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New Books in Communications

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

00:49:23

The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/10/04

In our increasingly distrusting and polarized world, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy may backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. In his bookThe Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives (MIT Press, 2026)Hallsworth shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed more hypocrisy and cynicism that corrodes our institutions. Through engaging

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01:30:55

The Best 100 TV Shows of the 21st Century

New Books in Communications ·

2026/10/02

It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and the New York Times has published its list of the best 100 television shows of the 21st Century. We react to this list, ponder what is underrated, overrated, and completely snubbed, and question the value of grand lists in an age of micro-cultures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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00:35:04

Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/26

Climate action is at an impasse. Its political opponents are stronger than ever, its advocates powerless. Almost every major government and corporation expresses their commitment to tackling climate change, yet decades of discussion, governance, and action have failed to stop carbon emissions advancing to record annual levels. How has so little been achieved for so long on such an urgent issue? In Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of Environmental Impasse(LSE Press, 2026), Laurie Parsons

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01:12:33

Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/26

Thomas Schatz returns us to an era when a newly enriched movie industry rediscovered its creative energy, and indie went mainstream without losing its edge.Between 1989 and 2004, all the old studios either merged with other media giants or were swallowed up by even bigger diversified behemoths, leading to an infusion of money and fast-tracking the digital revolution. Yet even as CGI and piles of cash fueled a new breed of blockbusters—Batman and Titanic, Toy Story and The Lord of the Rings—an indie

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00:58:43

Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/25

Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s(Brepols, 2026) takes one of those fundamental questions - how does knowledge circulate? - and says, like others: we must look at the media technologies through which that knowledge not only circulates, but is transformed. This edited collection does that by looking at the history of the projection lantern across the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The projection lantern, also known as the 'magic lantern', 'optical

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01:09:14

Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/25

How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media.Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025)explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual

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00:32:01

Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media,...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/25

When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement.XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony(Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li argues

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00:47:59

Ehsan Dehghan, "The Discursive-Digital Link:...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/22

We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge,

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01:38:08

Glenn Peers, "Strange and Familiar History of...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/21

Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and

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01:11:38

Joe Jackson, "Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/20

Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate

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00:34:08

Samantha Barbas, "Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/15

The United States has no hate speech laws; hate speech is generally considered to be free speech under the First Amendment. In Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (U California Press, 2026), acclaimed legal historian Samantha Barbas chronicles the country’s legal and cultural battles over the regulation of hate speech in the last hundred years. Charting the historical context for current debates, she ultimately argues that, however emotionally appealing they may seem,

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54:14

Jennifer Hoewe, "Enjoyment Is Breaking News: How We...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/13

Why we crave enjoyment from news, how our news use divides us, and what we can do to create better news and more informed citizens. TikTok. Short-form reels. Late-night TV monologues. Podcasts. The way news is delivered has changed dramatically and so has the way we consume it. Now, we no longer look to the news just to learn and be informed; we expect enjoyment as well. In Enjoyment Is Breaking News: How We Became Less Informed and More Divided (and How to Fix It)(MIT Press, 2026), Jennifer Hoewe

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41:46

Emeka Umejei, "China in African Media: Between...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/12

At its core, China in African Media: Between Influence Operations and Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a book about power, journalism, geopolitical influence, and knowledge production in China–Africa relations. It examines how the People’s Republic of China has moved beyond simply establishing Chinese media organizations such as Xinhua and CGTN in Africa toward a much more dispersed system of engagement. Conceptualizing these engagements collectively as a multimodal or mixed-media ecology of

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42:19

Debarati Sanyal, "Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/12

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (Fordham, 2025) investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear

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71:06

Violaine Roussel, "Data-Driven Hollywood: The New...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/07

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. InData-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming(Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations

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36:23

Autumn Lorimer Linford, "Extra! Extra! A History of...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/05

American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as there were newspapers in the United States, there were also newsgirls. Girl newsies were photographed,

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41:05

Done in a Day with the Vietnam War: Elisa Tamarkin (JP)

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/03

Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (AnglophiliaandApropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joinsRTBto discussDone in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed through her own stepfather's experience covering the war.Tamarkin anatomizes curious forms of self-delusion that flourished in the

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62:24

Michael Diniscia and Ellyn M Toscano eds. "Civility...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/09/03

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expected behavior, particularly in public spaces, and as a mechanism to manage human interaction. But civility and the use of this idea often shape hierarchical relationships within society and within politics and may define who is to be included within the polis and who may be excluded. Thus, the

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60:27

John Trafton, "Los Angeles and Film: A Cultural...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/08/31

It is impossible to talk about the City of Angels without talking about its movie business. The history of American cinema is so intertwined with Los Angeles that the term “Hollywood” is used interchangeably with “American film” worldwide. From the early 20th-century migration of film pioneers from the East Coast to the emergence of local subcultures and global genres, John Trafton traces how the city has been imagined by insiders and outsiders alike inLos Angeles and Film: A Cultural History of

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43:52

Karin Barber, "Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early...

New Books in Communications ·

2026/08/31

Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early Yoruba Print Culture in Lagos,1910-1930(Ohio UP, 2026)is a survey of the history and development of Yoruba print culture in Lagos, Nigeria, from the 19th to the early 20th century. The book details the emergence of the Yoruba language press, its themes, and its distinction from the English-language press. The influence of both missionary and secular presses on religion and morality as well as the socio-economic and political lives of the Nigerian people are also

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