New Books in Communications

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture. Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What are best-practices for alleviating stress in the workplace? Today I talked to Cary Cooper about his new book The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It (Kogan Page, 2020). Cooper explains why managers should say “Sorry, I Wasn’t Feeling." Cooper is the author/editor of over 250 books, and the president of the British Academy of Management. An advisor to the World Health Organization and the EU, he’s received both a knighthood and the CBE award from the Queen of England for “extraordinary contributions” to society. Topics covered in this episode include: The difference between operational and cultural failures, and why CEOs find it easier to apologize for the latter by pretending the problem has to do with the former. The percentage of workers who feel bullied by a boss at work on a constant basis, and Cooper’s estimation of the percentage of bosses who won’t be able to benefit from EQ-training and, therefore, should be given roles that don’t involve managing people. What the implications and solutions for huge CEO pay amid what could now prove to be the single most significant economic downturn in our lives (due to Covid-19). Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms. It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online. In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activities have been moved from face-to-face to online settings. The book will provide researchers with timely, much-needed, and rich food for thought as they make this unexpected transition. Novice and experienced researchers from multiple disciplines, such as education, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences and business, will all benefit from the methodological insights that Paulus and Wise shared in this book. Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA. Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA. Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of media allowed the circulation of Blackface images in ever greater profusion. This circulation, these images, and the performances that lay behind them make up the focus of Dr. Kevin James Byrne’s Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age (Routledge, 2020). Minstrel Traditions examines the technologically-mediated interactions that developed between live performances and their circulating images during this fraught period. It does so through a set of case studies: the last musical of Bert Williams, the live career of (now-former) pancake brand/performer Aunt Jemima, amateur minstrel shows and the companies that provided them with material, Black vaudeville performers, and Black Broadway. By examining how Blackface transitioned from live performance to images circulating through the mass media, Dr. Byrne provides an insightful account that deepens our understanding of the enormous, baleful influence the form exerted on 20th century culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in his history of the press and civil society, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces. Benjamin T. Smith is professor of history at the University of Warwick and the author of The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico and Pistoleros and Popular Movements. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at the University of Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increased while deliberation and the actual discussion of competing ideas have decreased. More and more, citizens are siloed, interacting only with those with whom they agree, and there is more negative animus directed at the opposition. In his new book, A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America (Oxford University Press, 2020), Political Scientist Brian F. Harrison critiques many of the current methods of communicating and explores the growing divide within political discourse. He demonstrates how, in our contemporary environment, political debate includes more name-calling and far less of a desire to understand political opponents. But hope is not lost. Looking at recent history, Harrison argues that conversations about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights successfully changed public opinion in a civil manner and did so rather quickly. Drawing on this example, Harrison proposes a model for how the citizens in the United States can overcome increased partisanship and dissent in favor of more civil and productive conversation. A Change is Gonna Come contextualizes both the advice and suggestions provided in the book by tracing out a great deal of the literature about political psychology and identity politics, since Harrison argues that part of the difficulty is the way that partisanship has become more of an identity marker for many voters. Harrison offers the discourse about LGBTQ+ rights as a model for how engagement should occur. This is also an area of research that Harrison has previously explored in other works, specifically his co-authored book with Melissa Michelson, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Changes Attitudes about LGBT Rights. He notes that change in public opinion typically takes a long time. But in the last 15 years alone, public opinion around LGBTQ+ rights has significantly shifted. Harrison contends that change in public opinion regarding LGBTQ+ rights was supported by people of differing backgrounds engaging in uncomfortable conversations about the issue. He extrapolates that by talking to people with whom we disagree, we develop a dialogue which helps people on all sides of the issue to understand other viewpoints. In A Change is Gonna Come, Harrison outlines how to approach these conversations, including how to avoid a combative approach and how to engage, respectfully, across political and cultural divides. Combining social psychology, communication studies, and political science, Harrison concludes that if citizens in the United States wants to regain a sense of civility in politics, they should follow the model presented by LGBTQ+ discussions and encourage people to have difficult conversations across policy and partisan lines. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians? In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and what potential exists for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our digital present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world. Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer, writer, and broadcaster. She is a founder and the chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for human rights online, is a special advisor to the National Justice Project, and also sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech and the Alliance for Gambling Reform. At the National Justice Project, she worked with lawyers, journalists and activists to establish a Copwatch program, for which she received a Davis Projects for Peace Prize. In June 2019, she was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Her research intersects intellectual history, digital humanities and cultural heritage studies. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polarized due to the biased or intentionally manipulated ways they are presented to the public? In Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Melissa K. Merry (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville) applies these questions to gun policy highlighting the ways both sides warp the gun policy narrative to fit and further their separate agendas. Noticing the way gun control advocates highlight white victims’ of mass shootings, while gun rights advocates stress self-defense rights, Merry concludes this type of framing serves to further polarize the public leaving policy makers less able to form coalitions and agree to compromise. In this way, warping has consequences for both policy and politics. Employing a social science lens and employing three distinct theoretical frameworks, Merry seeks to understand how and why actors, specifically interest groups, distort narratives. By analyzing “67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases” Merry documents the ways both sides over emphasize and omit crucial aspects of the gun policy debate, ironically resulting in negative consequences and failure for both sides. She combines three powerful theoretical lenses – Narrative Policy Framework, Social Construction of Target Populations, and Critical Race Theory – to reveal the structure and strategy of narratives of gun rights and safety. Both sides focus on atypical characters and settings – and both manipulate racial stereotypes. Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy is a systematic analysis of the gun policy debate providing important groundwork for understanding how specific actors distort and polarize public debate as well as a reflection on the greater implications this has for the future of public policy. Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State, Mia Fischer traces how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of trans women, exposing the traps of visibility by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. Bringing together transgender, queer, critical race, legal, surveillance, and media studies, Fisher analyzes the cases of Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica Jones and shows how the heightened visibility of transgender people has actually occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the increased surveillance of trans people by the security state. Terrorizing Gender concludes that the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a contingent cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and racialized violence that the state continues to enact against trans communities, particularly those of color. Dr. Mia Fischer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research and teaching focuses on LGBTQ media representations and the ongoing struggles of LGBTQ communities to access civil rights. Her work has been published in several academic journals, including Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, Sexualities, and Communication & Sport. She also co-leads the Denver Pen Pal Collaborative (DPPC), a collaborative prison-pen-pal project. Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (The New Press, 2020) chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military. Greg Mitchell blogs at http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com and is on Twitter at @GregMitch. Joel Tscherne can be followed on Twitter at @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Television informs our perceptions and expectations of leaders and offers a guide to understanding how we, as organizational actors, should communicate, act, and relate. Join NBN host Lee Pierce (s/t) and editor/contributor Dr. Creshema Murray as they discuss Leadership Through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) an edited collection of television case studies about how the pervasive medium impacts our expectations of leadership, organizational life, and pedagogy. Looking at a variety of case studies, including classroom research in television media, The Americans, Black women in cable television news, workgroups, Total Divas, and electronic church leaders (to name just a few) this intriguing edited collection considers leadership and television through three predominant themes: production of knowledge, presentation of identity, and power of opportunity Recorded just after the murder of George Floyd, the interview focuses particularly on the complexities of race and leadership in the case studies of Angela Rye’s “rye-roll” during Trump’s campaign, Shonda Rhymes construction of Black womanhood in How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal, and even a detour back to the Cosby Show in terms of what television has meant for Black America amidst ongoing structural oppression. We hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present. He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience— stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied. He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music. Greg Burris is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts. The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial discoveries and frustrations, and collaborations between Arab scholars and European Orientalists, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics combines the literary flair of a sumptuous novel with the textual density of a philological masterpiece. This carefully crafted and argued book represents both a profound tribute to a mesmerizingly layered archive of tradition and its actors, and a tremendous service to the field of Islamic Studies in particular and Religious Studies more broadly. It will also make a great text to teach in courses on intellectual history, manuscript studies, modern Islam, Muslim reform, and Islamic Law. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well before it emerged in the 1930s. Galili notes that much of this occurred within the context of contemporary technologies such as the cinema and the telephone, both of which pointed to the inherent possibilities of such an invention yet embodied very different ideas about image and communications. Seeking to conceptualize moving image technology, people often used the eye as a metaphor or model for how it might operate or the role that it would serve. Though the emergence of the cinema industry in the United States did much to shape the context in which television would develop in the United States, Galili shows how differing theories of visual media and society in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy offered alternate models that influenced how the new technology was received in their respective countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible. Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all familiar with the ways in which the acts associated with upholding morality can go wrong. For instance, blame can be excessive, apologies can be patronizing, and so on. Another way in which things can go wrong is when people wield morality opportunistically – for self-aggrandizement, or to elevate themselves in the eyes of others. In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020), Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi call this broad type of moral breakdown grandstanding. Their book examines the different kinds of grandstanding, demonstrates why grandstanding is morally bad, and proposes some tips for avoiding it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

During his nearly four decades as a newspaper editor and politician, Horace Greeley embraced a range of controversial causes. In his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), James M. Lundberg finds within his seemingly contradictory positions a consistent belief in the power of print to forge American nationalism. This Lundberg traces to his upbringing in a Protestant American culture which valued greatly the power of reading. Upon arriving in New York City in 1831 Greeley embarked on a career as a journalist and editor, and was a key figure in the shift away from relatively expensive periodicals to the mass-produced daily newspapers. His New-York Tribune gave Greeley a prominent platform from which he advocated for his nationalist vision, and he was a visible participant in the increasingly divisive political debates of the 1840s and 1850s. As an opponent of both slavery and secession, Greeley championed both a vigorous prosecution of the war and, with the Union’s victory in 1865, a swift reconciliation of the two sides, with the latter stance alienating many of his former allies and playing a key role in his nomination as Ulysses S. Grant’s challenger in the presidential election of 1872. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries. Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike. Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole, Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production Donovan Conley is Berman Chair in Language and Thought and associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Justin Eckstein is assistant professor and director of forensics in the communication department at Pacific Lutheran University. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British. Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire. Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news. Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice. Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will. This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital? Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout. You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise (Rutgers University Press, 2019) investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some. They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere. Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages. Bethany L. Johnson (MPhil, M.A.) is a doctoral student in the history of science, technology and the environment at the University of South Carolina and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Margaret M. Quinlan (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and core faculty in the interdisciplinary Health Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Gallup, Inc. This collaboration, which is on-going, has a number of foci, and this book project came out of work that combined expertise from political scientists, computer scientists, and data experts, concentrating specifically on social media, traditional media, and new Gallup survey data acquired over the course of the 2016 election cycle. The eight authors of Words that Matter brought distinct areas of expertise to analyze and explain not only the data that Gallup amassed through open-ended questions asked over the course of a number of months leading up to the general election in 2016, but also to pull together media analysis to use as contextual framing to examine and understand the responses provided to the Gallup surveys. Ceren Budak, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael Traugott spoke with me on behalf of the rest of the book’s authors as well, explaining this extended and unique ongoing collaboration while diving into the book’s particular research schema. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Teresa Bergman of the University of the Pacific on The Commemoration of Women in the United States: Remembering Women in Public Space (Routledge, 2019). Examining the public memorialization of women in the US over the past century, with a particular focus on the late twentieth century and early twenty first, the book includes six case examples of memorialization, and explores broad themes of cultural representation. Bergman argues that the construction, or relocation, of a series of prominent national memorials together form a significant moment of change in the ways in which women are commemorated in the US. The historic and present-day challenges facing such commemoration are examined, with reference to broader political debates. The case examples explored are the Women in the Military Service for America Memorial; the Women’s Rights National Historic Park; the Vietnam Veterans Women’s Memorial; the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park; the Eleanor Roosevelt Statue in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; and the Portrait Monument of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Providing insightful and grounded analysis of the history and practice of the commemoration of women in the US, this book makes useful reading for a range of scholars and students in subjects including heritage studies, communication studies, and history. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interview and the book The Commemoration of Women in the United States. Connect with the author @tbergman on Twitter and @teresa.bergman on Facebook. Connect with your host @rhetoriclee on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Gmail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California Press, 2020). Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip-hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip-hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts. Resources mentioned in the show: Farrugia and Hay,“The Politics and Place of a ‘Legendary’ Hip Hop Track in Detroit,” Journal of Music and Politics. Rebekah Farrugia is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She is the author of Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Connect @b3kkaf on Twitter and @rebekah.farrugia.7 on Facebook. Kellie D. Hay is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She has authored many articles about music, politics, and cultural identity, and specializes in critical qualitative methodologies. Connect @obihay on Twitter, @kellie.hay.37 on Facebook and by email at [email protected]. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interview and the book, Women Rapping Revolution. Connect with your host @rhetoriclee on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In this episode Jana Byars speaks with Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor of History at New Mexico State University, about her new book, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters. We explore her primary argument, that Venetians used their knowledge, and their ability to employ that knowledge, to write Venetians into the story. Along the way, we talk about grand historical narratives, the Venetian archives, and what leads an historian to her topics. We end up with a quick preview of her newest work, Amerasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility? Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, 2019). Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and writer. He contributes to media outlets such as PBS, the BBC, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the New York Times. This is his first book. Topics covered in this episode include: --What’s the origin of the term “snake oil” and how it illustrates the book’s larger points. --Which emotions social media, especially Facebook, exploit most effectively and why. How are the “sins” of social media similar to different from how traditional mass media operates? --In both work settings and in one’s private life, what kind of human foibles and illogical fallacies put us most at risk. What one emotion may help us grow and interact with others best. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which offers a fresh, provocative, and insightful contribution to our most pressing social challenges by taking an orientation toward catastrophe. On the face of things, argues Winslow, most of us would agree that catastrophe is harmful and avoiding it is key to human survival and progress. And yet, the planet warms, 30,000 more Americans are killed by guns each year, and Donald J. Trump creates political chaos with his rage tweets. American Catastrophe explores such examples to argue that, in fact, we live in an age where catastrophe not only functions as a dominant organizing rhetoric but further as an appealing and unifying force for many communities across America. Winslow introduces rhetorical homology as a critical tool useful for understanding how catastrophic appeals unite Americans across disparate religious, ecological, cultural, and political spheres. More specifically, the four case study chapters examining Christian fundamentalism, anti-environmentalism, gun rights messaging, and the administration of Donald Trump reveal a consistent formal pattern-oriented toward catastrophe. Ohio State University has been gracious enough to provide temporary free access to books such as American Catastrophe through their Bibliovault Scholarly Repository. We’d love to connect with you about the ideas in this interview and others from the New Books Network. Find your hostess with the mostess, Lee Pierce, on LinkedIn @leempierce and @rhetoriclee on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Gmail. Connect with today’s author, Luke Winslow, at [email protected] and read his recent Op-Ed about the COVID-19 pandemic for the Waco Tribune. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Cristina Soriano examines the links between the spread of radical ideas, literacy, and the circulation of information in a society without a printing press. In doing so, Soriano shows the ways Caribbean revolutionary ideas flowed into the ports and coastal communities across colonial Venezuela. The Haitian Revolution was front and centre of these revolutionary ideas, which inspired many and terrified others. Through these information networks, creole, pardo, and even enslaved people engaged in ideas about republicanism, abolitionism, and racial egalitarianism. This book offers insight into the later chaotic and multidirectional process of the anti-colonial movement in early nineteenth-century Venezuela. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Kurt Braddock's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of persuasion to domains unique to this digital era, such as social media, YouTube, websites, and message boards to name but a few. Terrorists deploy a range of communication methods and harness reliable communication theories to create strategic messages that persuade peaceful individuals to join their groups and engage in violence. While explaining how they accomplish this, the book lays out a blueprint for developing counter-messages perfectly designed to conquer such violent extremism and terrorism. Using this basis in persuasion theory, a socio-scientific approach is generated to fight terrorist propaganda and the damage it causes. --Describes four key theories and perspectives related to persuasion and how they relate to radicalization and counter-radicalization. --Identifies future challenges that security officials will face in trying to stop terrorist messaging from promoting violent radicalization. --Suggests future directions that security officials, researchers, and policymakers can take persuasion theory to develop effective counter-messaging campaigns. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans. In the telling, professional filmmaker Jon Wilkman draws on his own experience, as well as the stories of inventors, adventurers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who framed and filtered the world to inform, persuade, awe, and entertain. Interweaving American and motion picture history, and an inquiry into the nature of truth on screen, Screening Reality is essential and fascinating reading for anyone looking to expand an understanding of the American experience and today's truth-challenged times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedial adaptations are part of an evolution that can be traced to the turn of the last century, when comic strips such as “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Felix the Cat” were animated for the silver screen. Along with Barry Keith Grant, Scott Henderson (Dean and Head, Trent University Durham GTA) compiled a rich group of essays that represent diverse academic fields, including technoculture, film studies, theater, feminist studies, popular culture, and queer studies. Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame (University of Texas Press, 2019) presents more than a dozen perspectives on this rich history and the effects of such adaptations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere. In his new book, (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (Routledge, 2020), Sam Han analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death. Matt Coward-Gibbs is an Associate Lecturer and PhD student in Sociology at the University of York. He is the editor of the forthcoming collection Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead (Emerald, 2020). You can find his university page here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at [email protected] and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. In this ethnography, Alexander L. Fattal explores the ways marketing became a tactic of counterinsurgency as a means of a humanitarian intervention, which has proven stunning and illusory. The work draws on archival research and extensive fieldwork with Colombian Ministry of Defense, former rebels, political exiles, and peace negotiators in Colombia, Sweden, and Cuba. Alex. Fattal is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What is spam? In Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media, Dr Elinor Carmi, a postdoctoral research associate in digital culture and society at the University of Liverpool, takes this simple category that seems ever present in our online lives to explain corporate power, regulation, and the social world. Drawing on the work of Foucault, as well as the approaches of ‘processed listening’ and ‘rhythmedia’, the book analyses a whole range of case study material, ranging from telephones in New York, via digital advertising, cookies, and the EU, to the way Facebook orders and shapes our modern world. The book is open access, so you can download and read it for free here, and it is essential reading across humanities, social sciences, as well as for anyone online today. You can also learn more about Dr Carmi’s current project Me and my big datahere Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targeting a variety of terms, the author contends that a “good fit” may not always be desirable; delivers a takedown of the adjective “toxic”; and argues that “social justice” must take its place among other justices. This book also includes a critique of our modern emphasis on quick answers and immediate utility. By scrutinizing words and phrases that serve contemporary fads and follies, this book stands up against the excesses of language and offers engaging alternatives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, social sciences, music, and technology, Senechal offers a rich framework to make fresh connections between topics. Combining sharp criticism, lyricism, and wit, Mind over Memes argues for judicious and imaginative speech. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era. As Matzko explains, the origins of postwar conservative media lay in the broader changes taking place in broadcasting in 1950s. As the major networks shifted their focus from radio to television, local radio stations were eager to find programmers willing to pay to put programs on the air. This gave conservative religious broadcasters such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis an opportunity to spread their message to a nationwide audience. Fearing the growing influence of commentators organizing against their policies, the Kennedy administration sought to use such means as the previously underdeveloped Fairness Doctrine to constrain it. Working in conjunction with the National Council of Churches, they placed growing pressure on the broadcasters – particularly the acerbic McIntire – in an ultimately successful effort to undermine their nationwide stature. Yet while McIntire’s radio ministry was gone by the early 1970s, his example was followed a decade later by others who took advantage of broadcast deregulation in the late 1970s and 1980s to launch the modern era of conservative broadcasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018), Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Contact: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), a robust defense of Communication and the Humanities as disciplines of study. Major Decisions is a breathtaking work of research that proves the values and skills taught in humanities disciplines are exactly those needed in the 21st century. Despite the persistence of the myth “you can’t get a job with an English or Theatre major,” Major Decisions, which Ramsey co-authored with Laurie Grobman, shows that not only are humanities majors welcome on the job market; their critical thinking skills and creativity are also integral to advancing the work of science, technology, medicine, math, and engineering. Indeed, the core skills and knowledge imparted by an education in the humanities—including facility with written and verbal communication, collaboration, problem-solving, technological literacy, ethics, leadership, and an understanding of the human impacts of globalization—are immensely useful to employers across a variety of sectors. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Michele about this important book. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refers to as digital disadvantage (read the book to find out more!). The book tackles issues including who the audience really is for drill music and the social media output produced by these young men, and how they are sometimes exploited in the process. Exploration of authenticity, micro-celebrity, and self-branding contribute to larger understandings of race, stratification, and power in America. Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic look at the life of a text in the 21st century. Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, Update Culture is a deep diver into the many factors that contribute to the circulation of a digital text. The key three themes Gallagher explores include timing, attention, and management and they provide rhetorical points of access to understand the ever-evolving conditions of digital writing across genres and mediums. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with John about this instructive book. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Joe Packer of Central Michigan University about A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State UP, 2019), an intriguing book attempting to rescue pessimism from the dustbin of public emotion and philosophical thought. From the work of H.P. Lovecraft to Rick and Morty to True Detective, Packer and Stoneman find the best of pessimistic philosophy reflected back in the weird affects of these cultural touchstones. A Feeling of Wrongness explores how these texts twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Joe about this fascinating book. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, employment, public spaces, health care, legal documents, and other areas. Much of this is due to deeply entrenched ideas about the definition of gender, perceptions that transgender people are not "real" or are suffering from mental illness, and fears that extending rights to transgender people will come at the expense of the rights of others. So how do you get people to rethink their prejudices? In their book Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison examine what tactics are effective in changing public opinion regarding transgender people. The result is a new approach that they call Identity Reassurance Theory. The idea is that individuals need to feel confident in their own identity before they can embrace a stigmatized group like transgender people, and that support of members of an outgroup can be encouraged by affirming the self-esteem of those targeted for attitude change. Michelson and Harrison, through their experiments, show that the most effective messaging on transgender issues meets people where they are, acknowledges their discomfort without judgment or criticism, and helps them to think about transgender people and rights in a way that aligns with their view of themselves as moral human beings. In this interview, Dr. Michelson, Dr. Harrison, and I discuss common issues faced by transgender people, and the ideologies that contribute to anti-transgender discrimination. We then discuss three of the nine experiments conducted by Michelson and Harrison that provide empirical evidence to support the claims in their book. Lastly, we discuss potential ways to change discriminatory beliefs towards transgender people. I recommend this book for people interested in public opinion, social psychology, and LGBTQ issues. Dr. Melissa R. Michelson (@profmichelson) is Professor of Political Science at Menlo College. Dr. Brian F. Harrison is a Lecturer at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Founder and President of Voters for Equality. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with real or imagined historical grievances or even merely strongly held views. If you agree with that, then Adam J. MacLeod’s book The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) is the book for you. Alternatively, if you think such fears are overblown and just a nefarious argument advanced by a self-serving elite to justify a return to establishment rule this is likewise the book for you. Why both audiences? Because this important volume is all about how to go about thinking and reasoning and the role morality plays in those processes. In his book, MacLeod argues that due to the decline in moral education young people he dubs “selfies” have entered academia and the workplace without moral cores and are so riven with narcissism and a sense of entitlement that they are unable to think of the common good and are quick to take umbrage at any sort of questioning of their own personal preferences. According to MacLeod, a return to a larger place for openly moral arguments will enrich American life and enhance governance. To MacLeod, the misguided view of past decades that morality should play no part in policy making and that strict neutrality should be observed in the public square has only resulted in an acrimony-generating impoverishment of ideas and options. He suggests that the legal and philosophical concept of natural law can heal the ailing body politic and help soften divisions--or at least clarify, in a civilized way, what is at stake. In short, he wants us to learn how to “disagree well.” Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and digital platforms, like Facebook, have gone global. But, if problems straddle different national jurisdictions, how do regulation and enforcement even happen? Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a timely and wise analysis of globalization and how it has fundamentally transformed governance. Digging into transatlantic relations, Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell show how American and European businesses, activists and policymakers have fought over and decided security and data policy. The book is also a call to action for their fellow IR scholars to study, what Newman and Farrell call, “the international politics of information.” Given the significance of data politics and misinformation campaigns to our present moment, I hope they listen. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America (NYU Press, 2020), offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors--Christopher Bader and his colleagues-- also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself. In this interview, Bader and I discuss Americans’ greatest fears, conspiracies, preppers, and fear of crime. We then discuss how xenophobia and the media perpetuate fear. Lastly, Dr. Bader reviews the consequences of fear and how to ameliorate some of the negative effects of fear and how people can best manage their fears. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in crime and deviance, religion, collective behavior, and the social components of fear. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music Technologies Lab at the University of Sussex—provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing as well a set of forward-looking strategies for thinking critically about our future relationship with new music technology. Importantly, Magnusson identifies many similarities between present and past sonic creative practices as he takes the reader through an impressive survey of music technologies spanning the analog–digital divide. Consistently thematising the act of writing throughout, Sonic Writing calls attention to the rich and continuous history of inscription practices such as staff notation, instrument building, phonographic sound recording, and programming digital synthesizer patches, practices that have been so intimately connected with the shared creation and enjoyment of music over its long and fruitful history. Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (Penn State University Press, 2018). Filled with fresh takes on classical rhetorical theories, From Hysteria is an engaging exploration of the study of “women’s problems” (take the air quote seriously there). Dr. Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. From womb to brain to hormones, the book links our contemporary understanding of women’s bodies to antiquated roots, illuminating the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications