New Books in Communications

In their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus and engagement of the veil as it appears in various literary, artistic, and popular cultures, such as of historical Algeria and contemporary Iranian television series, Bollywood films, and street art in Europe. The book locates these critical discussions and theoretical interventions within both a postcolonial and neocolonial critique of how the veil was orientalised and fetishized historically, for example in the Victorian transmissions of the 1001 Nights, and how the veil, specifically the burka, is deployed in reductive and harmful ways in contemporary state projects today, as seen in France, and even in popular liberal discourses (such as in the United States). The essays in this collection are sharp and accessibly written and will be useful as a teaching tool in various undergraduate courses. The book will also be of interest to those who work on literature, popular culture, gender, Islam, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Why does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a journalist, broadcaster and the co-host of the BBC’s Screenshot, shows how the storytelling potential offered by screen media shape how we understand ourselves and our societies. The book covers a huge range of genres in film and TV, from superheroes and horror, through romance and crime, to costume drama, comedy and westerns. It tells the history of race in Hollywood, the struggles over British history on screen, and how filmmakers are challenging genre stereotypes across screen industries. Offering a powerful call to reimagine the power, potential, and possibilities offered by film and TV, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture as well as a more just and equal world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the mediaeval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualised in writing.In Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Ada Maria Kuskowski uses French lawbooks known as coutumiers to trace the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke UP, 2024), Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media.Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Dr. Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (MIT Press, 2024), Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries.Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass media’s formative years, Patterson delves into some of the major subcultures of the era. Old-time radio aficionados felt the impact of inexpensive audio recording equipment and the controversies surrounding programs like Amos ‘n’ Andy. Bootlegging communities devoted to buddy cop TV shows like Starsky and Hutch allowed women to articulate female pleasure and sexuality while Star Trek videos in Australia inspired a grassroots subculture built around community viewings of episodes. Tape trading also had a profound influence on creating an intellectual pro wrestling fandom that aided wrestling’s growth into an international sports entertainment industry.Original and engaging, Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution (U Illinois Press, 2024) shares the story of how fan passion and technology merged into a flourishing subculture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis (De Gruyter, 2023), Emily Lynell Edwards explores this virtual and vicious threat, analyzing how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Edwards details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communities on Twitter and analyzing the content of their conversations, Digital Islamophobia provides policy-makers, researchers, and scholars with a potential road-map to stop them.Emily Lynell Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Educational Technologist at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the ideological, and the professional.In The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications (MIT Press, 2020), Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional purposes in the post–World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally, he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and understood the infographic, but also an account of what data visualization can tell us about the past.Dr Murray Dick. Senior Lecturer In Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle UniversityMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications