New Books in Communications

Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including film, television, novels, stage productions, and theme parks. It showcases fan engagement such as cosplay, fan art, and on social media, as well as the company’s reaction to it. Further, the volume deals with crucial issues—race and racism, the role of queerness, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advent of the streaming service Disney+—within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts.

The authors come from a variety of disciplines including cultural and medi...

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11 (UNC Press, 2021), Professor John Bodnar argues that the nature of patriotism as being war-based or empathetic divided the nation as much as the responses to the 9/11 attacks. Using a variety of public media and private correspondence, Dr. Bodnar explores the different ways Americans tried to understand and remember 9/11, their disagreements over government responses to it, and how patriotism itself was also part of the debate. Dr. Bo...

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.
In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new...

Jasbeer Mamalipurath’s TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is the first of its kind in-depth examination of the TedTalk phenomenon and in particular how Islam and Muslim experiences are represented in these talks. Mamalipurath argues that TED Talks on Islam are part of a larger postsecular (the secular's renewed interest in faith) discourse. The book examines the perspectives of Muslim and non-Muslim TED viewers about TED's storytelling strategies. Finally, the book studies aspects of the authority that both Muslim and non-Muslim TED speakers represent and embody as ‘spokespersons of Islam.’ By doing so, this book offers a...

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse.

Dr. Winderman demonstrates how "back-alley abortion" was always more than just descriptive language—it has shaped perceptions of medical legitimacy and clin...

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story

OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and ne...

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the third episode of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. We talk through this episode as a literalization of the problem of being an individual in late-stage capitalism or, if you prefer, the Amazonification of everything.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”
found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a s...

How are influencers changing the arts? In Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (U California Press, 2025) Sophie Bishop, an Associate Professor in the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication analyses the lives of artists and influencers to understand the working and living conditions shaping modern culture. The book draws a comparison between the two sets of workers, showing how artists are having to engage with influencer’s techniques to be successful in the online economy, and how both groups struggle with the inequalities of the platform economy. Rich with fascinating case studies, alongside a range of...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. The show posits an extraordinary intervention in worldwide politics and culture producing a utopia (that is of course simultaneously a dystopia) of quiescent bliss. Is the show shaping up to be another hit for the showrunner, previously responsible for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, examines the discourses and metaphors of contagion and contamination in vernacular beliefs and practices across a number of media and forms. Using ethnographic, media, and narrative analysis, chapters discuss the changing representations of vampires and zombies in popular culture, the online discussions of Slenderman in relation to adolescent experiences of bullying, the misogyny embedded in legends about...

In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration, mass connection with the wider world (making it both smaller and bigger), and the twilight of an empire shaped the Madrileños, their sense of identity, and their feelings of being modern and visually aware. A history of print media—and itself an example of print media—the book shows how people adapted to the dawnin...

How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China’s media landscape—while drawing comparisons with the US and EU.

Dr. Joanne Kuai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and holds a PhD from Karlstad University in Sweden. Her research focuses on digital journalism, the social implications of automation and algorithms, and the governance of data and AI.

Nin...

In an age when digital media permeates every aspect of our lives, understanding its influence is more critical than ever. Algorithmic Saga: Understanding Media, Culture, and Transformation in the AI Age (Atique Mindscape Publishing, 2025), serves as a compass, guiding readers through the complexities of our interconnected world. From the moment we wake to a flurry of notifications to the late-night scrolling that often accompanies our downtime, we find ourselves enmeshed in a digital landscape that shapes our perceptions, relationships, and routines. The journey ahead will illuminate the dual-edged nature of technology—its ability to connect and empower as well as i...

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

In Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (Columbia UP, 2025), Dr. Martin Moore and Dr. Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their po...

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.
Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and ha...

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades. More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link...

In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitable crowdfunding for healthcare in the United States—and the consequences of allowing healthcare access to be decided by the digital crowd.

Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in popularity across the globe. Sites such as GoFundMe, which now boasts a “global community of over 100 million” users, have transformed the ways we seek and offer help. When faced with crises—especially medical ones—Americans are turning to online platforms that promise to connect them to the charity of t...

A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? 

In Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Stevie Suan examines how anime's recognizable media-form--no matter where it is produced--reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality. Far from valorizing the individualistic "ori...

Maggie Gram is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experience-design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Harvard University, and she has written for N+1 and the New York Times. She lives in New York. The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History (Basic Books, 2025)

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Is...

Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), edited by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren, answers the urgent need to re-evaluate not only the significance of women's documentary practices and their contributions to feminist world-building, but also the state of documentary studies as it engages with political, aesthetic, and industrial developments arising as a result of an increasing numbers of women's documentaries. 

Bringing together a range of diverse practitioners and authors, the volume analyzes alternative and emergent networks of documentary production and collaboration within a global context. The chapters investigate filmmaking practices...

The Co-production Landscape in Europe: From Eurimages to Netflix (Springer Nature, 2025) explores the evolving landscape of European film and television co-productions, from traditional models supported by Eurimages to new collaborations shaped by global streaming platforms like Netflix. It examines how European co-production policies have influenced industry practices, funding structures, and audience engagement, balancing artistic, economic, and cultural priorities. Through historical analysis, case studies, and stakeholder perspectives – including policymakers, industry professionals, and audiences – this book offers fresh insights into the challenges and opportunities facing European audiovisual production today. It is essential reading for scholars, industry professionals, and policymakers interested in transnationa...

How is the world of work depicted on page and on screen? In Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work Dr Will Kitchen, an Associate Lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth explores this question using a series of literary and media case studies. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque, the book assesses the possibilities of media texts, including histories, literature, films and sitcoms, to offer alternative visions of work. More critically, the analysis highlights media’s role in reinforcing exploitation and alienation within its seemingly playful and positive engagements with work. Theoretically rich, but accessible...

John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC's highly influential punk community DIY culture has always been at the heart of DC's thriving punk community. As Washington, DC's punk scene emerged in the mid-1970s, so did the periodicals--"fanzines"--that celebrated it. Before the rise of the internet, fanzines were a potent way for fans to communicate and to revel in the joy of fandom. These zines were more than just publications; they were a distillation of punk's allure, connecting the city to...

Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Avishek Ray about his co-authored book Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. This book explores how the digital selfie, unlike traditional photography, turns the lens inward while reconfiguring social identities, gender norms, power relations, and everyday interactions. Drawing on rich, situated examples, it shows how selfies operate as acts of self-making and...

Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Litwin Books, 2025) sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. In Ways of Knowing, Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara present unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in l...

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical “things” with architecture and art.
Based on extensive research of North American company archives, and French institutional ones, and drawing on secondary literature in art and architectural history, media studies, and the history of...

On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (The Ohio State UP, 2025) is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Author Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitut...

The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (Heresy Press, 2025) constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government. This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn’t f...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, about her book, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice. The book examines how black girls use social media posts to fashion self images that express the girls’ self-understandings, goals, and worldviews. Vinsel and Wade talk about the research methods and ethics of the project and end by talking about Wade’s current project on young social media influencers and how the digital content production and i...

Why can’t we seem to agree on facts? In this succinct volume, sociologist Joel Best turns his inimitable eye toward the social construction of what we think is true. He evaluates how facts emerge from our social worlds—including our beliefs, values, tastes, and norms—and how they align with those worlds’ standards. He argues that by developing a sociological perspective toward what we think we know, we can better parse the use of facts and untruths around us.
Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory Claims (U California Press, 2025) by Joel Best examines how facts are created and supported t...

Archival Research in Historical Organisation Studies: Theorising Silences offers an accessible account of theorising the archive, contesting the narrow definitions of the archive with a view beyond a mere repository of documents. Scholars Gabrielle Durepos and Amy Thurlow discuss the ways that business archives have marginalized various populations and themes by providing two frameworks for examining the processes that have led to previous exclusions from archives. Ultimately, the authors seek to redress these absences and contribute to a better future.

Gabrielle (Gabie) Durepos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Tourism, at Mount Saint Vinc...

Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be (Punctum Books, 2025) offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts, popular culture, and others. But, when did game studies start? And what (and who) is at the core or center of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are not as b...

Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical framework, the book draws on a range of interviews with radio workers, revealing how stories are chosen and supported, expertise and perspectives are included and excluded, and how radio workers of colour are challenging and changing the radio industry. Published at a time when public radio faces an...

The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai (Rutgers UP, 2025) is an accessible collection that explores the cultural, industrial, and historical impact of that beloved American sitcom. Edited by Taylor Cole Miller and Alfred L. Martin, Jr., this anthology brings together a diverse range of voices that model different media studies approaches to researching and critically analyzing television texts. The Golden Girls reclaims the production history and development of the show, opens new conversations about audiences–especially Black, queer, and female audiences–and provides new insight into the meteoric rise in popularity of The Golden Girls as a 2020s cultural phenomenon...

In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (Cambridge UP, 2025) unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields.

Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa, J. Siguru Wahutu turns our focus to the underexplored journalistic representations created by African journalists reporting on African countries.

In assessing news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these n...

Creating the Viewer: Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem (U Texas Press, 2024) is a study of the largely hidden world of primary media market research and the different methods used to understand how the viewer is pictured in the industry.

The first book on the intersection between market research and media, Creating the Viewer takes a critical look at media companies’ studies of television viewers, the assumptions behind these studies, and the images of the viewer that are constructed through them. Justin Wyatt examines various types of market research, including talent testing, pilot testing, series maintenance, brand stud...

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.

She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to d...

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.

Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior (U of Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how this sp...