This book, the first of its kind, brings together leading scholars from multiple perspectives in a serious dialogue about continuity and change in global media production and content. Looking at a wide swath of the world, these authors show the emergence of transnational collaboration in global television and film production across national borders that seem to transcend national cultures and identities. At the same time, traditional class analysis of such phenomena is reframed within the rise of myriad social movements for equality, democracy, human rights, and defense of the environment. What are the effects of media, local or global? Does the West continue to dominate or is cultural imperialism waning? With original chapters written by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in global media communication, cultural studies, and international political economy.

This book, the first of its kind, brings together leading scholars from multiple perspectives in a serious dialogue about continuity and change in global media production and content. Looking at a wide swath of the world, these authors show the emergence of transnational collaboration in global television and film production across national borders that seem to transcend national cultures and identities. At the same time, traditional class analysis of such phenomena is reframed within the rise of myriad social movements for equality, democracy, human rights, and defense of the environment. What are the effects of media, local or global? Does the West continue to dominate or is cultural imperialism waning? With original chapters written by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in global media communication, cultural studies, and international political economy.

This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others’ lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing ‘mediated intimacy’ and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives. Orgad examines five sites of media representation – the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others. Media Representations and the Global Imagination will be of particular interest to students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, politics, international relations, development studies and migration studies.

Transcontinental Dialogues brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropologists from Mexico, Canada, and Australia who work at the intersections of Indigenous rights, advocacy, and action research. These engaged anthropologists explore how obligations manifest in differently situated alliances, how they respond to such obligations, and the consequences for anthropological practice and action. This volume presents a set of pieces that do not take the usual political or geographic paradigms as their starting point; instead, the particular dialogues from the margins presented in this book arise from a rejection of the geographic hierarchization of knowledge in which the Global South continues to be the space for fieldwork while the Global North is the place for its systematization and theorization. Instead, contributors in Transcontinental Dialogues delve into the interactions between anthropologists and the people they work with in Canada, Australia, and Mexico. This framework allows the contributors to explore the often unintended but sometimes devastating impacts of government policies (such as land rights legislation or justice initiatives for women) on Indigenous people’s lives. Each chapter’s author reflects critically on their own work as activist-scholars. They offer examples of the efforts and challenges that anthropologists—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—confront when producing knowledge in alliances with Indigenous peoples. Mi’kmaq land rights, pan-Maya social movements, and Aboriginal title claims in rural and urban areas are just some of the cases that provide useful ground for reflection on and critique of challenges and opportunities for scholars, policy-makers, activists, allies, and community members. This volume is timely and innovative for using the disparate anthropological traditions of three regions to explore how the interactions between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples in supporting Indigenous activism have the potential to transform the production of knowledge within the historical colonial traditions of anthropology.

"For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references." "The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. ... The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the internet, and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations."

This book provides a clear and authoritative introduction to the emerging Arab media industries in the context of globalization and its impacts, with a focus on publishing, press, broadcasting, cinema and new media. Through detailed discussions of the regulation and economics of these industries, the authors argue that the political, technological and cultural changes on the global media scene have resulted in the reorganization of the Arab media field. They provide striking examples of this through the particular effects on media policies, media technology and the content and genres developed for the new generation of media consumers. As part of the book's overview of the contemporary characteristics of Arab media, the authors outline the development of the role of modern Arab media from a tool of mobilizing the public to a tool of commercial and symbolic profit. Overall, the volume illustrates how the Arab region represents a unique case where the commercialization and liberalization of selected media industries has gone hand in hand with continuous state intervention and an increasing self censorship. Written for students without prior knowledge of the topic, Arab Media will be essential reading for all interested in the contemporary global media industries.

