Books in the Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series

This book draws together and focuses the work of scholars from diverse disciplines on intersections of gender and humor, giving voice to approaches in disciplines such as film, television, literature, linguistics, translation studies, and popular culture.

This volume explores how advances in the fields of evolutionary neuroscience and cognitive psychology are informing media studies with a better understanding of how humans perceive, think and experience emotion within mediated environments. The book highlights interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the production and reception of cinema, television, the Internet and other forms of mediated communication that take into account new understandings of how the embodied brain senses and interacts with its symbolic environment. Moreover, as popular media shape perceptions of the promises and limits of brain science, contributors also examine the representation of neuroscience and cognitive psychology within mediated culture.

In this volume, contributors-literary scholars, media theorists, and specialists in comics, graphic novels, and digital culture-examine the economic, narratological, and social effects of serials from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and offer some predictions of where the form will go from here.

This collection by trans and non-trans academics and artists from the United States, the UK, and continental Europe, examines how transgenderism can be conceptualized in a literary, biographical, and autobiographical framework, with emphasis on place, ethnicity and visibility. The volume covers the 1950s to the present day and examines autobiographical accounts and films featuring gender transition. Chapters focus on various stages of transitioning. Interviews with trans people are also provided.

The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses.¿Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination.

Multiculturalism, and its representation, has long presented challenges for the medium of comics. This book presents a wide ranging survey of the ways in which comics have dealt with the diversity of creators and characters and the (lack of) visibility for characters who donΓÇÖt conform to particular cultural stereotypes. Contributors engage with ethnicity and other cultural forms from Israel, Romania, North America, South Africa, Germany, Spain, U.S. Latino and Canada and consider the ways in which comics are able to represent multiculturalism through a focus on the formal elements of the medium. Discussion themes include education, countercultures, monstrosity, the quotidian, the notion of the ΓÇÿother," anthropomorphism, and colonialism. Taking a truly international perspective, the book brings into dialogue a broad range of comics traditions.

This volume builds a foundation for studies of activities based in and around video production and consumption. It contributes to the interdisciplinary field of visual methodology, investigating how video functions as a resource for a variety of actors and professions.

This collaborative book explores the artistic and aesthetic development of shojo, or girl, manga and discusses the significance of both shojo manga and the concept of shojo, or girl culture.

The original research in this book 1) provides insight into how ethnic media are adapting to changing technologies in the media landscape of our times, 2) highlights the emergence of new trends in media production and consu mption, and 3) underscores the enduring roles that ethnic media perform in local communities and a globalized world.

This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate the connections of people to place to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film.

This volume responds to the question: How do you know when you belong to a country? Contributors examine how the practices of migration and identification, procured and produced through global exchanges of bodies and goods that cross borders, foreclose those borders to (re)produce, and (re)imagine the homeland and its boundaries.

This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies.

In this thought-provoking book, a diverse range of educators, activists, academics, and community advocates provide theoretical and practical ways of activating our knowledge and understanding of how to build a human rights culture.

This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. The authors take their cue from the observation that art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. They do memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: How do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the archive? Does the past speak in the performed past (or do we speak to it)? To what purpose do objects "recall"? And for whom do they recollect? Here authors combine a methodological focus on memory as performance with a theoretical focus on art and popular culture as practices of remembrance. The essays in the book thus analyze what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis, that make up cultural memory.

This collection seeks to understand the long-lasting and global appeal of Tarzan: Why is a story about a feral boy, who is raised by apes in the African jungle, so compelling and so adaptable to different cultural contexts and audiences? How is it that the same narrative serves as the basis for both children''s cartoons and lavish musical productions or as a vehicle for both nationalistic discourse and for light romantic fantasy? Considering a history of criticism that highlights the imperialistic, sexist, racist underpinnings of the original Tarzan narrative, why would this character and story appeal to so many readers and viewers around the world? The essays in this volume, written by scholars living and working in Australia, Canada, Israel, The Netherlands, Germany, France and the United States explore these questions using various critical lenses. Chapters include discussions of Tarzan novels, comics, television shows, toys, films, and performances produced or distributed in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Palestine, Britain, India, The Netherlands, Germany and France and consider such topics as imperialism, national identities, language acquisition, adaptation, gender constructions, Tarzan''s influence on child readers and Tarzan''s continued and broad influence on cultures around the world. What emerges, when these pieces are placed into dialogue with one another, is an immensely complex picture of an enduring, multi-faceted global pop culture icon.

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture.

This book examines different models from around the world of how journalism can support deliberation ΓÇö the processes in which societies recognize and discuss the issues that affect them, appraise the potential responses, and make decisions about whether and how to take action. Authors from across the globe identify the types of journalism that might best assist or even drive deliberative activity in different cultural and political contexts. Case studies from 15 nations spotlight different approaches to deliberative journalism, including strategies that have been sometimes been labeled as public or civic journalism, peace journalism, development journalism, citizen journalism, the street press, community journalism, social entrepreneurism, or other names. Each of the approaches that are described offer a distinctive potential to support deliberative democracy, but the book does not present any of these models or case studies as examples of categorical success. Rather, it explores different elements of the nature, strengths, limitations and challenges of each approach, as well as issues affecting their longer-term sustainability and effectiveness.

This volume explores the spectral qualities of space, using the language of hauntings, to understand how absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something (that once was, and still is) there. Contributors navigate affective spaces that have the potential to threaten, destabilise and sometimes even c

This is the first scholarly collection to examine the social and cultural aspects of the worldwide interest in the faded remains of advertising signage (popularly known as 'ghost signs').

Contemporary popular culture is engaged in a rich and multi-levelled set of representational relations with austerity. This volume seeks to explore these relations, to ask: how does popular culture give expression to austerity; how are its effects conveyed; how do texts reproduce and expose its mythic qualities?

This volume builds on previous notions of transmedia practices to develop the concept of transtexts, in order to account for both the industrial and user-generated contributions to the cross-media expansion of a story universe.

Combining theoretical perspectives from analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, and narratology with approaches from phenomenology, psychosemiotics, and social semiotics, the contributions collected in this volume provide a state-of-the-art map of current research on a wide variety of ways in which subjectivity can be represented across conventio

Media matter, particularly to social minorities like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Rather than one homogenised idea of the 'global gay', what we find today is a range of historically and culturally specific expressions of gender and sexuality, which are reflected and explored across an ever increasing range of media outle