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PODCAST

New Books in Communications

Interviews with Scholars of Media and Communications about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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All Episodes

70:31

Radiophilia

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/28

Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013. Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in the

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72:55

Ben Arogundade, "Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/27

On February 29, 1940, African American actor Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color, and the first Black woman, to win an Academy Award. The moment marked the beginning of Hollywood's reluctant move toward diversity and inclusion. Since then, minorities and women have struggled to attain Academy Awards recognition within a system designed to discriminate against them. In Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Inclusion at the Oscars (Octupus Publishing, 2025) author Ben Arogundade interweaves

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50:06

Randy Laist and Brian Dixon, "Figures of Freedom:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/26

Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis takes on the idea and terminology of freedom, examining our understanding of this concept and our relationship to the word itself as well as what it means to society, culture, and politics. Randy Laist and Brian A. Dixon, two scholars who often explore popular culture to better understand the society and politics all around us, have brought their admirable skills to Figures of Freedom, where they have assembled a broad array of

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52:05

Peter B. Kaufman, "The Moving Image: A User's Manual"...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/25

Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on

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16:06

Connor Jackson, "Zombies, Consumption, and Satire in...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/24

Zombies, Consumption, and Satire in Capcom's Dead Rising (Routledge, 2024) explores the relationship between video games and satire through an in-depth examination of Capcom’s Dead Rising series, which alludes to, recontextualises, and builds upon George A. Romero’s filmic satire on American consumer culture, Dawn of the Dead. Proposing a taxonomy of videoludic satire, this book details how video games can communicate satire through their virtual environments, their characters, their audio, the way

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46:05

Gabe Henry, "Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/23

In Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell (Dey Street Books, 2025), Gabe Henry presents a brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter. Why does the G in George sound different from the G in gorge? Why does C begin both case and cease? And why is it funny when a philologist faints, but not polight to laf about it? Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to write

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48:47

Ross Benes, "1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/22

In 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted our Bizarre Times (2025, University of Kansas Press) journalist Ross Benes examines low culture in the late 1990s. From pro wrestling and Pokémon to Vince McMahon and Jerry Springer, Benes reveals its profound impact and how it continues to affect our culture and society today. The year 1999 was a high-water mark for popular culture. According to one measure, it was the "best movie year ever." But as Benes shows, the end of the '90s

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24:27

Cosmic Visions in Sound

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/21

Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space? Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro

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44:32

Christian Ilbury, "Researching Language and Digital...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/20

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Christian Ilbury about his new book, Researching Language and Digital Communication: A Student Guide, published by Routledge. The book is an introduction to research on language and digital communication, providing an overview of relevant sociolinguistic concepts, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches commonly used in the field. It’s a practical guide designed to help students develop independent research projects on language and digital

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76:38

Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "Fandom for Us, by Us: The...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/19

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural

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36:26

Gestures and Emblems: A Discussion with Lauren Gawne

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/16

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Lauren Gawne, about cross-cultural variation in gesture use. In this episode, Brynn and Lauren discuss a paper that Lauren wrote in 2024 with co-author Dr. Kensey Cooperrider entitled “Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture”. Brynn and Lauren talk all about how emblems are different to gestures, cultural uses of emblems, emoji, and how emblems might be changing in the digital age. Discussions in this episode include references to Lauren’s book Gesture:

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79:29

Anne Korfmacher, "Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap,...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/15

Starting from the observation of the ubiquity of fan podcasts engaging in media commentary, Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap, Review (Routledge, 2024) explores three fan podcast genres in which commentary manifests as a structuring form: rewatch and reread podcasts, recap podcasts, and review podcasts.Anne Korfmacher conducts a formalist genre analysis of these podcasts, close reading nine case studies to describe how the three genres function and how different fan labor manifests in podcasting. Each

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40:40

Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/14

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing both

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58:25

Henry Jenkins, "Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/13

The 60s produced a Baby Boom generation that catalyzed the dawn of a new era—the space age, the age of television, the global age, and the beginnings of civil rights. At the same time, a new paradigm for parenting was unfolding that put emphasis on permissiveness, defined by what it permitted – the free and unfettered impulses of children. Others worried that the wildness of children, personified by the characters in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, was

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32:57

Milena Droumeva, "Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/12

Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (Amherst, 2024) makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of

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69:15

Jaye Early, "Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/11

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity Private Experiences in Public Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2025) examines the development of the confessional subject in video art and demonstrates how it can provide a vital platform for navigating the politics of self, subjectivity, and resistance in society. In doing so, it reframes video art – the most ubiquitous and yet most understudied art form of recent decades – as an urgent socio-political tool that is increasingly popular among contemporary artists as a

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70:10

Jeremy Braddock on "Firesign: The Electromagnetic...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/10

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor of Literatures in English and Coordinator of the Media Studies Initiative at Cornell University, about his book, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. The book explores themes of media and technology through nine albums made by Firesign Theatre, an experimental, surrealistic comedy troupe formed in the mid-1960s that created art across several media forms. The theme of

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24:38

Frances Yaping Wang, "The Art of State Persuasion:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/09

Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive policy measures? The Art of State Persuasion (Oxford UP, 2024) delves into China's strategic use of state propaganda during crucial crisis events, particularly focusing on border disputes. Frances Wang aims to explain the diverse strategies employed in Chinese state media, analyzing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This

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75:07

John Alekna, "Seeking News, Making China:...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/08

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford UP, 2024), John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and

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62:52

Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of...

New Books in Communications ·

2025/04/07

Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely designed to end fighting. But as Dr. Eric Min argues in Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2025), that wartime negotiations are not just peacemaking tools. They are in fact a highly strategic activity that can also help states manage, fight, and potentially win

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418 results

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