New Books in Communications

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid.Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience— stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied.He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music.Greg Burris is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts.The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial discoveries and frustrations, and collaborations between Arab scholars and European Orientalists, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics combines the literary flair of a sumptuous novel with the textual density of a philological masterpiece. This carefully crafted and argued book represents both a profound tribute to a mesmerizingly layered archive of tradition and its actors, and a tremendous service to the field of Islamic Studies in particular and Religious Studies more broadly. It will also make a great text to teach in courses on intellectual history, manuscript studies, modern Islam, Muslim reform, and Islamic Law.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well before it emerged in the 1930s. Galili notes that much of this occurred within the context of contemporary technologies such as the cinema and the telephone, both of which pointed to the inherent possibilities of such an invention yet embodied very different ideas about image and communications. Seeking to conceptualize moving image technology, people often used the eye as a metaphor or model for how it might operate or the role that it would serve. Though the emergence of the cinema industry in the United States did much to shape the context in which television would develop in the United States, Galili shows how differing theories of visual media and society in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy offered alternate models that influenced how the new technology was received in their respective countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible.  Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all familiar with the ways in which the acts associated with upholding morality can go wrong. For instance, blame can be excessive, apologies can be patronizing, and so on. Another way in which things can go wrong is when people wield morality opportunistically – for self-aggrandizement, or to elevate themselves in the eyes of others.In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020), Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi call this broad type of moral breakdown grandstanding. Their book examines the different kinds of grandstanding, demonstrates why grandstanding is morally bad, and proposes some tips for avoiding it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries.Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike.Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food.As a whole, Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural productionDonovan Conley is Berman Chair in Language and Thought and associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.Justin Eckstein is assistant professor and director of forensics in the communication department at Pacific Lutheran University.We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

During his nearly four decades as a newspaper editor and politician, Horace Greeley embraced a range of controversial causes. In his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), James M. Lundberg finds within his seemingly contradictory positions a consistent belief in the power of print to forge American nationalism. This Lundberg traces to his upbringing in a Protestant American culture which valued greatly the power of reading. Upon arriving in New York City in 1831 Greeley embarked on a career as a journalist and editor, and was a key figure in the shift away from relatively expensive periodicals to the mass-produced daily newspapers. His New-York Tribune gave Greeley a prominent platform from which he advocated for his nationalist vision, and he was a visible participant in the increasingly divisive political debates of the 1840s and 1850s. As an opponent of both slavery and secession, Greeley championed both a vigorous prosecution of the war and, with the Union’s victory in 1865, a swift reconciliation of the two sides, with the latter stance alienating many of his former allies and playing a key role in his nomination as Ulysses S. Grant’s challenger in the presidential election of 1872. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas.In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century.Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British.Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire.Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world.In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news.Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice.Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will.This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Gallup, Inc.This collaboration, which is on-going, has a number of foci, and this book project came out of work that combined expertise from political scientists, computer scientists, and data experts, concentrating specifically on social media, traditional media, and new Gallup survey data acquired over the course of the 2016 election cycle.The eight authors of Words that Matter brought distinct areas of expertise to analyze and explain not only the data that Gallup amassed through open-ended questions asked over the course of a number of months leading up to the general election in 2016, but also to pull together media analysis to use as contextual framing to examine and understand the responses provided to the Gallup surveys.Ceren Budak, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael Traugott spoke with me on behalf of the rest of the book’s authors as well, explaining this extended and unique ongoing collaboration while diving into the book’s particular research schema.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital?Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout.You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise (Rutgers University Press, 2019) investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds.Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some.They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere.Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages.Bethany L. Johnson (MPhil, M.A.) is a doctoral student in the history of science, technology and the environment at the University of South Carolina and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Margaret M. Quinlan (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and core faculty in the interdisciplinary Health Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications