New Books In Communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), a robust defense of Communication and the Humanities as disciplines of study. Major Decisions is a breathtaking work of research that proves the values and skills taught in humanities disciplines are exactly those needed in the 21st century. Despite the persistence of the myth “you can’t get a job with an English or Theatre major,” Major Decisions, which Ramsey co-authored with Laurie Grobman, shows that not only are humanities majors welcome on the job market; their critical thinking skills and creativity are also integral to advancing the work of science, technology, medicine, math, and engineering. Indeed, the core skills and knowledge imparted by an education in the humanities—including facility with written and verbal communication, collaboration, problem-solving, technological literac

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic look at the life of a text in the 21st century. Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, Update Culture is a deep diver into the many factors that contribute to the circulation of a digital text. The key three themes Gallagher explores include timing, attention, and management and they provide rhetorical points of access to understand the ever-evolving conditions of digital writing across genres and mediums. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with John about this instructive book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Joe Packer of Central Michigan University about A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State UP, 2019), an intriguing book attempting to rescue pessimism from the dustbin of public emotion and philosophical thought. From the work of H.P. Lovecraft to Rick and Morty to True Detective, Packer and Stoneman find the best of pessimistic philosophy reflected back in the weird affects of these cultural touchstones. A Feeling of Wrongness explores how these texts twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Joe about this fascinating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @r

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, employment, public spaces, health care, legal documents, and other areas. Much of this is due to deeply entrenched ideas about the definition of gender, perceptions that transgender people are not "real" or are suffering from mental illness, and fears that extending rights to transgender people will come at the expense of the rights of others. So how do you get people to rethink their prejudices? In their book Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison examine what tactics are effective in changing public opinion regarding tr

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with real or imagined historical grievances or even merely strongly held views. If you agree with that, then Adam J. MacLeod’s book The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) is the book for you. Alternatively, if you think such fears are overblown and just a nefarious argument advanced by a self-serving elite to justify a return to establishment rule this is likewise the book for you. Why both audiences? Because this important volume is all about how to go about thinking and reasoning and the role morality plays in those processes. In his book, MacLeod argues that due to the decline in moral education young people he dubs “selfies” have entered academia and the workplace without moral cores and are so riven with narcissism and a sense of entitlement that they are

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and digital platforms, like Facebook, have gone global. But, if problems straddle different national jurisdictions, how do regulation and enforcement even happen? Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a timely and wise analysis of globalization and how it has fundamentally transformed governance. Digging into transatlantic relations, Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell show how American and European businesses, activists and policymakers have fought over and decided security and data policy. The book is also a call to action for their fellow IR scholars to study, what Newman and Farrell call, “the international politics of information.” Given the significance of data politics and misinformation campaigns to our present moment, I hope they listen. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global hist

From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America (NYU Press, 2020), offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear aff

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music Technologies Lab at the University of Sussex—provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing as well a set of forward-looking strategies for thinking critically about our future relationship with new music technology. Importantly, Magnusson identifies many similarities between present and past sonic creative practices as he takes the reader through an impressive survey of music technologies spanning the analog–digital divide. Consistently thematising the act of writing throughout, Sonic Writing calls attention to the rich and continuous history of inscription practices such as staff notation, instrument building, phonographic sound recording, and programming digital synthesizer patches, practices that have been so intimately connected with the share

On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (Penn State University Press, 2018). Filled with fresh takes on classical rhetorical theories, From Hysteria is an engaging exploration of the study of “women’s problems” (take the air quote seriously there). Dr. Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. From womb to brain to hormones, the book links our contemporary understanding of women’s bodies to antiquated roots, illuminating the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for someone who is comfortable with calculus, but for those readers who are, it is a treat. It is a thorough study of the history and mathematics of the heat equation, which is not only important as an analysis of heat, its analysis marked the beginning of Fourier series. It came as a surprise to me that the heat equation was also instrumental in analyzing the problem of laying the transatlantic cable that was one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century. Although it isn’t necessary to work through the math to appreciate this book, I think that students studying this material would not only find Paul’s treatments easy to follow, but would benefit greatly by learning something of the history that surrounds the development of the analysis and applications of the heat equation. Learn more about your ad choic

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth. The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Alger

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship. In this interview, Dr. Selwyn and I discuss the overarching question guiding this book: what is digital sociology? We go on to discuss how the classical figures in sociology wrote about, and engaged with, technology, the distinctivenes

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile ma

Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2019), Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movemen

Technological advancement through the 20th century has allowed religious leaders to broaden their reach, first through print, then televangelism, and now, social media. In this podcast, Dr Ryan P. Burge, of the Eastern Illinois University, discusses how religious leaders use twitter today, whether successful tweeting means having conversations, and the extent to which evangelicals engage with politics on twitter. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Is Social Media a Digital Pulpit? How Evangelical Leaders Use Twitter to Encourage the Faithful and Publicize Their Work,” which is published in Brill’s Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Kristen Hoerl (she/hers) on her impressive new book The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements (University Press of Mississippi, 2018). The Bad Sixties explores the construction of “the sixties” in Hollywood media, from Family Ties and The Wonder Years to Law and Order, arguing that these texts have proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. Hoerl describes our contemporary relationship to the sixties, shaped by these media

Joshua Foa Dienstag, Professor of Political Science and Law at UCLA, considers, in his new book, the interaction between our experiences in watching films and our positions as citizens in a representative democracy. In both situations, as an audience member watching a movie and as a citizen in a representative republic, we need to understand the interactions we have with others, and consider how we experience representation, in politics and in film. These are not necessarily spaces and concepts that are usually woven together, but Dienstag makes the case that they should be considered in regard to each other because they both are forms of representation, and important emotional dimensions are threaded through each form. Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2019) begins by diving into the idea of representative government, especially in contrast to idealized notions of direct democracy. Dienstag examines some of the history of political thought about