A series of conversations about science in graphic form, on subjects that range from the science of cooking to the multiverse. Physicist Clifford Johnson thinks that we should have more conversations about science. Science should be on our daily conversation menu, along with topics like politics, books, sports, or the latest prestige cable drama. Conversations about science, he tells us, shouldn't be left to the experts. In The Dialogues, Johnson invites us to eavesdrop on a series of nine conversations, in graphic-novel form—written and drawn by Johnson—about “the nature of the universe.” The conversations take place all over the world, in museums, on trains, in restaurants, in what may or may not be Freud's favorite coffeehouse. The conversationalists are men, women, children, experts, and amateur science buffs. The topics of their conversations range from the science of cooking to the multiverse and string theory. The graphic form is especially suited for physics; one drawing can show what it would take many words to explain. In the first conversation, a couple meets at a costume party; they speculate about a scientist with superhero powers who doesn't use them to fight crime but to do more science, and they discuss what it means to have a “beautiful equation” in science. Their conversation spills into another chapter (“Hold on, you haven't told me about light yet”), and in a third chapter they exchange phone numbers. Another couple meets on a train and discusses immortality, time, black holes, and religion. A brother and sister experiment with a grain of rice. Two women sit in a sunny courtyard and discuss the multiverse, quantum gravity, and the anthropic principle. After reading these conversations, we are ready to start our own.

The first English translation of a nonfiction work by Stanisław Lem, which was "conceived under the spell of cybernetics" in 1957 and updated in 1971. In 1957, Stanisław Lem published Dialogues, a book "conceived under the spell of cybernetics," as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. Mimicking the form of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Lem's original dialogue was an attempt to unravel the then-novel field of cybernetics. It was a testimony, Lem wrote later, to "the almost limitless cognitive optimism" he felt upon his discovery of cybernetics. This is the first English translation of Lem's Dialogues, including the text of the first edition and the later essays added to the second edition in 1971. For the second edition, Lem chose not to revise the original. Recognizing the naivete of his hopes for cybernetics, he constructed a supplement to the first dialogue, which consists of two critical essays, the first a summary of the evolution of cybernetics, the second a contribution to the cybernetic theory of the "sociopathology of governing," amending the first edition's discussion of the pathology of social regulation; and two previously published articles on related topics. From the vantage point of 1971, Lem observes that original book, begun as a search for methods "that would increase our understanding of both the human and nonhuman worlds," was in the end "an expression of the cognitive curiosity and anxiety of modern thought."

From Here to Diversity: Globalization and Intercultural Dialogues sees interculturalism as movement, transit, travel, and the dynamics between cultures. Contemporary intercultural travel is a global journey, a circumnavigation at the speed of light that underwrites all the comings and goings, the departures and arrivals, the transmissions and receptions that are implicit in this title. Hence, From Here to Diversity examines the motivations, characteristics and implications of cultural interactions in their perpetual movement, devoid of spatial or temporal borders, in a dangerous but stimulating indefinition of limits. In the contemporary intercultural dialogue, new voices are making themselves heard, as valuable sources of study: the voices of women; non-occidentals; the non-powerful; forgotten narratives of a past that was as intercultural as the present (after all, what is colonialism other than a perverse form of interculturality?); global entertainment; tourism; oral literature; diaries; mythical narratives; the cinema; ethnography; and new teachings, among so many others. Because this project is also intercultural at its source and subject, From Here to Diversity: Globalization and Intercultural Dialogues adds to the coherence of the project by including contributions from the most wide-ranging backgrounds and nationalities, without fear of the alterity that, after all, we propose to study.

A comprehensive and accessible introduction, this book examines a range of issues pertaining to theory, history and critiques of media in Africa. Featuring contributions from global scholars, that represent both new and established voices on the African continent and the diaspora, this volume explores themes of decolonization, media freedom, media censorship, identity, representation, pluralism, media framing, political economy of the media with emphasis on ownership, market trends and transnational media operations in Africa. Contributors explore these and other topics across a variety of media tiers, types, genres and platforms. The book also features contributions from practicing journalists and media practitioners working in Africa, providing students with hands-on knowledge from the field. Chapters in this volume take an instructional approach with contributors engaging key concepts and related theories to explore the praxis of media in Africa through specific case studies. An essential text for students of media, communication, journalism, and cultural studies who are studying media in Africa, as well as those studying global media.