Social Sciences Media Studies

The internet was created on the basis that all users are equal, but children and the vulnerable are not. In Born Digital, Robert Wigley distils the mountains of available research on the subject and brings to bear his wealth of institutional experience to present a road map for society to radically and urgently reset its relationship with technology - for the sake of future generations.

A riveting exploration of how visual media has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the “worthy and necessary” (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.

Our world is constantly buffeted by new and dramatic changes we can't fully grasp. No one is fully prepared for the challenges, crises, and risks that lie ahead. The Extreme Future is a blueprint for what's next and how to navigate these changes.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard had a major influence in the development of 20th-century existentialist and postmodernist philosophies. Many go as far as to call him the “Father of Existentialism”. Kierkegaard regarded himself as a religious poet above everything else. His Christian writings emphasized Lutheran pietism and explored sin, guilt, suffering, and responsibility for oneself. In his writings, Kierkegaard proposed that everyone passed through three stages of life on the way to “[B]ecoming a true self”. The phases he proposed are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

Narratives about decision making are often inadvertently tailored primarily to men. Meanwhile, narratives about women in business overlook decision making or offer advice that is unhelpful and can even backfire. How Women Decide fills this gap. It takes on the very real psychological and cultural obstacles women face, asks how these affect decision making, and suggests practical changes for approaching important choices.

After her brother died unexpectedly and her mother moved into a dementia-care facility, spiritual travel writer and Episcopal deacon Lori Erickson felt called to a new quest: to face death head-on, with the eye of a tourist and the heart of a pastor. Blending memoir, spirituality, and travel, Near the Exit examines how cultures confront and have confronted death by investigating Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Mayan temples, Colorado cremation pyres, Day of the Dead celebrations, Maori settlements, and tourist-destination graveyards.

Women have made up roughly half of the college-educated workforce for years, and before the onset of the economic crisis of 2020, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the labor force was the lowest on record. But women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status. The endurance of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress? Ammerman and Groysberg focus on the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalance.

Our children's first digital footprints are made before they can walk-even before they are born - as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby's hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone - friends, employers, law enforcement - forever.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance.

In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina - and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other - only then was it possible to truly take flight.

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity. Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction.

Head down the rabbit hole and feed your fascination for conspiracy and controversy. Conspiracy theories—they're influential and spread to sometimes irrational extremes. Why do people cling to conspiracy theories so powerfully? Is there a way to separate the possible from the impossible? Yes. Enter: Debunked.

The perfect book for all student journalists, this young learners adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters' Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's New York Times best-selling She Said will inspire a new generation of investigative journalists.

The millions of fans who watch World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programs each year are well aware of their role in building the narrative of the sport. #WWE: Professional Wrestling in the Digital Age explores the intersections between media, technology, and fandom in WWE's contemporary programming and business practices. In the Reality Era of WWE (2011 to the present), wrestling narratives have increasingly drawn on real-life personalities and events that stretch beyond the story-world created and maintained by WWE.

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside - and closely observing - the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions.

Extended reality (XR for short) - which encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality - is one of the biggest business trends of today. It refers to the use of technology to create more immersive digital experiences that are promising to transform many businesses and industries. In this book, best-selling author, strategic business advisor, and respected futurist Bernard Marr explains the role of XR in providing innovative businesses solutions for companies of varying sizes and across different industries.