New Books in Communications

In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive study of adaptation across media, form and genre, this book argues passionately for the importance of adaptation to our understanding of literary texts. For Lopez Szwydky, adaptation does not just constitute the afterlife of the adapted work, but instead it forms part of the dynamic process that...

When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2016), I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic poetry in Medieval Greek I had read over the weekend. I wondered about the PDF conference volume on my desktop between other PDFs downloaded at my university library. Casting an eye to the bookshelves along my wall, I looked at the spines of all the books there, upright and peaceful in...

What are the possibilities and what are the inequalities of the digital world? In The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave, 2020), Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores the experiences of Black women as producers and as consumers of digital media. The book offers a rich combination of archival and interview material, along with a theoretical framework crossing boundaries of digital, media, and communication studies, along with...

What are the limitations of relying on logic as an upfront filter in pursuing ideas? Find out as I talk to Rory Sutherland about his new books Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life (William Morrow, 2019) Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, a legendary advertising agency. He’s also a columnist for The Spectator and a past president of the London-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). His TED Talks have been viewed over 6.5...

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the nonprofit's largest in number of articles published and its broadest in coverage, ranging as it does over all topics in the natural sciences and medicine, to include, as well, some in the social sciences, too. PLOS One appears only online, a format the staff bring into service to foster Open Access...

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio...

What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his book Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Dylon Robbins approaches this question in a stunning series of chapters that move between Cuba and Brazil just as both nations were moving into post-emancipation and increasingly intense appeals to...

The implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible...

It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested Third World country to that of a frontier of boundless economic opportunity? In her nimbly researched and lucidly narrated new book Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (Stanford UP, 2020), Prof. Ravinder Kaur tracks the over two decades of mega-publicity...

What are we to make of the year’s first presidential debate? Listen in as John R. Hibbing, Jonathan Weiler and I discuss this question and others surrounding the 2020 presidential race. Hibbing is a Foundation Regents University Professor of political history and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a NATO Fellow and a Senior Fulbright Fellow. He is the author of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences...

Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson. Helen Pearson is Chief...

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In...

How does the music industry work in the modern world? In Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2020), Bethany Klein, a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, explores the relationship between music and money, from the early years of the pop industry to contemporary society’s ‘promotional culture’. The book conceptualises ‘selling out’, and offers a nuanced understanding of how the idea developed and how it might still be important and...

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave...

In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defined concept of critical thinking, including its history and role in a democratic society. We discuss the important role critical thinking plays in making decisions and communicating our ideas to others as well as the most effective ways teachers can help their students become critical thinkers....

In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. In his book Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939 (Oxford UP, 2020), Simon J. Potter describes these efforts to use radio to promote global harmony and how they were eclipsed by nationalism and the weaponization of...

How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Morgan is one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. He’s written for Fortune 50 CEOs as well as for political and educational leaders, and coached people for events ranging from TED talks to giving testimony to Congress. Topics covered in this episode include:...

Not all Christians are anti-science or climate change deniers; on the contrary, the intersection of climate change and Christianity ranges from deniers to bargainers to harmonizers. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Emma Frances Bloomfield (she) about this intersection and how different segments of Christians talk about climate change and how others can use communication to engage them. While existing studies have discussed environmentalism as...

In Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Dana Renga offers the first comprehensive study of recent, popular Italian television. Building on work in American television studies, audience and reception theory, and masculinity studies, her book examines how and why viewers are positioned to engage emotionally with—and root for—Italian television antiheroes. Italy’s most popular exported series feature alluring and attractive...

The way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Allison L. Rowland (s) about zoetropes and zoerhetorics or ways of talking about living beings that promote (#blacklivesmatter) or demote (“collateral damage”) lives and groups of lives. Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood (Ohio State University Press, 2020)looks at a variety of these zoerhetorics and the zoetropes or rhetorical...