New Books In Communications

Ben Denne (Director of Publishing, Academic Books, Cambridge UP) joins Avi to discuss how Open Access quickly became a predominant form of academic publishing in the last decade, what issues OA raises for the publishing industry, how OA impacts book publishing and some of the creative solutions for alternative models, including CUP's novel "Flip it Open" program. We also discuss Ben's journey from writing children's books to presiding over one of the most important academic publishers in the world and the responsibility behind the position. Finally, stay tuned until the end for some interesting ideas regarding alternative publishing forms that break free of the 'book' and 'journal.' Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing.  Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that it was not always a common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with the ever-expanding surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent events like the George Floyd protests and the Central Park birdwatching incident, Mirzoeff

Let's plays are among the most popular genres on YouTube. The visual worlds of video games shape the worldviews of millions. Gaming is a hobby and a mass spectacle. For a long time, the history of video games was primarily one of technical progress: from pixelated figures in 2D to increasingly convincing illusions of reality in games like Control. At the same time, independent game worlds emerge, such as in the expressionist dystopia Disco Elysium.  In Video Games: Digital Image Cultures (Videospiele: Digitale Bildkulturen), Jacob Birken vividly analyzes the different types and generations of games, provides insights into the interaction of hardware and software, and shows how newer video games stylistically reference the past of their own medium. But does this also revive the unfulfilled promises of the future of the information society? Jacob Birken writes and researches on the history, aesthetics, and theory of media technologies. In 2018, he published "The California Institution" on the 1906 San Francisc

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments and autocrat-wannabes are licensing and utilizing Pegasus spyware in the most vulnerable democracies in the world. Pegasus follows the personal stories of real victims--intrepid individuals who have spoken truth to some of the most corrupt, risible powers around the globe. Laurent Richard is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin. He is the founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devo

At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring.  Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy (Syracuse UP, 2021), wit

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and

Today’s book is: A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2022), which is a guide for those who are teaching digital history for the first time, and for experienced instructors who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Dr. Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just w

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other. Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors--and beyond their c

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke UP, 2023), Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in th

Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2022) brings together emerging and established voices at the nexus of new materialist and decolonial rhetorics to advance a new direction for rhetorical scholarship on materiality. In part a response to those seeking answers about the relevance of new material and posthuman thought to cultural rhetorics, this collection initiates bold conversations at the pressure points between nature and culture, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, knowing and being, and across culturally different ontologies. It thus relies on a tapestry of both accepted and marginalized discourses in order to respond to frustrations of erasure and otherness prevalent in the fields of rhetoric, writing, and communication—and offers solutions to move these fields forward. With diverse contributions, including compelling pieces from leading Indigenous scholars, these essays draw from political, cultural, and natural life to present innovative projects that consider m

What is the future of news? In the twentieth century Western-educated journalists championed impartial, unbiased news – which always seemed rather odd as everyone agreed it wasn’t possible for journalists to shed all their biases. That fundamental contradiction has been replaced by something even more problematic – fake news and worse than that, fake news which people believe and even the idea that everyone can publish their own news. So where are we headed in the twenty first century. Roger Mosey was a senior BBC editor and is now master of Selwyn College Cambridge Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/commun

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craf

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 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 supremac

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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting, philosophically, about the unsayable? And if if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to (if not say something about) it?  In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues that philosophical interest is not limited to the in-principle unsayable, as many philosophers claim: there is great value in what may be unsayable at a given time, due to epistemic limitations. Cleveland, who is professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University, defends a view in which words rendered in a certain way in fiction – such as in T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" – can acquaint us with, or exhibit to us, experiences that emerge from but are not semantically encoded in the sentences the works contain. Learn m

Communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt talks about her book, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, as well as some of her recent and forthcoming pieces on the digital technology industry with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Weiss-Blatt’s work examines both the rise of the “techlash”—the development of negative public and expert sentiment about the digital technology industry—and how company public relations efforts responded to this development. Weiss-Blatt and Vinsel also talk about how some claims about the negative impacts of social media do not seem to hold up to empirical scrutiny and what all of this means for regulation of the digital technology industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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 ne

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/adchoices Support 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, compassi