Cultural and media studies Books

Examining the four main single player games in the franchise and its related spinoff games, this book explores the world of the popular role-playing video game, Fallout.

This book identifies and examines three years of Beyoncé's career as a pop mega star using critical race, feminist, and performance studies methodologies.

The book examines how the contemporary Indian situation poses a strict theoretical challenge to Habermas's theorization of the public sphere and employs the method of samvāda to critically analyze and dissect its universalist claims.

This book examines how the young in Northeast Asia engage with the political, especially in terms of the production, reformulation, or contestation of their national identities.

This book advances a novel methodological approach - pop culture as political object - to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating and...

Informed by critical theory, this book employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) to examine the ever-increasing impact that social media has on politics and contemporary civic discourse.

This book is an exploration of media scandals in contemporary Japanese society. Shedding new light on the study of scandal in Japan, the book offers a novel view of scandal as a specific social ritual which follows moral disturbances in Japanese society.

The book examines the changing discourses of Chinese audience research in the past four decades, aiming to shed light on the complicated relationships among China's media, audiences, and society.

Reaching beyond the Global North, this book showcases research on transnational celebrity as a technology of soft power and counter-hegemonic organizing, and as a driver of discourses of race and migration. It also explores self-presentation and...

This book explores the moral and representational issues associated with engaging young people with popular media depictions of death and dying. It will appeal to researchers and students interested in new media and its cultural and psychological impact...

This book studies how memes disrupt and reimagine politics in humorous ways. Memes create a playful activity that follows a shared set of rules and gives a (shared) voice, which may generate togetherness and political identities but also increase...

This book provides a critical study of the power, trust and legitimacy of algorithmic gatekeepers.

Studying the reception of Farsi Christian television channels by Muslim audiences in Iran, this book uses a wealth of empirical research to explore religious conversion, making it a great resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Media Studies and...

This collection explores the impact of COVID-19 on the production and consumption of television and film content in the English-speaking world.

Critical Discourse Studies aims to enhance our understanding of how discourse figures in social processes, social structures and social change. This book is in response to specific changes in mediation technologies of discourse, brought about by...

Examining how horror and science fiction films from the 1950s to the present invent and explore fictional "us-versus-them" scenarios, this book analyzes how such films employ allegory and/or satire to interrogate the causes and consequences of ...

This book showcases the vibrancy of the study of digital journalism in Latin America. In a research field marked by inequality, the studies included in this volume illustrate how research about and from the Gloabl South, where 86% of the global...

This book is one of the first ethnographic works on small-town stringers or informal news workers in Indian journalism. It explores existing practices and cultures in the field of local journalism and the roles and spaces stringers occupy.

An emerging interest in a British East and Southeast Asian identity after decades of political and social exclusion has coincided with periods of economic and political challenges in the UK.

60 years after Understanding Media, McLuhan remains one of the most influential intellectuals of 20th century. This book focusses not so much on his media theory per se as on the habits and practices that animated his reading, and on larger questions of...

In this book, Lisa Parks develops the concept of vertical mediation to explore how audiovisual cultures enact and infer power relations that exist far beyond the screen. Parks demonstrates how "coverage" makes vertical space intelligible to global...

Cyberactivism is a timely collection of essays examining the growing importance of online activism. The contributors show how online activists have not only incorporated recent technology as a tool for change, but also how they have changed the meaning...

What did you do before Google? The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that everything that matters is now on the Web, and should, in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search...

Journalism is in the middle of sweeping changes in its relationships with the communities it serves, and the audiences for news and public affairs it seeks to address. Changes in technology have blurred the lines between professionals and citizens,...

You probably already have a clear idea of what a "discussion guide for students" is: a series of not-very-interesting questions at the end of a textbook chapter. Instead of triggering thought-provoking class discussion, all too often these guides are...

Luke Hockley explores a new ontology of the cinema and the psychological meanings of films through phenomenological and Jungian film theory.

Media Literacy Education in Action brings together the field's leading scholars and advocates to present a snapshot of the theoretical and conceptual development of media literacy education-what has influenced it, current trends, and ideas about its...

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday...

The study of fashion has exploded in recent decades, yet quite what this all means, quite where it might take us, is not clear. This new book helps to bring fashion into focus, with a comprehensive guide to the key theories, perspectives and developments...

From classic gothic literature like Frankenstein, to contemporary serial killers, horror film fanzines and low-budget movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this book collects twenty-nine key articles to examine the enduring resonance of horror...

This exciting collection addresses action and adventure from the silent to the contemporary period exploring diverse questions of aesthetics, industry and ideology. Action has established itself as one of the leading commercial genres of the New...

"Camp" is often associated with glamour, surfaces and an ostentatious display of chic, but as these authors argue, there is an underside to it that has often gone unnoticed: camp's simultaneous investment in dirt, vulgarity, the discarded and rejected,...

Mobile devices' impact on daily life has raised relevant questions regarding public and private space and communication. Both the technological environment (operating systems, platforms, apps) and media ecosystems (interface design, participatory...

As individuals incorporate new forms of media into their daily routines, these media transform individuals' engagement with networks of heterogeneous actors. Using the concept of media practices, this volume looks at processes of social and political...

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling-typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape-this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media...

Contemporary British Television Crime Drama examines one of the medium's most popular genres and places it within its historical and industrial context. The television crime drama has proved itself capable of numerous generic reinventions and continues...

This book examines how the media approached long-standing and long-simmering issues of race, class, violence, and social responsibility in Baltimore during the demonstrations, violence, and public debate in the spring of 2015. Contributors take Baltimore...

This book brings theory from popular music studies to an examination of identity and agency in youth films while building on, and complementing, film studies literature concerned with genre, identity, and representation. McNelis includes case studies of...

Since the early 2000s, Disney Channel has been dominated by original live-action programming popular among tween girls. The shows' successes rely not only on their popularity among girl audiences, but also on the development of star personae by girl...

Hollywood's live-action superhero films currently dominate the worldwide box-office, with the characters enjoying more notoriety through their feature film and television depictions than they have ever before. This book argues that this immense...

This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories...

Research Skills for Journalists is a comprehensive, engaging and highly practical guide to developing the varied skillset needed for producing well researched, quality journalism across a range of platforms.Illustrated with original interviews and case...

This book studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870. These representations have been invisible in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies due to the general view...

The book adopts a critical cultural studies lens to explore the entanglement of government and gambling in everyday life. Its qualitative approach to gambling creates a new theoretical framework for understanding the most urgent questions raised by...

This book offers a material critique on various aspects of Indian literary production and its reception by its audiences. Taking a historical and contemporary lineage into account, the author variously discusses the social, political, and economic...

Tracing continuities in digital and documentary practices, this book is a study of interactive documentary from the perspective of documentary culture. Exploring the dizzying array of new documentary forms that have emerged in the past ten years, the...

This new and substantially revised edition of Heritage Planning: Principles and Process offers an extensive overview of the burgeoning fields of heritage planning and conservation.  

This book analyzes the constraints on press freedom and the ways in which independent reporting and reporters are at risk in contemporary Asia to provide a barometer of democratic development in the region.Based on in-depth country case studies written...