New Books in Communications

In this succinct and brilliantly written one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, premier historian Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, if not on the entire planet, traces the English press’s history from the 17th century to the Internet age. The English Press: A History (Bloomsbury, 2019) focuses on the major developments in the world of print journalism and sets the history of the press in wider currents of English history, political, social, economic and technological.Black takes the reader through a chronological sequence of chapters, with a final chapter exploring possible scenarios for the future of English press. He investigates whether we are witnessing the demise of, or simply a crisis of the English press in the aftermath of the News of the World scandal and Levinson Inquiry. A new title by one of the most eminent historians of Britain and a leading expert on the history of the press, The English Press will appeal to undergraduate students of British and media history and journalism, as well as to the lay reader with an interest in the history of England, and the media.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. 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, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo—is joined by co-host and recent Geneseo Graduate Haley Wigsten to interview Derek Gaunt (he/his)expert trainer and coach at the Black Swan Group--on his thrilling new book Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader (New Degree Press, 2019). Gaunt is a lecturer and author who trained for 29 years in law enforcement; for 20 of those years, he was leader, then commander, of a hostage negotiations team. Ego, Authority, Failure uses the fundamentals of hostage negotiations leadership (HNL) to teach readers practical strategies for increasing their leadership potential and negotiating uncomfortable situations. Gaunt uses real-life stories of successes and failures in leadership and negotiations which are both compelling and pragmatic to readers’ own lives. The book is a must-read for anyone who has felt that they could improve on their own tactical empathy, emotional intelligence, and negotiation skills. Learn more about Gaunt and his team at the Black Swan Group website. 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, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistant Professor of Women’s Leadership at Tulane University--on her judicious new book Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era from University of Massachusetts Press (2017). Mediating Morality is a contemporary exploration of the construction of teen pregnancy in legal events, activism, media campaigns, television, film, and across many domains of popular-political culture since the dismantling of the welfare state, which Daniel definitively places in the year 1996. Daniel argues that these domains of public thought have merged to reconstruct teen pregnancy as a privatized and deeply personal issue of moral failure--what Daniel, following Lauren Berlant, describes as intimate citizenship--rather than symptomatic of ineffective policies that reproduce racist, classist, and sexist structures of inequality. In addition to engaging readings of popular culture texts such as the movie The Pregnancy Pact and pregnancy prevention campaigns, Mediating Morality is also closely attuned to the legal and political events since 1996 that have authorized and capitalized upon an approach to teen pregnancy that absolves the state of responsibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Discussions of Middle East politics will inevitably bring Islamism to the table and with it, questions of how Islam in its current iterations came to be. In most cases, the Islamic revival is emphasized as a major turning point in 20th-century Islam. In the case of Egypt, there’s even more prescribed significance to the revival, with Egypt's booming population, but also its perceived centrality in both the region and in the Muslim world. In Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival(Cambridge University Press, 2019), Aaron Rock-Singer focuses on three principal characters to tell us the story of the Islamic revival: Salafis, the Muslim Brothers, and state institutions. Combining press sources and oral history, Rock-Singer looks at how non-state actors organized amongst themselves and how the state reacted to them. Thematically, he looks at how all three –the Salafis, the Muslims Brothers, and the Egyptian state– engaged in questions of education, prayer, and gender. In turn, they shaped the Islamic revival in Egypt, with major implications not only for Egypt, but for the global Muslim community.Aaron Rock-Singer is a social and intellectual historian of the Modern Middle East and Islam. He received his B.A from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), his M.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2010) and his Ph.D from Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies (2016). Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House, he joined Cornell's Department of Near Eastern Studies as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In the Fall of 2019, he will begin a tenure track position in Middle Eastern History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the key policy debates during this period. Based on a range of evidence from the Reagan Revolution into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process.Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement. As the authors note, “#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.” This text came out of The Color of New Media working group at the University of California at Berkeley and the contributors come from a variety of academic backgrounds and disciplines, making this a particularly interdisciplinary approach to considering and understanding a wide variety of social movements, social engagement, political discourse, and active use of hashtagging and Twitter. The chapters include examinations of the global use of Twitter in India and Africa; the rise of and then subsequent response/backlash to black Twitter; and the way that Twitter has been used to target minoritarian groups who have established connections and communities via Twitter and social media. This is a fascinating and diverse book, bringing together different voices, studies, and analysis, all examining how Twitter and #hashtagging has grown up, evolved, and essentially provided a platform for political rhetoric, engagement, and also silencing. #identity will appeal to scholars in many different disciplines including sociology, political science, media studies, gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, postcolonial studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, global studies, and more.This book is available open access here.Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of media transform people, institutions, and societies,” Yasar traces the early histories of sound reproduction in modern Japan and their consequences. Electrified Voices examines the development of media technologies—including the telegraph and telephone, phonograph, broadcast radio, and film—and their attendant oralities, auralities, and effects on language, nation, the performing arts, and even intellectual property law. As Yasar shows, sound reproduction changed language and attitudes about language, collapsed time and space, and shaped both individual and collective identities and practices. The impact of these technologies is indispensable to a clear understanding of modernity, and Yasar’s book is a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on not just Japan, but histories of media and modernity as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) explores how Motorola tried—and eventually failed—to turn this dream into a reality. Collins, curator of the civilian applications satellite collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells a remarkable story, one that is deeply relevant to our interconnected present.Using Motorola as a case study, A Telephone for the World tracks how U.S. businesses navigated the end of the twentieth century, a moment marked by the rise of neoliberalism, the economic challenge of Japan, and the end of the Cold War. Most significantly, the book shows how businesspeople at Motorola responded to global conditions, sought to create a global firm, and even constructed “the global as a way of life.” The book is therefore a deep dive into the mechanics of globalization, as seen from the inside of a global company. A Telephone for the World will interest historians of technology, communications scholars, business historians, and anyone who wants to know more about globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With talk about birthright citizenship and border walls running rampant in Trump’s America, there are many scholars reaching back to antebellum America to historically ground today’s citizens in debates from the past that hold relevance now about both topics. Scholars like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Associate Professor of English Derrick Spires is one of those scholars weighing in. Today on New Books in African American Studies, your host, Adam McNeil will help guide the conversation with Professor Spires about his brand new book The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Edited by Nicholas Baer of the University of Chicago, Maggie Hennefeld of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen, both of Carelton University, Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019) is interesting on both an academic and popular level. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications