Building on and extending Pierre Bourdieu's critique of our media-saturated culture, this work presents case studies of such diverse phenomena as media coverage of the AIDS-contaminated blood scandal in France, US youth media activism, and political interview shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field is an exciting new text which builds on and extends Pierre Bourdieu's impassioned critique of our media-saturated culture. Presenting for the first time in English the work of influential scholars who worked with or were influenced by Bourdieu, this volume is the one and only book for Anglophone scholars seeking a more detailed elaboration of field theory in relation to the mass media. In his short book 'On Television', Bourdieu provided a powerful critique of the 'journalistic field', but what exactly does he mean by this? How does the journalistic field relate to external economic and political pressures? And what kind of autonomy can, or should, journalists expect to maintain? Such questions are taken up in case studies of such diverse phenomena as media coverage of the AIDS-contaminated blood scandal in France, U.S. youth media activism, and political interview shows on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters by both American and French scholars also demonstrate methods for measuring field autonomy and spatially mapping journalistic fields, or discuss the similarities and differences between field theory, new institutionalism, hegemony, and differentiation theory. Rejecting all forms of dogmatism, the authors in this volume demonstrate why field theory remains a "work in progress," and indeed, a research paradigm whose promise has only begun to be tapped. The book includes an important and hitherto unpublished text by Pierre Bourdieu, 'Fields of Journalism, Social Science and Politics', and contributions from Rodney Benson, Patrick Champagne, Eric Darras, Julien Duval, Daniel Hallin, Eric Klinenberg, Dominique Marchetti, Erik Neveu, and Michael Schudson.

On Television exposes the invisible mechanisms of manipulation and censorship that determine what appears on the small screen. Bourdieu shows how the ratings game has transformed journalism - and hence politics - and even such seemingly removed fields as law' science' art' and philosophy. Bourdieu had long been concerned with the role of television in cultural and political life when he bypassed the political and commercial control of the television networks and addressed his country's viewers from the television station of the College de France. On Television' which expands on that lecture' not only describes the limiting and distorting effect of television on journalism and the world of ideas' but offers the blueprint for a counterattack.

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

Analysis of art, literature and aesthetics

This anthology explores challenges to understanding the nature of cultural production, exploring innovative new research approaches and improvements to old approaches, such as newsroom ethnography, which will enable clearer, fuller understanding of the workings of journalism and other forms of media and cultural production.

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.

Bourdieu’s theory of social fields is one of his key contributions to social sciences and humanities. However, it has never been subjected to genuine critical examination. This book fills that gap and offers a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the theory. It includes a critical discussion of its methodology and relevance in different subject areas in the social sciences and humanities. Part I "theoretical investigations" offers a theoretical account of the theory, while also identifying some of its limitations and discussing several strategies to overcome them. Part II "Education, culture and organization" presents the theory at work and highlights its advantages and disadvantages. The focus in Part III devoted to "The State" is on the formation and evolution of the State and public policy in different contexts. The chapters show the usefulness of field theory in describing, explaining and understanding the functioning of the State at different stages in its historical trajectory including its recent redefinition with the advent of the neoliberal age. A last chapter outlines a postcolonial use of the theory of fields.

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.

In focusing on the practices, politics and ethics of listening, this wide-ranging book offers an important new perspective on questions of media audiences, publics and citizenship. Listening is central to modern communication, politics and experience, but is commonly overlooked and underestimated in a culture fascinated by the spectacle and the politics of voice. Listening Publics restores listening to media history and to theories of the public sphere. In so doing it opens up profound questions for our understanding of mediated experience, public participation and civic engagement. Taking a cross-national and interdisciplinary approach, the book explores how listening publics have been constituted in relation to successive media technologies from the invention of writing to the digital age. It asks how new practices of listening associated with sound and audiovisual media transform a public world forged in the age of print. Through detailed histories and sophisticated theoretical analysis, Listening Publics demonstrates the embodied and critical activity of listening to be a rich concept with which to rethink the practices, politics and ethics of media communication.