crosshairs of the anti-vaccine movement and other pseudoscience groups. He has received a significant amount of hate mail and even death threats for speaking out in the name of good science and the health of mankind. Bad science isn’t just wrong,

John H. McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written academic books on creole linguistics, including the book we’ll be talking about today, but also a number of popular books on language (including The Power of Babel), and black identity in the United States. He is a regular columnist for several US broadsheets; he’s a two-time TED talker; and he has a weekly podcast dealing with issues related to language called Lexicon Valley which is worth checking out if you’re listening to New Books in Language. In this interview, McWhorter discusses his recent book The Creole Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Making the case that prominent scholars in creole studies have systematically mischaracterized the nature of creole languages, McWhorter calls for a more intellectually honest engagement with the empirical evidence, both from “syntactocentric” formal linguists, and from creolists concerned that treating creoles as typologically distinct is t

We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences, and is “economy” necessarily the most productive frame in which to understand these transformations in attention and distraction? Yves Citton’s new book explores these questions in a fascinating study of attention as economy, ecology, and “echology” (with the last taking on resonances of the notion of the echo). The Ecology of Attention (tr. Barnaby Norman) (Polity Press, 2017) looks carefully at attention-related phenomena emergent at a number of scales and argues throughout that there are high stakes for how we understand and work with these phenomena: for teaching, performance, the environment, and liberty itself. It’s a clear and compelling book about an important topic, and it will be of interest to a wide readership. Enjoy the conversation! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon C

Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance seen to predominate. Such a binary framing is particularly often applied to analyses of the country’s media which is understood in terms of mouthpieces of the party-state or vanishingly rare dissident voices. Yet as Maria Repnikova lucidly shows in her book Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2017) there may be much more at play here than a straightforward cleavage between collaboration and resistance. Through discussion of the work of ‘critical journalists’ and their interactions with officialdom, Repnikova paints a rich and provocative picture of the flexible, creative, if nevertheless precarious, nature of state-media interactions whose implications go far beyond the media sphere. Repnikova suggests that journalistic ‘change-makers within the system’ (to