New Books in Communications

Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (Michigan State UP, 2022) reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.Avery Weinman earned her Bachelor’s in History from UCSC and her Master’s in History from UCLA. Her work has been published in American Jewish History and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She is a naturalist, an environmentalist, and a birder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

A hybrid lab functions in the space between institutions and infrastructure, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. However, their legitimacy remains fuzzy without formal and methodological critique. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 2021) proposes the "extended lab model" to describe the relationship of various facets of a lab and uses a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies. This conversation covers the role of collection in academic labs, the influence of universities on labs and infrastructure negotiations, the acknowledgment of people and imaginaries in knowledge production, and transparency and accessibility. Find the Open Access version of the book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Comic Book as Research Tool contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. Along with two illustrated research comics, Toxic Play and 10 Business Days, the book offers readers numerous comic-based illustration activities and creative visual exercises to support data generation, foster conversational knowledge exchanges, facilitate inference, analysis, and interpretation, while nurturing the necessary skills to illustrate and create research comics. The book engages a diverse audience and is an illuminating read for visual novices, experts, and all in-betweeners.Dr. Stephen O’Sullivan is lecturer in marketing and consumer culture at University College Cork, Cork University Business School. His research is primarily situated in the consumer culture theory dimensions of marketplace cultures and consumer identity projects. Current research involves an investigation of contemporary play, particularly that which is harmful in nature. Stephen is an advocate for the greater application of creative media in social science. His published works can be found in the Marketing Theory, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption Markets & Culture, Advances in Consumer Research, and Journal of Customer Behavior. Contributes research films to the Indie Cork Film Festival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age.A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.Archival Film Curatorship is available as an open access e-book at this link.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from The Wren, The Wren (Norton, 2023) and discusses the “etherized” state of our inner lives as they circulate on social media. Anne says we don't yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”--though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos...is not as interested in your period as you might think.”Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they're "just Irish." Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want--while simultaneously “mortifying them...condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’s Now We are Six. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Today’s book is: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), edited by Dr. Sisanda Nkoala (with Gilbert Motsaathebe). The book focuses on South African radio stations and broadcasters in the past and present. It brings together media scholars and practitioners to deliberate on the role and influence of radio broadcasting in South Africa over the past 100 years. One of few books to consider radio broadcasting in South Africa, this volume provides a historical account of the development of the sector, theoretical frameworks, an in-depth look at key people and institutions that have shaped the sector, a critique of the medium’s role in community-building and culture making, and includes the voices of media practitioners reflecting on the importance of this medium.Our guest is: Dr. Sisanda Nkoala who is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. She won the NIHSS Digital Humanities: Best Visualisation or Infographic award; the Western Cape Cultural Affairs Award for Best Researcher Contributing to Archival Heritage; the HERS-SA Young Women Leader in Higher Education award; and Vodacom Journalist of the Year: Western Cape Radio Features category. She serves as vice-chair of the IAMCR’s media education research section, the African Journalism Educators Network secretary-general, as an associate editor for the Journal of Communication Technology, a public representative on the South African Press Council, a member of the Film & Publication Board’s Appeals Tribunal, and as the vice-president of the South African Communication Association. She is published in journals and in The Conversation. She is the editor of 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now, and Community Radio, Digital Radio and the Future of Radio in South Africa. Before joining academia, she was a radio journalist.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also like: The Conversation article discussed in this episode on 100 years of radio in Africa: from propaganda to peoples' power The Conversation article referenced in today's episode on radio in South Africa turning 100 and colliding with podcasting and streaming The Conversation article referenced in today's episode on community radio and how young South Africans are helping shape the news through social media The Conversation article referenced in this episode on setbacks for indigenous languages learning Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP. 2023), Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches at the Department of English and Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She studies global media cultures, environmental media and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, while the co-edited volume exemplifies her current research, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic (Rutgers UP, 2023) reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.Dr. Shiamin Kwa is Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. Her written work explores relationships between form and content, text and image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and narrative theory. Her published articles analyze a broad variety of topics, including Italian opera, contemporary Chinese literature, and North American and European graphic narratives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Little Guide to Getting Your Book Published (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) takes prospective authors from idea to draft manuscript to published book in a step-by-step process. The book advises writers on creating a book proposal and then how to find a publisher or agent. Whether a trade non-fiction work, monograph, or textbook, the book is guaranteed to motivate and inspire you to get started on the road to publishing today. Written by a book professional with 30 years of experience on hundreds of publishing projects, The Little Guide will help you decide which route is right for you: a big publisher or self-publishing. It discusses the secrets on what you need to know when signing a contract, creating a winning title, and how to find the time to do it all. It includes valuable listings of publishing resources and suggested readings you will want to have at your fingertips. The Little Guide answers all of the beginner’s questions in a direct and useful fashion. The book can be read all the way through or serve as a spot reference guide as authors wind their way through the process. The book is divided into 32 short, focused chapters. Sections include: “Getting Started,” “Writing Your Manuscript,” Selecting a Book Publishing Model,” “Getting Published,” and “What is an Author Promotional Platform and Why it Matters?”John Bond is a Publishing Consultant at Riverwinds Consulting. To connect with on a proiect, see his website PublishingFundamentals.com. His YouTube channel contains over 100 short videos on academic publishing. Or connect with him on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Using techniques garnered from startups and quickly evolving technology companies, in The Experimental Library: A Guide to Taking Risks, Failing Forward, and Creating Change (ALA Editions, 2023), Cathryn Copper explores how information professionals can use experimentation to make evidence-based decisions and advance innovative initiatives.The last five years have demonstrated that sticking with the status quo is not an option; instead, as the experiences of many libraries have shown, those that experiment are better positioned to adapt to rapidly changing environments and evolving user needs and behaviors. The Experimental Library supports librarians as they draw from new approaches and technologies to harness experimentation as a tool for testing ideas and responding to change. Copper borrows ideas and inspiration from the startup sector to teach you how to take a human-centered and design thinking-based perspective on problem solving. This conversation for New Books Network explores the mindset, methodology, and culture that support experimentation in libraries.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications