Publications

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

Brands are everywhere. Branding is central to political campaigns and political protest movements; the alchemy of social media and self-branding creates overnight celebrities; the self-proclaimed “greening” of institutions and merchant goods is nearly universal. But while the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics. That, in fact, we live in a brand culture.


Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship

In Kids Rule! Sarah Banet-Weiser examines the cable network Nickelodeon in order to rethink the relationship between children, media, citizenship, and consumerism.


The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women.


Laura Castañeda

News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity

Edited by Laura Castañeda and Shannon B. Campbell, this volume contains original material written for this text that equips students with the general knowledge of sexual diversity needed by today's journalists.


Manuel Castells

Communication Power

Manuel Castells analyses the transformation of the global media industry by this revolution in communication technologies.


Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age

Networks of Outrage and Hope is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the social protests in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere."


Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age

This book stands out as one of the most provocative insights into the impact of the Global Information Age on all dimensions of the human experience.


Bill Celis

Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America's Vanishing West

A colorful look at rural America's rebound-and at the tensions created when urban expatriates meet old-time country values-centered on a Colorado community and its one-room school house.


Nicholas Cull

The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989

Published at a time when the U.S. government's public diplomacy is in crisis, this book provides an exhaustive account of how it used to be done.​


Christina Dunbar-Hester

Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country."


Robeson Taj Frazier

The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination

In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad.


Yu Hong

Labor, Class Formation, and China's Informationized Policy of Economic Development

In Labor, Class Formation, and China's Informationized Policy of Economic Development, Yu Hong examines crucial connections between the evolving political economy of information and communications technology (ICT) and the reconstitution of class relations in China"


Félix Gutiérrez

Racism, Sexism, and the Media: Multicultural Issues Into the New Communications Age

"The Fourth Edition of Racism, Sexism, and the Media examines how different race, ethnic, and gender groups fit into the fabric of America; how the media influence and shape everyone's perception of how they fit; and how the media and advertisers are continuously adapting their communications to effectively reach these groups."


Josh Kun

Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America

"Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity."


To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City

"How did Los Angeles become the modern city the world watches? We know some of the answers all too well. Sunshine. Railroads. Hollywood. Freeways. But there's another often overlooked but especially delicious and revealing factor: food."


Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition

"Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles."


Mark Lloyd

Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America

Mark Lloyd has crafted a complex and powerful assessment of the relationship between communication and democracy in the United States.​"


Roberto Suro

Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America

Strangers Among Us" is a lucid, informed, and cliché-shattering examination of Latino immigration to the United States--its history, the vast transformations it is fast producing in American society, and the challenges it will present for decades to come."


Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue

Bringing nuance, complexity, and clarity to a subject often seen in black and white, Writing Immigrationpresents a unique interplay of leading scholars and journalists working on the contentious topic of immigration."


Sandy Tolan

Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land

Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child from a Palestinian refugee camp, confronts an occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something much bigger than himself, and then, through his charisma and persistence, inspires scores of others to work with him to make that dream real.


The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier.


Alison Trope

Stardust Monuments (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)

In this engaging analysis, Alison Trope explores the tensions between art and commerce as they intersect in a range of nonprofit and for-profit institutions and products.


Ernest J. Wilson III

Diversity and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Reader

As the public face of American has changed, so has the face of its foreign policy. Diversity and U.S. Foreign Policy, goes beyond the traditional texts that focus on foreign policy only as a contest between super-powers to grapple with multiculturalism in America and multipolarism on the international state."


Diane Winston

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media

Whether the issue is the rise of religiously inspired terrorism, the importance of faith based NGOs in global relief and development, or campaigning for evangelical voters in the U.S., religion proliferates in our newspapers and magazines, on our radios and televisions, on our computer screens and, increasingly, our mobile devices."


Book reviews courtesy of Amazon.com