"Mediated forms of communication increasingly influence the social relations and different spheres of life in the region of South Asia, Southeast Asia and in the Arab-speaking region. ... This volume has a strong focus on the internet and on the diversity of internet-based communication in the three regions mentioned above."--P. [4] of cover.

Yoga gurus on lifestyle cable channels targeting time-pressured Indian urbanites; Chinese dating shows promoting competitive individualism; Taiwanese domestic makeover formats combining feng shui with life planning advice: Asian TV screens are increasingly home to a wild proliferation of popular factual programs providing lifestyle guidance to viewers. In Telemodernities Tania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun demonstrate how lifestyle-oriented popular factual television illuminates key aspects of late modernities in South and East Asia, offering insights not only into early twenty-first-century media cultures but also into wider developments in the nature of public and private life, identity, citizenship, and social engagement. Drawing on extensive interviews with television industry professionals and audiences across China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore, Telemodernities uses popular lifestyle television as a tool to help us understand emergent forms of identity, sociality, and capitalist modernity in Asia.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant and enduring Sunni Islamist organization of the contemporary era. Its roots lie in the Middle East but it has grown into both a local and global movement, with its well-placed branches reacting effectively to take the opportunities for power and electoral competition offered by the Arab Spring. Regarded by some as a force of moderation among Islamists, and by others as a façade hiding a terrorist fundamentalist threat, the potential influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Middle Eastern politics remains ambiguous. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Arab Spring and its Future Face provides an essential insight into the organisation, with chapters devoted to specific cases where the Brotherhood has important impacts on society, the state and politics. Key themes associated with the Brotherhood, such as democracy, equality, pan-Islamism, radicalism, reform, the Palestine issue and gender, are assessed to reveal an evolutionary trend within the movement since its founding in Egypt in 1928 to its manifestation as the largest Sunni Islamist movement in the Middle East in the 21st century. The book addresses the possible future of the Muslim Brotherhood; whether it can surprise sceptics and effectively accommodate democracy and secular trends, and how its ascension to power through the ballot box might influence Western policy debates on their engagement with this manifestation of political Islam. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book presents a comprehensive study of a newly resurgent movement and is a valuable resource for students, scholars and policy makers focused on Middle Eastern Politics.

Technology vs. Government examines why government fails at technology acquisitions, innovation, and implementation, the impact on people, and the future opportunities and implications for government service, administration and policy.

This manual provides an extensive overview of the importance and use of Romance languages in the media, both in a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Its chapters discuss language in television and the new media, the language of advertising, or special cases such as translation platforms or subtitling. Separate chapters are dedicated to minority languages and smaller varieties such as Galician and Picard, and to methodological approaches such as linguistic discourse analysis and writing process research.

Demonstrating the tremendous diversity of families in India, as well as their ongoing evolution, this volume answers a clear call to dive deeper into the intimacy of the domestic sphere in one of the world’s largest and fastest growing societies.

This book offers a timely examination of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), a chapter of the transnational movement Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), whose key aim is the revival of the caliphate. It cautions against an overly simplistic read of a group like HTI and political Islam in Indonesia. While there is much to laud, particularly with regard to how leaders in Indonesia have attempted to counteract Islamist extremism, insofar as the trajectory of non-violent Islamism in Indonesia is concerned there are clear reasons for apprehension. Groups like the HTI have been adept at using the democratic space in Indonesia to propound their illiberal objectives, including encouraging the curtailment of Indonesian art forms deemed un-Islamic, and more importantly pushing for certain Islamic sects, such as the Ahmadiyahs, to be banned. Yet, despite its extreme posturing, HTI is accepted as a mainstream Muslim organization. As such, the Indonesian chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir represents a unique case: unlike other chapters, which are deemed extreme and fringe, HTI, though radical, still exists within the space provided by the Indonesian religio-political landscape. This book offers new insights into HTI’s history, organizational structure and ideology, adding considerable new details about HTI and correcting errors in existing literature, while directing its primary focus on explaining HTI’s rapid growth in Indonesia. The central argument is that the key to understanding HTI’s growth lies in the role collective identity plays in attracting new members and retaining its existing members within the party. Factors such as institutional and non-institutional opportunities within the Indonesian political system, HTI’s resource mobilization strategies and the anti-systemic ideology of HTI serve as political, organizational and religious incentives for individuals to join the party and launch collective action. This goes on to emphasize and show that collective identity remains the most crucial factor in the party’s growth. Analysing this process of collective identity formation and its impact on recruitment and membership retention is central to this book. This book will be of much interest to students of Southeast Asian politics, regional security, political Islam, and International Relations in general.

How is the concept of the civil state understood in Arab countries? In The Battle over a Civil State, Limor Lavie examines how this important concept, which originated in Western philosophy, became incorporated into Arab discourse. The civil state as understood in Arab political discourse, Lavie argues, attempts to bridge Islamic history and culture with modernity. It is an attempt to forge a middle ground between a purely theocratic rule and a purely secular rule, and a solution for the tensions between a desire to catch up with global modernization and democratization processes and the desire to reject those same processes. In the political discourse of most of the Arab Spring countries, the concept of the civil state played a pivotal role. In the public debate over the character of Egypt, in particular, following the January 25, 2011 uprising, the demand to establish a civil state was shared by all the political currents. However, when these currents sought to set out basic guidelines for Egypt's future, it soon became clear that they were far from reaching a consensus, and that the concept of the civil state was at the heart of the controversy between them. The struggle over Egypt's civil character in the post-Mubarak era was the main reason for the turbulence the country experienced on June 30, 2013—leading to the ouster of President Muhammad Mursi.

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences

In this book, Barrie Gunter provides a broad overview of the methodological perspectives adopted by media researchers in their attempt to derive a better understanding of the nature, role and impact of media in society. By tracing the epistemological and theoretical roots of the major methodological perspectives, Gunter identifies the various schools of social scientific research that have determined the major perspectives in the area. Drawing a distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods, he discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and examines recent trends that signal a convergence of approaches and their associated forms of research. The unique strength of this