New Books in Communications

In Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics (Ohio State UP, 2022), Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating how White supremacy adapts its discursive strategies by cannibalizing the language and rhetoric of Black and Latinx social justice movements. Analyzing a wide-ranging collection of cultural objects—memes, oration, music, advertisements, and news coverage—Noel shows how White deflection sustains and reproduces structures of inequality and injustice.White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations.Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

It’s the early 1990s, and the USSR is no more. An intrepid young American TV producer has been given a seemingly foolhardy task: bringing the beloved children’s show Sesame Street to Russia, and the rest of the post-Soviet sphere.This is the premise of Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)—a memoir from that aforementioned producer, Natasha Lance Rogoff. Amidst car bombings, soldiers kidnapping Elmo, and a collapsing ruble, Lance Rogoff assembles a team of Russian creatives to adapt Sesame Street into Ulitsa Sezam, as the show is known in Russian. While culture clashes ensue at first, they eventually give way to cross-cultural empathy, as Lance Rogoff poignantly illustrates in the book. It’s a story that feels especially resonant in the present day, with Russia and the West again at opposite ends of a daunting geopolitical divide. Lance Rogoff talks with the New Books Network's Anthony Kao about how she came to produce Sesame Street in Russia, and gives us a taste of the adventures contained within Muppets in Moscow.Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In this episode, Dr. Kenny Linden, an environmental and animal historian of Mongolia and Inner Asia, joins me to discuss the Disney+ Star Wars prequel series Andor and its real-world parallels to pastoralism and the treatment of pastoralists in Central and East Asia by state authorities. We talk about nomadism in the Star Wars universe, depictions of nomads in pop culture, and the planet Aldhani in Andor as a reflection of modern histories of pastoralism and nomad-state relations in Central and Inner Asia.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How can the news better reflect important global issues? In Humanitarian Journalists Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone (Routledge, 2022), Drs Martin Scott, an Associate Professor in Media & Development at the University of East Anglia and Kate Wright, Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow in Media and Communication at the University of Edinburgh, and Prof Mel Bunce, a Professor of International Journalism at City University of London, explore the context that shapes the lives and practices of humanitarian journalists. The book uses rich case study materials, detailed interview data, and a framework drawing on field theory to analyses how humanitarian journalists exist between the journalistic and humanitarian fields. This comes at a cost to them, as well as offering significant positives for both their activities and for news itself. Accessible, and available open access here, the book is essential reading across media studies, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone concerned about the need for a better system for reporting the news.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jennifer Crewe talks about how translation became a key component of the Columbia University Press publishing program and how the press decides which books they want to translate. In addition, we go behind the scenes to understand the mechanics of a translation rights deal and how negotiations are conducted between academic publishers around the world. Finally, we cover the ever-changing business of academic book sales that can literally turn on its head overnight.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of change—bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. So how can we, as individuals, radically expand the work of museums to live up to this potential? How can we more fiercely recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities? How can we work together to build a stronger culture of equity and care within museums? Questions like these are increasingly vital for all museum professionals to consider, no matter what your role is within your institution. They are also important questions for all of us to be thinking about more deeply as citizens and community members. Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) is about the work we need to do to become changemakers and demand that that our museums take action toward positive social change and bring people together into a more just, equitable, compassionate, and connected society. It is a journey toward tapping the energies within all of us to make change happen and proactively shape a new future.Mike Murawski is a consultant, change leader, and educator living in Portland, Oregon. After more than 20 years of work in education and museums, Mike brings his personal core values of collaboration and care along with a deeper understanding of placed-based connections into the work that he leads within organizations, non-profits, schools, and communities. Mike is the author of Museums as Agents of Change, and author of the Substack publication Agents of Change. In 2016, he co-founded Super Nature Adventures LLC, a place-based education and creative design business that partners with parks, government agencies, schools, and non-profits to expand learning in the outdoors and public spaces. When he's not working on place-based projects or supporting change in nonprofits, you can find Mike on long trail runs in the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest.Callie Smith is a poet and museum educator living in Louisiana.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In this episode of High Theory, Dennis Duncan tells us about the history of the index. At it’s simplest, an index is a table with columns that allow you to match sets of terms, most often topics and page numbers. Google is an index, as was the first bible concordance, completed in 1230 under the direction of a French Dominican scholar named Hugo de Saint-Cher.In the episode, Dennis quotes a line from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad:How index-learning turns no student pale. Yet holds the eel of science by the tail(book 1, lines 279-80)He also references Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic, July/Aug 2008), and the book based upon it, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2011), both of which make an argument against shallow reading that Dennis argues goes all the way back to medieval critiques of the index. In the longer version of our conversation, we talked about Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler.Dennis Duncan is a scholar of book history, translation, and avant-garde literature at the University College London. His book about the history of the index, Index: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age was published in the US by Norton in 2022. The book includes two indices, once made by indexing software, and the other by Paula Clarke Bain.This week’s image is a portrait of Hugo de Saint-Cher, made by Tommaso da Modena. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Full citation: Hugues de Saint-Cher († 1263), bibliste et théologien, Paris, Centre d’études du Saulchoir, Actes du colloque 13-15 mars 2000, Brepols, coll. « Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Âge », n°1, Turnhout, 2004, 524 p., ISBN : 2-503-51721-8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Journalist and STS graduate student Gemma Milne talks about her book, Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book examines how hype works and how it plays out in a number of scientific and technical fields, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, brain implants, cancer drugs, fusion energy, and the future of food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Information scholar Daniel Greene, an assistant professor at University of Maryland, talks about his book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The Promise of Access examines how the “digital divide” became a policy problem, and draws on fascinating ethnographies of a “tech” startup, a public library, and a charter school to examine how organizations come to chase technological solutions to social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.In this episode, our co-hosts Aswin Punathambekar and Jing Wang discusses the book Platforms and Cultural Production (2021) by Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy.You’ll hear about: How this collaborative project came about, given each of the authors has distinct interests and disciplinary orientations; Given the two keywords of “platforms” and “cultural production,” how did the authors make sense of these keywords in relation to broader processes of digital infrastructures and imaginaries; How three key sections – social media, games, and journalism – were identified by the authors to explain the idea of “platformization”; How the platforms work as multi-sided markets and the approaches to account for the dynamism and lifecycles at work in platform economies; A discussion of Twitter as a useful case of platformization to grasp the challenges of platform governance; Why the authors chose to specifically focus on the role and agency of cultural producers; How to study cultural practices in various platforms across a wide variety of sociopolitical contexts in both Global North and South; The structural inequalities of platform economies, the precarity of the platform-dependent labor market, and the efforts of cultural producers to face insecurity; The cultural meanings of “creativity” and “authenticity” and the tension between the profit-driven platform logic and the individual search for belonging in social media such as TikTok; The relevance of cultural production and platforms to understanding the present and future of democratic governance and civic life in the post-truth era; The next collaborative project, such as a second volume, conferences, and research networks. About the bookPoell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. You can find the book from Polity Press HERE.Authors:Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam, program director MA Media Studies, and director of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures.David B. Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information.Brooke Erin Duffy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she is also a member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty.Co-Hosts: Aswin Punathambekar is Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Editor & Producer: Jing Wang Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications